Places That Love People

I was introduced to this term recently; it sounded backwards the first time I heard it, but is fascinating in its implications, so please bear with me. The first mention of love on this site was in the very first blog post in April 2008, which closed with this: "If it can’t be loved, it won’t last."

The "idea honeymoon" didn't last long. I presented the Original Green shortly thereafter and one of the founders of the New Urbanism was there. He told me afterward "Steve, you're embarrassing yourself with the term 'lovable buildings'; no other architect in the country could say that with a straight face." I have great respect for him, but ignored that advice.

A few years later, the President of the Congress for the New Urbanism proposed "Building Places People Love" as the new CNU tagline. I was delighted and honored, and it remains on the CNU website to this day.

So how does it work if we flip that equation? How can a place made up of things like buildings, thoroughfares, and civic spaces that aren't alive be capable of love? Isn't love something humans and other creatures do, not the things they've created?

Yes, but let's think about gifts. A gift can be a thing, an experience, or an idea. But whatever the type of gift, the one thing all true gifts have in common is the love from the giver that's embedded in the gift to the receiver. So Places That Love People should be considered gifts to future generations. Yes, those future generations feel the love from the giver who understands things like setting the stage for humans to thrive and prosper, as mentioned many times here. But the love felt doesn't always come directly from the giver, who might have long since passed from the scene. Instead, it is the love and wisdom embedded in the place that those future generations feel.

So gifting Places That Love People to future generations could ultimately be the greatest superpower of the thoughtful place-maker because doing so embeds their wisdom and love in places that may outlive them (and us) by an order or two of magnitude. What better gifts could we mere mortals give than the gifts of love and wisdom extended so long into the future?

PS: I just read this to Wanda, and she said "that's very good philosophically, but let me tell you how Places That Love People make me feel," and what she said was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that we'll film it someday soon and get it up on OGTV.

Visible Destinations

Potsdam's Brandenburger Strasse is firmly anchored by the Brandenburg Gate on the west end, framing a church steeple at the city center, enticing countless locals and visitors to explore the many connection opportunities along the way.

Urbanists call these "terminated vistas," but I use "goals in the middle distance" instead because termination has an unpleasant ring to it. There is only one such goal enticing us to keep exploring on most streets, but this great street has a pair of goals, one at each end of the street, amplifying exploration. And because each block is populated with a wide range of destination types, there are numerous opportunities to connect with others throughout the day.

Open Streets

They have existed for ages in some locations, but Open Streets blew up worldwide in 2020. Unencumbered by auto traffic, they can serve many more people on foot and bike than typical traffic-jammed streets. Without high-speed vehicles, establishments along the edges are free to take reasonable amounts of street space for their tables, chairs, and retail displays.

Places to Sit

The light of a northern German autumn evening fades behind Potsdam's Brandenburg Gate on what was a swarming street cafe scene less than an hour before. Of all the connections that occur between people who were previously strangers, some by plan and some by chance, most of them occur while sitting down. If your city isn't serious about places to sit, it's not serious about creating a stronger community.

Places to Walk and Bike

The second-best connection condition is a place where it's easy to walk and bike. In most cultures, people walking or biking tend to acknowledge each other in some way, whether with a nod, a wave, or a smile. Those acknowledgements, though often fleeting, can lead to conversations. And as noted many times here, those conversations can lead to connections, which may endure over time.

Challenging Connections

Great connections do not all begin with joyful conversations across a fence or across a sidewalk cafe table. Some are forged in the crucible of conflict, whether with fellow-warriors on a battlefield, teammates on a playing field, or fellow-climbers on a mountainside. And those conflict-born connections can be some of the most durable, often lasting a lifetime.

Conversation Coffins

The three connection conditions above all get their jobs done, albeit in different ways. Driving a car is a condition definitely does not work at connecting people (except in crashes) and it's important to understand why not.

Cars are conversation coffins. The only verbal communication between drivers is the usually unintelligible shouts fueled by road rage, and the flip-off is the only hand signal except for old-timers still stuck on shaking their fists.

The "conversation coffin" term isn't just polemical. According to Road Rage Statistics, one person per day is murdered in the US as a result of road rage, most frequently with guns, but more broadly, 66% of traffic fatalities stemmed from road rage, with the car being directly or indirectly the weapon. In 2024, that works out to about 26,000 deaths in the US that began with some form of road rage.

Why do people in the US kill more people with their cars than with their guns? Some make a strong case that road rage begins with getting mad at a machine instead of the driver of the machine. Put another way, it's easier to get mad at mechanical objects than humans, even if humans are steering them.

But this page is mostly about connection, and less so about machines that prevent connection, so let's swing back in that direction. The biggest lessons about cars and connections is that cars put a mechanical face forward, which rarely ends as well as putting a human face forward. So the more our places set the stage for face-to-face encounters, the more connections that place is likely to cultivate.

Chamfered Corners

A chamfered corner occurs on a street-corner building where the building's corner is cut back, usually at a 45° angle. This does three good things:

First, it makes the building's corner entry visible from more locations around the intersection, saying with its architecture "you're welcome here."

Second, because the corner is made up of two 45° angles instead of a single 90° angle, people coming around the corner in either direction see each other sooner and therefore avoid crashing at the corner unless they're both running at top speed.

Finally, the chamfered corner makes a good base for a tower or other architectural element that, depending on its scale, may be visible from several blocks away, serving as a Goal in the Middle Distance, thereby enticing people to walk or bike to this corner of the neighborhood.

Sidewalk Cafes

The sidewalk cafe tops the list of general-purpose connection tools because they combine food and friendship in highly walkable places. And they're greatly adaptable in scale from a one-table-deep cafe like this one to the legendary Parisian cafe scene that lines boulevards and avenues several tables deep for world-class people-watching both from the tables and to the tables.

Cultural Settings

Showcases of the arts from music in this place on this evening to drama and visual arts have the ability to draw large crowds of people who share like passions. And there are few conversation-starters stronger than shared passions.

Books

Library and bookstore obituaries were written a quarter century ago with the rise of the web and its search engines. But the reports of their deaths were greatly exaggerated, to misquote Mark Twain. Yes, the super-size chain bookstores are in decline because they mostly carry the same stuff all across the country, and those same books are all available online.

But libraries have reinvented themselves as community-based info hubs, a substantially broader mission than 1950s city libraries. And independent bookstores often have hidden gems you'd never find in a super-size chain store. For example, I found the entire set of Foxfire books in an indy store just five blocks away. For perspective, they are the legendary self-sufficiency books that were 1970s precursors to both the modern homesteading movement and also the Original Green.