“Leveraging Place”: A Toolkit for Staying Loyal to the Places We Shape

Recently, I have focused on understanding how places change and identifying the foundational elements and through-lines specific to a city, neighborhood, or other setting. The clearest form of analysis is not always architectural. Today’s post offers an outline of a place-specific toolkit built on more holistic factors.

But first, a brief, cross-border digression.

Recognition of important, “beyond architecture” place characteristics can occur when two people perceive the same landscape logic from different sides of a geographic boundary.

Last month, in a virtual Spanish class, my teacher and I both decided autumn (or otoño) is our favorite season. This choice did not depend on cooler temperatures or specific holidays. It was based on how, in each of our regions, autumn is when the mountains seem deceptively close, because the horizon sharpens amid higher, thinner air. We discussed, in Spanglish, how the late afternoon light rusts amber and orange as winter draws near.

Sofia’s mountains are in northern Mexico near Saltillo; mine are the Sangre de Cristo range north of Santa Fe. They are not in the same place, yet we spoke the same high-altitude vocabulary to describe arid slopes and long shadows.

Independent of land use plans, codes, design review, or trendy acronyms, we shared a sense of place as a kind of inheritance, “leveraging place” in its most elemental form: we found community and affiliation in commonalities from each landscape, without one place imitating another. Perhaps it was a landscape continuity that could only occur at our similar latitudes, within the cultural and ecological corridor where contemporary New Mexico and northern Mexico share similar histories, premised on Spanish conquest. But the landscape continuity I discussed with Sofia is not just a metaphor. It is a working and lived geography.

This same continuity becomes vital for planning practice. It reframes continuity as inheritance rather than appearance. It is rooted in forces that predate — yet help define — contemporary land use policy.

As I have recently argued, leveraging place in Santa Fe is more than an aesthetic task — the built environment reflects other forces more than it serves as a sole source of place definition.

The drivers are multidimensional. If “authenticity” and “character” mean anything in the Santa Fe context, their definitions depend on altitude, light, hydrology, and Indigenous and Hispanic inheritance — merged to display a pattern of ongoing change.

Nearby Galisteo, discussed in my recent Substack post, provides more perspective. The imperfections in Rob King’s clay vessels derive from the land and its raw materials; their “imperfection” is not so much stylistic but an expression through a lineage of shaped and prompted clay.

After living here, I believe urban and landscape character is, in practice, a similar refusal to dissociate origin from form. This is the foundation for a credible planner’s toolkit for leveraging place in New Mexico.

Once seen this way, perhaps the work of planning changes from managing similarity to stewarding the lineage of places.

Compatibility of newer development becomes a question of sensibly adapting rather than the traditional design review process that many see as dictating resemblance.

Maybe the question for reviewing commissions and staff is no longer “Does this proposal match what surrounds it?” Instead, the question from now on looks deeper: “Does this proposal proceed in a fashion loyal to the forces that shaped the underlying and surrounding landscapes?”

From this perspective, a leveraging place toolkit must begin with a focus on the foundation and source rather than the superficial:

• First, understand the underlying place, not just the proposal, because elements of continuity precede design.
• Second, identify what holds a place together before shifting to a compliance mindset.
• Third, avoid mere mimicry and stress lineage and latent relationships.
• Fourth, honor still unfolding shapes rather than configurations mindlessly frozen in time.

These benefits could readily follow:

• Staff planners could gain a defensible basis for interpretation that is not just superficial, subjective, or taste-based.
• Commissions could replace a static and narrow compatibility debate with a more coherent analysis consistent with the overall context.
• Planning and land use directors could move local city planning culture from containment and enforcement to stewardship.
• Communities could find restored trust because the essence of place is honored, rather than an emphasis on abstracted or staged programming based on a myth or a meme.

In conclusion, back to this morning’s digression.

The short Spanish class exchange discussed above was not incidental: It demonstrated that underlying forces and themes of continuity have existed here long before governments recognized the importance of plans and codes.

Mexico and New Mexico not only border each other, but spontaneous conversations across borders can easily resonate after hundreds of years. Much of Santa Fe’s legibility is still based on geographical and cultural inheritances that predate planning. The land — and Rob King’s material components — may have better memories than land use policy and regulation.

Leveraging place requires not only civic ceramics, but also forensic and archeological frames of mind. The task is not always to preserve what was, but to understand and evolve the foundation.

This piece originally ran on Resurgence: A Journey