A new friend of mine, Pete Bastrom recently posted a discussion in BIM Experts which I'm going to expand upon. It seems to me in the Built Environment we are constantly hoping to make our world a better place to live, at least I trust that is the basis we are all working from. Yet, we still seem to get all tangled up when we develop new spaces, or old spaces and are only thinking of the economic impact of the project we intend to complete. So often we roll out the same sprawling pattern we have found so easy to unroll not thinking of the sense of place we forget. Now I'm not going to wax poetic about the quaint old cities of Europe because they just don't meet the new demands of our lives today. The cost to retrofit them to provide the basics of our lives is extreme for water and power alone, not to mention waste removal and other of life's essentials, both physical and economic.
I am going to go more toward the idea of Jane Jacobs and her work on the sense of place. I can rant and rave about Henry Fords legacy, and at some point I will but not today, Like my friend Pete, I'm concerned about how we remember and act about the sense of who we are and how we interact. The sense of community and personal value and how we express it in our Built Environment. I'm not going to suggest any particular solution here, just to listen to Cat Stevens and then think about, "What can I do today to make sure the sense of the places around me are improved?" If you aren't so privileged to live in such a place, many of aren't, then what can you do to help foster the creation of place and identity in your city, neighborhood and block.
This post is part of a connection to the Built Environment, design and collaboration
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