How Can We Increase "Place Awareness"?

Most people float through life experiencing place all the time without thinking about it. Isn't there a way to increase their awareness of what they are experiencing?

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How can we persuade people from all backgrounds to be recognize the role that where plays in their lives?

That’s the question I was really grappling with the other day when I posted my Substack newsletter about whether people have a “place gene”.

Since starting The Future Of Where Substack newsletter a few months ago, I’ve tried to focus on the future of place and location – that is, on the future of where – rather than the future of cities in particular. I’m a big fan of cities myself, but not everybody is, and promoting them to the exclusion of other types of human settlements is not my intent here.

Rather, my goal is to understand – and hopefully convey – where the whole idea of where is going. What role do place, proximity, and specific geographical locations play in our lives? How is that changing after the pandemic? How important will face-to-face contact be, and how will that shape what urban planners like me call “the built environment” – and how, in turn, will that built environment shape our lives?

So to me, Issue No. 1 is not trying to persuade people – especially people hostile to my point of view – that I’m right about cities and that more compact communities are desirable. Indeed, I have often heard from people whose point of view I disagree with, but who are deeply aware of and attached to place. Therefore, Issue No. 1, as I suggested the other day in my Substack post about “the place gene,” is simply to get people from all backgrounds to recognize that place is an important part of their lives.

But how do you do that?