INSIGHT: Somewhere, not anywhere with Place Strategist Bec Mills

How to create places that are as unique as they are loved.

“People don’t want their built environment to be a fragment of anywhere. They want it to be somewhere.”

When Bec Mills read this line in a press release from the launch of the UK Government Office for Place in July 2021, it struck a chord. In a simple, eloquent, line they’d nailed the key to creating a great place – a somewhere. To create a great place, you need to start with a vision for what that place will be. And it’s not about subdivisions, or structures or services. It’s about experiences.

Place visioning has a huge role to play in shaping the future cities we want to live in, visit and leave for the next generation. Places aren’t just where we go, they shape who we are. And truly great places are all about how they make us feel.

Here, she shares her top tips for creating places that feel so right you’ll win the most valuable real estate possible – a place in people’s hearts. 

Treat people as somebodies 

Too often we start building places with no idea about the most important things we want at the end – the ambience, the interactions, and how people actually want to use and enjoy them. To gain this insight, primary research – and having conversations with end users – is a step in the process that should never be undervalued.

Once you start including audiences and working with genuine empathy, they become somebodies in your process.  And these somebodies have invaluable insights to share on the road to giving places a unique and enduring sense of identity, because they are the ones who will use or buy into them. Assumptions and secondary research will only get you so far – the ‘ah ha’ moments and golden insights lie in those conversations.

Define the feeling 

A few years ago, our team had the privilege of working with Bob Laughrea from Generis Collective. Bob worked with Steve Jobs to create the first Apple Store experience and he’s worked with Disney – he knows how to deliver an outstanding place. And he says, “you need to start with the feeling”.

Over the past decade, we worked with the talented team delivering Quay Quarter – a new Sydney neighbourhood on the doorstep of our famous harbour. But even before the extraordinary architects like 3XN were on board, we considered what this place should feel like. How does it feel to work here? Or wake up there? What about when you visit in your lunch hour? Or even celebrating on New Year’s Eve.

The feeling was generosity. We envisioned this as a place that opens itself up to you at every turn. And this was the starting point for everything – the architectural briefs, the narratives, the approach for the retail laneways, the wayfinding, the place. Always start with the feeling. Get into the deep emotional territory early, have the conversations that get you there. It’s not the fluffy stuff, it’s the fundamental.

Safe is risky 

Place delivery takes time. We’re working on projects that have 5, 10, 20, 30-year development timelines. This means the challenge for us is to always strive to be at front of the curve. It’s up to all of us to push harder for the improbable and the seemingly impossible – as these are the things that will differentiate our places and put them on the map, as well as ensuring they are not outmoded the day they launch.

At the moment, we’re observing a huge over-reliance on trends. Trends are familiar, of the moment and easy to sell into clients. It’s what developers can see happening in other cities or visit on a field trip. But, by the time their project comes out of the ground, the ship has sailed. In this context, it’s risky to be safe. So, we need to collectively, rattle the cage, ditch the reliance on trends and aesthetics-only solutions. Instead invest in unlocking deep, human insights and tapping into the cultural tides that are shifting ... and imagine.

Spark hopeful imagination

So, how do we avoid being safe? I believe imagination – and a particular breed of imagination – is desperately needed. There are so many things we need to solve for; the climate crisis, housing affordability, public health crises, widespread extinctions. The list is long. I believe, we can only get there if we can imagine better than we have done in the past. And the particular breed of imagination we need to work hard to conjure is Hopeful Imagination.

Professor Max Saunders of the University of Birmingham introduced me to this concept. He points to the futurologists and science fiction writers of the 1920s and 1930s, who, despite the ravages of war and economic depressions, conjured otherworldly scenarios that were bold, transformative and hopeful. They predicted biospheres, smart phones, visual effects and robotics. It was almost as if they suspended themselves from the evils of that time and put on rose-coloured glasses to conjure fantastical visions, that are now our reality.

And this is not to discount the challenges that we face – they are substantial ones – but I hope we can break open a new era of optimistic hopeful imagination, not dissimilar to our sci-fi counterparts of 100 years ago.  We need to unhook from the present and re-engage with our childlike urge to ask ‘how’ and ‘what if’. One that counters the doom cycle that it’s easy to get trapped in, filled with risk aversion and anxiety – and dare to imagine better places.  

So, I am hopefully in our collective ability to create more ‘somewheres’ than ‘anywheres’. If we can commit to combining imagination with empathy.   By putting an emphasis on the importance of how places feel, fixing our eyes firmly on the future and committing to the specific kind of imagination we need, we can do great things.  We can improve our future by creating places that uplift our moods, our minds – and our cities.