The greatest role I could play in society as an architect is to make the lives and experiences of everyday people better, more experiential, and, above all, more rewarding,” writes architect Kevin E. Kelley in his book, “Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places that Bring People Together.”

We spend our entire lives in places—we are born in them, go to school in them, shop in them, walk in them, celebrate in them, raise families in them, and die in them. The book's thesis that we can create better places by designing with intention and understanding what place means to people seems like a siren call from Kevin Kelly to homebuilders and community developers, who are relied upon to create spaces.

During a recent conversation, I asked Kelley about the impetus for writing the book. Not surprisingly, it dates back to 2007, the same year Apple introduced the iPhone.

Starting in 2007, behaviors in public space started changing,” he explained. “People were not making eye contact, not nodding their heads at each other. Watching people in restaurants—now it’s sadly common, but then it was shocking to see people not engaging with each other, to be on a date or to be out with their family and to not be talking.”

This shift wasn’t just about behavior; as the internet continued to dominate our lives, it also affected how people bought. As an architect and co-founder of the firm Shook-Kelley, this shift caused him to wonder whether his work would continue to be relevant.

Place has a business value, it has a social value, it has a mental health value,” determined Kelley.

In his book, he laments that despite advances in health, transportation, computing, science, and other areas, the quality of places today seems less human and more brutal. The book offers a foundation and a system for creating better places, focusing on how we experience retail in the Amazon era.

Do Places Recharge or Drain?

When shopping in real life or online, people don’t want to choose one over the other — rather, they want a healthy balance of digital convenience, physical experience, social interaction, and community connection. In our world today, places are either “human recharging stations or battery draining spaces,” according to Kelley. Perhaps the defining question to ask in every placemaking and planning workshop is: How can we ensure our guests have a physical, social, and emotional experience that transcends the work required to acquire our offering and provides a payoff that can’t be found elsewhere, including online?

When I asked Kelley how we could apply this to new-home communities, he started with the mindset of buyers, observed over decades of watching people.

People get very anxious about going to a home building community, so they’re carrying psychological anxiety. They’re frustrated, they don’t have time, and they don’t want to be sold,” Kelley said. “So right off the bat they’re dragging a black bag into the sales center. The whole thing starts to unfold, and they are cantankerous and irritable, and they just want to know how much it is.”

Said another way, these places and experiences are energy drainers.

It’s shocking to me, this model that we just can’t seem to get away from and it’s just over and over. We are just bypassing all the romance of life, of community, of walking, of experiencing the town square. It creates incredible tension in people,” Kelley said. “And when we look at how other industries do it, selling motorcycles, furniture, cars, it’s just such a fascinating dynamic. I’m amazed that homebuilding companies still allow that, and they go, ‘It’s just how it is,’ while I think, ‘No, change it.’” 

Kelley challenges us to consider how directors Alfred Hitchcock or Martin Scorsese would design a new-home community experience.

They would divide the experience into scenes," Kelley notes. "An entrance, an arrival, a center, and an exit — and they would ask, ‘What do I want a person to feel in this moment?’”

He goes on to describe a key takeaway in the book, which he calls the Theater of Place:

• A good retail scene has a beginning, middle, and end.
• A good retail scene has a mini-climax inside of it to keep it engaging.
• A good retail scene reinforces the overall plot, quest, and story of the brand.
• A good retail scene has carefully chosen props, cues, and triggers.
• A good retail scene has values and says something about what you and your customers care about.

We could apply this to the places in our communities and create other contexts and relationships with people that have more meaning and even drama. We could invite them to enjoy something that is indirect, like a wine tour, cooking event, or a live music event on the town green, so they can experience directly what our community is about, and what promise we are creating, all of which is powerful and engaging. 

Supply-Side Thinkers vs. Demand Creators?

So how did we get here, where so many of the places we create are less human than they were generations ago? We lament the death of the neighborhoods where kids walked to the corner store, you knew your neighbors, and there were places to just hang out.

Kelley tracks it back in time.

We have a production mentality that dates back to the end of World War II, and it still permeates business," he says. "What we’re missing are demand-side thinkers, those who can get people out. Too many leaders have a conquering mentality, where they think you build it once, complete it, don’t mess with it ever again, and move on. I tell them, ‘You’re not done. People aren’t coming to your place. You’re not done at all.’”

Places need to constantly evolve, or they die.

Today, regardless of whether we think this way, every business is in the fashion, cultural times, and human emotions business. According to Kelley, most businesses don’t have people at the strategy table who understand this. Rather, these creative thinkers are often relegated to what leaders perceive as less strategic roles. They also tend to be younger than those making decisions, so it’s generational.

You need the person with the good eye, the good instinct about what people want,” Kelley writes. “When you have a demand problem, you need these people at the table. What’s often a limiting factor to this is the organization sees them as lacking the ‘supply-side pedigree’—they don’t have an MBA, but they have an instinct.”

They know how to create what Kelley calls “bonfire moments,” meaning an experience so great you would crawl through mud to do it. To transform battery-draining places into human recharging stations, those are the people needed at the table. The consumer is smart now about all these things. They want fashion design, status, culture, meaning, cause—they want all of that bundled into “the experience value proposition,” a tall order. Place affects our behaviors in ways we don’t always see, and Kelley offers a six-part system to help those creating them evaluate, strategize, and design the experience of places. 

• The Voluntary vs. Involuntary Eye: Our eyes are like swimmers in that they go to destinations they find interesting, sifting through a bunch of information and deciding what to focus on. How can we create places that are interesting and engage us visually?
• Visual Harmony vs. Visual Noise: How do you help people orient themselves in your place and evoke emotion in a way that makes sense and has a comfortable, balanced hierarchy?
• Symbols vs. Words: Would you rather buy “produce” or “fresh fruits and vegetables”?
• Product vs. Context: Context is king. How might you surround your place with the right context, props, supporting elements to set the scene, and get your brand story to stand for something and to “stick” unconsciously in people’s minds? 
• Walking vs. Milling: Great places divide attention by giving people a break from life, and getting them to look up and have an enjoyable time. How might we get people to slow down, wander, and experience the place more?
• Information Overload vs. Sensory Deprivation: Nature restores and refreshes our mind, and it has symmetry, rhythm, hierarchy, contrast, and scale. How might we apply these variables to help people feel engaged by a place, and not overwhelmed?

When it comes to creating extraordinary places in new-home communities, Kelley said he would prioritize two of the above concepts: walking vs. milling, and voluntary vs. involuntary eye movement.

Where is the center of your community? How do I know when I’ve arrived?” he observes. “There are many sides to a community, how do they link together and connect? There’s the office place, trails, shopping, dining, and nighttime entertainment place. Where is the beginning, middle, and end? It’s more powerful when they connect and tell a story.” 

That is the challenge, and one we need to take seriously in a world where consumers make their decisions about a place within seconds. Is this place going to give people a social, emotional, and physical experience great enough for them to trade their time to spend there? Will it leave their tank full, or will it drain their battery? And, perhaps most important in relation to home and community development, does it encourage people to interact, share, and spend time together in the irreplaceable theater of life?