PLACE by Trevor Hightower

What is PLACE ?

PLACE is a publication designed to stoke higher imaginations for real estate that is Place Making, Leader Building, Architecturally Meaningful, Common Good Creating, and Entrepreneur Empowering. ("PLACE")

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What Is The Format? 

• A Trend or Big Idea:  Summarized through books, articles, and podcasts to help us better understand the cultural moment we are in, where we are going and what it means for the future of PLACE. 
• An Alternative Imagination: Applied to the trend line, offered with a hope to throw some rocket fuel on our collective higher vision for PLACE. 

This will also be unique from future issues in that it include some underpinning of the "why" behind writing this. I do hope this finds each of you well. My hope is that any time you spend reading this will be a help, encouragement, and spark for you.  

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HERE'S TO THE IMAGINATION LIFTERS 

Dave Blanchard's day job is to help entrepreneurs create and execute on higher visions. He and his co-founder Josh Kwan started Praxis, an accelerator (and more) which helps entrepreneurs bring into reality a higher vision for products and services.  

In his previous life Dave worked at IDEO where he helped companies find intersection of:

1. The customer need.
2. The technological trend(s) that shape the need. 
3. The right business plan which provides the solution for this future need.  

This model helps a company identify the trend-line of a given industry and create market opportunities in front of where the puck is going to be.  This is not easy to do, but is a model that has helped create many successful businesses.  

He was helping companies win by swimming ahead of an existing and growing current. However, he was not helping them ask if trend itself or the solution provided actually made the world a better place.  Dave became dissatisfied with the imaginative limitations of the model. 

Dave started an organization to help entrepreneurs shift their fundamental question from:

 “What business will work given this need and this trend?” 

To the question:

“What business is best for the world given this need and this trend?”

His organization then brings around the network, coaching, and support to help companies bring about the answer to this better question in the form of a successful business. 

My friend Evan Loomis is also in the imagination lifting business. The founder of TreeHouse and Icon, recently wrote a children’s book that has Elon Musk as the main character (This Book Is About Rockets!). Evan’s son loves superheroes. He wanted to fan the flame of his son's understanding of what a hero is. Batman and Superman are great, but Evan envisioned an even better standard of the word “hero” for his son. 

Evan made a "hero wall" in his son's room with pictures of real life imperfect heroes like Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, William Wilberforce and... Elon Musk. Each night before bedtime he and his son would tell stories about each hero. As often happens with higher imaginations, serendipity occurred and the hero wall lead to a book. My son and I read the book a lot. My son who now tells me that Elon had 3 ("3 Dad!") rockets fail before he finally got it right and thinks it was sad Elon was bullied by some mean kids when he was little. My son who now knows that perseverance is an attribute of real life heroes. This is because Evan had a better imagination, a better vision... and it led to a better reality.  

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A HIGHER IMAGINATION FOR PLACE  

All of us are shaped by Place and most of us do not realize it. I should know. I spent a decade as a real estate professional and I rarely, if ever, thought about the meaning, purpose, and importance of place.  

Like Dave's original process at IDEO, I started my work related questions with:

• "will this deal work?"
• "will this deal make me look good ?" (Yikes)

I never considered my opportunity (and advantage) to start with questions like:

• "Will this deal make the world a better place?"
• "Will this deal help or hurt human flourishing ?" 

It is rare for those who shape Place to start with these types of questions and it is even more rare for us to see how the places we occupy are shaping us.  

There is good reason for this. Place can be transparent to us.  A fish can't exist without water. But if you were to ask this fish about water, it would look at you and say "what the heck is water?" 

And so it is with place for many of us. Place is invisible to us, even though to be in a "place" is necessary to even exist. We can't help not being in "place". Place is where we eat, live, play, worship, create, and destroy. Place is always before us and we only seldom see it.  

Place is also downstream from our collective desires and demand. We don't create new Place in a vacuum. Starbucks exists because we longed for a Place to connect and Howard Schultz knew we are willing to pay $3.50 for a cup of coffee for this experience. Crossfit gyms exist because we long to connect and we like to brag about how many burpees we can do in community. Traditional Office buildings exist because at one time companies needed large blocks of space to put Mad Men sized offices along the windows. Chuck-e-Cheese exists ...well, I am not sure why Chuck-e -Cheese exists other than to prove the frailty of man. 

But just as we form Places, Places are forming us. Walk into this office environment vs. this office environment and ask how each would impact every aspect of your life over hundreds of hours of work a year. The stores, offices, homes, museums, parks, neighborhoods, mix-use places we inhabit are constantly shaping us in obvious and not so obvious ways. It was Sir Winston Churchill who said: 

"We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us"   

The beginning of a higher imagination of Place is a better cognition of the Place all around us and understanding the cultural trends (and our own desires) that are driving the demand and supply of the places we see, live, work, and play. 

Like Dave asks his entrepreneurs to do, we can then ask better questions to envision a better vision for better places. Places that directly and indirectly lead to more human flourishing.  The places we create and inhabit are literally where the best and worst things of the world are thought of, created, and carried out. Where the highest or lowest visions for connection, community, and design occur. May we form and shape demand and supply for place with the highest possible imagination. 

In our next issue we will start understanding the important idea of "space as a service" and form the best imagination for the highest possible solution in line with this trend.  Hope this and future issues are helpful and valuable to you!

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PLACE postscript

In the ending chapter of The Last Battle ( The final book in the Chronicles of Narnia Series), the main characters find themselves in a place called "New Narnia". This new place was: 

"...deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know.The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more."

There is a generative effect of lifting our imagination for place that does not yet exist but we believe should and will. This publication is for those of us who believe that every rock, flower, workspace, store, and apartment will look "as if it meant more" one day. May we use our unique ability and position to envision and help bring to reality better place in the here and now.  Restorative real estate that is Place Making, Leader Building, Architecturally Meaningful, Common Good Creating, and Entrepreneur Empowering.