One of my clients is based in Barcelona. For obvious historical reasons that city is different to anything here in the valley. But they have to deal with precisely the same issues we do as far as economic diversity, attractiveness of place and infrastructures to support automobile, train and air transit. However, in Barcelona, they haven’t created a regulatory environment that is solely oriented toward accommodating the automobile or making life easy for developers to chew up more and more land. Consequently their buildings – existing as they do in a similar climate to ours – don’t have to be located hundreds of feet away from each other to meet setback and nose-in parking regulations. In Barcelona the buildings can actually shade each other thereby providing for a far more humane and walkable urban habitat than anything we have here. The result? People actually want to go to Barcelona to hang out there. They’d go there whether or not there were any galleries, gated “communities”, golf clubs or resorts. The place itself – and the culture it engenders – is enough of a magnet to get people to show up by the millions each year.

We hear lots of talk about economic revitalization – very pertinent and relevant topics for nation and our region. But in these debates we hear few calls for radically changing the physical makeup of our human habitats – the very places where we carry out our lives, bring up our children, seek comfort and solace after a long week at work and so on. Its almost as if the places we call home are some kind of stylistic afterthought to making money or educating our children. We have become so anesthetized to the mile upon mile of strip-mall ugliness that assaults our senses every day, that we tend to think that our physical surroundings – the way they are planned, designed and built – has little to do with our culture, economic stability and wealth creation.

As Winston Churchill once remarked “First we make our buildings…..and thereafter our buildings make us”. He had a point worth noting.