Principles of Place

Place-making — the often invisible work of creating and improving the spaces we all share — is a complex, sprawling field of work.

There are dozens of organizations, movements, frameworks, and individuals all working on how cities and communities function — each approaching the problem from a different angle, each with their own language, their own priorities, and their own theory of change.

Some of them have been at it for decades. Some have changed laws. Some have redesigned streets and rewritten zoning codes and built real, substantial followings.

What most of these organizations share, and what drives everything we do here at Principles of Place, is a common underlying goal: improving quality of life in the public spaces we all live in and move through every day.

This post is about helping you understand that landscape — who the major players are, what they’re actually working on, and how they…

The five cities in this bracket are smaller, quieter, and in several cases more specialized than those in the 500K-1M article.

What they share is a combination of structural soundness and policy momentum that puts them ahead of most American cities their size — not in the headlines, but in the decisions that actually determine whether a place is worth living in ten years from now. Some of them have a single decisive signal: a zoning reform, a federal transit grant, a university anchor that doesn’t move. Others have the more durable advantage of simply being good cities that nobody is paying attention to yet.

One of these cities closes the list rather than leads it for reasons of geographic distribution rather than merit. Dayton, Ohio belongs here on the evidence. Its placement reflects an editorial commitment to not letting one state dominate a list that is meant to describe an…

The three cities in this article are not the obvious picks.

They are not the fastest-growing, the most talked-about, or the ones appearing on relocation listicles aimed at remote workers priced out of Austin.

They are cities that have been doing serious work —

• on transit,
• on zoning,
• on the physical form that makes daily life easier

— in ways that most people outside the planning community haven’t registered yet.

That gap between what these cities are becoming and what the market thinks they are worth is, in practical terms, the opportunity.

A note on scale: Cincinnati’s MSA exceeds the bracket’s stated ceiling, and the Albany-Syracuse entry treats two cities as a single corridor argument. Both decisions reflect editorial judgment rather than inconsistency. The ceiling exists to focus attention on overlooked cities; Cincinnati is overlooked despite its size in ways that matter for this series, and Albany and Syracuse are only…

A sense of discontent in where we live is, for Americans, an all-too-common occurrence.

It is, at least partly, an artifact of where we are as a relatively young nation still figuring out what it wants to be — and where.

Determining where to go for a better quality of life is one of the most consequential decisions a person can make, and even with the entirety of the internet at our disposal, it remains genuinely difficult research to do well.

I had the idea for this series on a sunny afternoon, sitting outside with a cold cider and Spanish guitar music, enjoying the kind of ease that a good day in a good place produces – and wanting to translate that into an everyday, everywhere experience.

Finding Ease

That word — ease — is at the center of everything Principles of Place is about.

The core argument is simple: the…