The Fallacy of Trading Sense of Place for Density

In May of 1989 I accepted an offer to relocate to Durham, North Carolina and jumpstart the community’s destination marketing organization.

It was clear during my interview visit that Durham had good bones as well as deeply held traits and values that would be appealing visitors.

By good bones, I mean that many of its indigenous, core commercial districts retained the smaller, people scale, historical blocks of buildings that a majority of travelers are drawn to because they reflect a distinctive sense of place.

This is the “there” there of a particular place that so very many places long ago surrendered. 

It is a term that was coined in the 1930s by Gertrude Stein that over time has come to describe anywhere that “sense of character or coherence has eroded,” as so eloquently noted by Scott Russell Sanders in his essay The Geography of Somewhere.

Of course there is a lot more to having a “there” there than just architectural setting.

It was also clear back then that Durham had given in every now and then to the temptation during the 80s to throw up a skyscraper or two, as it is currently doing.

But different than those prior to WWII, apparently both developers and local officials (as illustrated by their own buildings) have forgotten a crucial tenet noted by Witold Rybczyski in How Architecture Works.

New buildings, according to Rybcyski (Rib-chin-ski,) a noted architect, professor, critic and author, should foremost seek coherence with place and setting.

When I mentioned a need for “coherence” to an official during deliberations for this newest and tallest building underway in Durham, I received only a look of bewilderment and something mumbled about the need for density.

More on density that later but studies show that, too, is a fallacy when used as a justification for towering structures that violate sense of place.

At year-end I will be seven years retired from that career, but last week the staff there invited me a personal tour of the new headquarters for the organization I led for 21 years in Durham.

Including the ground floor Durham Visitor Info Center, it occupies the first two floors of the six story 1905 Trust Building, Durham’s first skyscraper and one perfectly coherent with place.

It was the tallest building in the state when it was erected.  It also had the first elevator in Durham and was a little more than twice the height of surrounding buildings.

There is no record of controversy at the time but there is evidence three years later when the 47-story Singer Building opened in New York as the tallest building in the world that these structures were taking a toll on sense of place.

For several decades people had complained of the canyons these buildings created, along with the wind tunnel effect and the deep shadows they cast shortening the amount of daylight for blocks in at a time.

Now, 100 years after Jane Jacobs published launched a conversation in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a new study across a wide range of metrics finds that blocks of older, smaller builders perform better than districts with larger, newer structures.

By comparison, these blocks generate more jobs per square foot, a greater diversity of businesses, more non-chain local businesses, more small business vitality and greater density, more character, walkability and a broader socio-economic residential mix.

The answer isn’t either/or.  It is about mix, fit and especially coherence.

Communities that have surrendered to forces who told them they had to sell out their sense of place in order to be major league still have pockets or fragments they can salvage.

Communities such as Durham that turned the corner with sense of place in tact but may be unprepared for how quickly out of town “buyer/flippers” as well as franchise architecture developer/lenders can hollow out sense of place.

They may need to shift gears even more quickly.

Reading this study is a good start.   Begin by dissuading planners and officials of any notion that coherence of place must be sacrificed for density.

Origins of a Divide That Still Haunts Tourism Today

Once you turn off the country road toward our place on Mayo Lake there is a mile of gravel road before you reach the last stretch of pavement leading to our lakeside retreat.

It is what was called “macadam” when road surfaces in America first started to be improved in the 1820s (as depicted in the image below.) 

Many so-called paved roads in the countryside today are macadam bound together with a little asphalt tar.

By 1909, just as what is now called North Carolina Central University was founded, Durham, where we alternatively live a part of each week, was being heralded for already having laid 82 miles of macadam road.

Nationwide at the time, only 700 miles of road, about 10% of the total were as good or better than those in Durham.

By that year there were almost 306,000 cars and a few more than 6,000 trucks registered in America, up from 8,000 overall in less than a decade. 

Those known as “highway progressives” were already shifting the economic impact rationale for good roads from “farm to market” to “tourism.”

But ironically, roads had long been politically, as well as ideologically, controversial.

Other than military roads, Founding Father progressives on both sides of the isle, such as Washington and Jefferson, had only been able to push through the first “national road” along what is now I-40 as a means to open up western settlements for Revolutionary War veterans.

Conservatives argued that roads were too expensive and that they should be a state issue.

Then at the state level, such as in North Carolina, they were often able to pigeonhole roads as a county-by-county issue clear up until the eve of the Civil War.

It was about this time that pleasure driving/riding in carriages took hold, usually limited to grand city parks such as those created by Fredrick Law Olmsted or in cemeteries.

But in 1888 the re-invention of the pneumatic tire, which had been unsuccessfully introduced in 1846, galvanized a grass-roots coalition of activists to push for good roads.

The coalition was spearheaded by bicycle riders who teamed with “farmers, nature-lovers, conservationists and tourists” to spawn a national movement not only better roads but a national network of “hard-surfaced, all-weather roads.”

Soon they were joined by nascent automobile manufacturers.

The roads envisioned were a means to an end such as farm to market or home to resort but all roads were intended to be scenic along the way.

Then as the movement gained steam between 1911 and 1926 “highway progressives” were overwhelmed by commercial interests who coopted the movement.

It created a schizo-polarization of tourism that persists today.

At one end are those with a deep respect for sense of place, authenticity and scenic preservation. 

On the other is a hawker-huckster form frenetically enabling billboards, developer churn, mainstream mega-facilities and other forms of cookie-cutter architecture.

To overcome conservative opposition to a system of national roadways, “highway progressives” had begun to tout tourism as a rationale.

To enlist communities along proposed roadways they encouraged them to “manufacture” reasons for tourists to stop along these routes.

Rather than look to innate qualities, community boosters egged on by a chamber-of-commerce mentality fell instead for hyperbole, thus the manufacture of roadside amusements along with monikers such as the “Grand Canyon of the East” or the “Paris of the South.”

By 1930, many states, including North Carolina had begun to fight back against blight but the forces of blight this has fueled including a faction of tourism that had found political cover among a wing of conservatives.

This wing of conservatives, which cut across party lines, has consistently and inexplicably argued that blight is good for economic development, something still being repeated by a candidate running for governor in the last election.

Tourism, if it was more open to introspection as well as critical and strategic thinking would align in such a way that it could shift this paradigm.

But don’t hold your breath. 

It isn’t just that one side of the schizo-divide is somewhat superficial.  More problematic is that the other side lacks the moral courage and passion of those early “highway progressives.”

The True Bellwethers of Revitalization

At the conclusion of my last post, I promised to delve further into the DNA of my adopted home town Durham, NC’s emergence as a foodie powerhouse and the bellwether revitalization role of locally-owned chef driven restaurants.

It is a movement rooted here in the 1970s and 1980s, that along with a sense of place revolt, deserves primary credit for Durham’s resurgence, including downtown’s, and helping make it one of the most acclaimed communities anywhere.

But the fingerprints of this movement stretch back nearly 70 years or more.

First, as an aside, it is too bad that communities don’t follow the lead of tiny rural towns such as Ashton, Idaho (pop. 1,000) - the closest place to the ancestral ranch of my birth and early years.

There, the local chamber of commerce is different from others across the nation which have long since deserted sense of place or wisely surrendered it when destination marketing organizations are established for that purpose.

Small rural towns without the resources for specialization are often sources of best practice nuggets.

An example is that Ashton’s volunteer business organization makes an effort to include in the profiles of each member, where possible, the DNA of each location often going back to when the community was established.

One example from my youth traces the heritage of a row of 1920s log cabins as part of a motel that I fondly recall behind the grade school I attended.

I wish I had thought to build this capacity into the DMO inventories and databases for the three communities I represented over the years.

Durham is so extremely fortunate to have Open Durham, a local website created and populated by a friend and physician-turned-developer.

It drills down location by location into the heritage of Durham’s built environment including occupants.

It was interesting to note recently in a Durham News Service post that a local native-returned-home chef plans to open a diner in the storefronts below a mid-century motel under renovation in Downtown Durham.

It happens that when when I was being recruited to come here in the spring of 1989, I ate at another diner in that very location, kitty-corner from the newly opened hotel where I was put up, called the Plaza.

But Open Durham reminds us that it was also the 1910 location of the Plaza Café at the base of the Hackney Building that preceded the classic 1960s motel now under restoration.

I’ve written previously that today’s colony of Durham chef-owner-driven restaurants dates to at least the first half of the 1980’s well before I was I was recruited here to start up and lead the community's official destination marketing organization.

That’s when these locally owned restaurants also became a force for revitalization of districts such as Ninth Street and Downtown.

But their finger prints extend even further back.

Nearly a decade before he opened Café Parizade in the Ninth Street District and Taverna Nikos Downtown, in 1981 Georgios Bakatsias (Bok-i-shaw) who has now concepted and opened restaurants in many cities, opened his first restaurant in Durham.

He was 19 years old when his persistence persuaded a local banker to place trust in him.  One day Durham will recognize that no one has done more than the unpretentious Georgios over so many decades to inspire its culinary prowess.

The former Bakatsias Cuisine was where the restaurant Blue Olive thrives today but while it wasn’t the first of its caliber in Durham including Downtown or the Ninth Street districts, Bakatsias quickly drew attention to Durham’s culinary potential.

Nineteen eighty one (1981) is also the year that Mary Bacon opened the former and soon-to-be-acclaimed Anotherthyme in downtown just as two dilapidated tobacco warehouses nearby were adaptively renovated as Brightleaf Square.

Both were a nod to the awakening brought about by the mid-1970s sense of place revolt that first ignited Downtown Durham’s turnaround.

As I noted in my last essay, it is chef-driven and -owned restaurants that first inhabit areas where the bones of sense of place remain well after their decline, inspiring adaptive reuse developers behind them.

All of what I have outlined so far predated the opening of arguably Durham’s most nationally famous restaurant, the former Magnolia Grill in the Ninth Street District, which chefs Ben and Karen Barker opened in November 1986.

In the early 1980s, it was the Barkers who were one of the very earliest pioneers of what is now known as farm-to-table by sourcing ingredients from local farms.

But the contributions of locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants to Downtown Durham’s revitalization was also nearly a decade before Nana’s and Foster’s Market, both in the Rockwood District, would add to Durham’s acclaim in 1990, while reinvigorating that area.

This was also the year Durham native and Magnolia Grill-alumnus chef Walter Royal, along with partner Don Wexell, opened the former Delta cuisine-themed Crescent Café in the fall of 1990 deep into in the very heart of Downtown.

Royal wasn’t alone.  Chef Mark Day had left Fowler’s Gourmet in 1987 to open a highly acclaimed Bistro a few doors away called Mark’s at Five Points, next to the former Ghirardelli Ravioli Factory (wholesale/retail) which had opened two years earlier.

Both were located where Bull McCabe’s is today and where the former Joe & Jo’s and the indomitable but unpretentious JoAnne Worthington made such an impact on the continued resurgence of downtown between 2002 and 2006 by being, well, Durham.

The Crescent Café opened just as lofts were being created above it in historic buildings along Main Street and just over a year after DCVB had been founded, in part to capitalize on national acclaim such as the Crescent would bring to Durham and downtown by mid-1991.

This was years before Downtown Durham Inc. came to life as an advocate for that area of Durham, fostering economic development from the supply-side as a complement to DCVB’s demand-side approach community wide.

This was also decades before building owners and developers would come to understand how important having truly locally-owned chef-driven restaurants is to not only property values but authenticity and identity.

But the DNA of Durham’s emergence as a foodie town also stretches back long before 1973 when Mary had opened an earlier restaurant in the Ninth Street District called Somethyme.

In many ways, it traces back at least to 1949 which is the first year that Mayola’s Grill opened in what is now the Brightleaf District of Downtown Durham.

It was through the block from what would open as the former Ivy Room later known for “chicken in the rough,” similar to a favorite place on Spokane’s South Hill while I was in law school.

Beverly Osborne who devised “chicken in the rough” in the late 1930s is famous for stating that;

“in business, the product is the vehicle that is used to implement a strategy for creating a good idea.”

No one grasps that genius more than locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants.

I miss Mary Bacon’s “AT chicken” at Anotherthyme and the stories she would regale me with about Mayola’s.  In part, it was the sparkle with which she articulated that heritage before her restaurant came about that helped make the DNA connection.

Mayola Nance’s restaurant morphed over the years from grill to grill and fountain to grill, fountain and pool parlor, to chili house, but Mayola’s was always a mainstay of Durham hospitality for breakfast, lunch and dinner from 6 a.m. to midnight.

The clientele, too, was like Durham, a blend of blue collar factory workers and university students, researchers and professors as well as bankers and lawyers.

The fun thing about scouring old phone directories such as the one linked from 1949 is that you not only get a sense of businesses at the time such as Mayola’s but you can actually see noted next to various names in the listings exactly who worked there back then.

Playing under Mayola’s feet in the 1940s was a young boy better known today for his weightlifting prowess even at age 76, something he has studied and perfected over more than 60 years now into what is known as Maitland’s Method.

Maitland Nance and personal trainers groomed in his controlled-movement method use it to strengthen clients of all ages in his small boutique studio where we go in the Ninth Street District twice each week across from Duke East Campus.

But in his twenties, Maitland took was he had learned from his Mom growing up in Mayola’s and soon developed or acquired dozens of restaurants in Durham and beyond including some still famous with Duke alumni who often regale them on basketball listservs.

It is a tough business.  Thirty percent of all restaurants fail in their first year and another 30% fail within two years of opening.  The local chefs and restaurants I acknowledge in this post are not only pioneers in sense of place, they were courageous.

Maitland’s included perpetuating the former Turnage’s out on Morreene Road as well as the former A.B. Morris Café across from American Tobacco.  Renamed Nance’s, it was still there when I arrived, although the Lucky Strike factory had abandoned it two years before.

It was virtually all that remained of what has now been resurrected as the American Tobacco District.

It was located near where friends whose DNA traces back decades in Durham’s foodie heritage will open NanaSteak next year at a corner of the just-opened ALoft Durham Downtown hotel, one of four to recently open in downtown alone.

Restaurants lead the way to revitalization while hotels mostly follow it.

Locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants were among the first to grasp that economic development, in the words of Ed McMahon, is “about what you have, not what you don’t have.”

Maitland’s first restaurant was the former Top Hat Bar Grill in the Ninth Street District across from where the acclaimed Watts Grocery is today, near where the famous Green Room is, having been renamed to reflect its role in the movie Bull Durham.

Still in his twenties, that was eight years before Mary Bacon opened Somethyme there.

Sometime in the mid to late 1970s, Maitland opened Maitland’s, a fine dining restaurant in Downtown Durham in Mayola’s location.

It was just after a sense of place revolt had halted the wanton destruction of Urban Renewal eventually drawing the attention of adaptive reuse developers instead.

It is from trolling Maitland’s that Georgios found some of his kitchen staff for Bakatsias Cuisine, some of whom joined him a decade later at Parizade and Taverna Nikos in downtown.

Robert Adams, another Durham native and the longtime executive chef of Parizade, had joined Maitland out of chef school.

It is from kitchens such as Parizade, Anotherthyme, Magnolia Grill, Fosters and Nana’s that a host of new Durham restaurants found their beginnings, including many being spawned today.

In 1981, Maitland, who was more comfortable with basic southern food, sold the site of Maitland’s to Mary Bacon for Anotherthyme, the year Brightleaf Square opened in two wonderfully restored historic tobacco warehouses nearby forging the template other developers have followed for decades now.

Little did he know that a few years later, Magnolia Grill and the Barkers would take basic southern flavors and recipes to the height of acclaim in the food world.

Restaurants are the bellwethers for resurrecting downtowns and forging other even more organic districts in a community, such as Durham’s Ninth Street.

Chef-driven and owned restaurants are at the epicenter for bringing settings back to life while preserving sense of place.

This is not meant to take anything away from economic developers, such as I was, or development advocacy associations or financial backers, including governments granting incentives, or the development community.

But all of these and more are merely cogs when viewed strategically.

Today as noted in the SlideShare document linked to the image above, huge national developers, such as North American Properties, have identified locally-owned chef driven and owned restaurants as “the secret sauce,” to “establishing an identity.”

Nearly 40 years ago, Durham became a pioneer not only in North Carolina but nationwide in the realization that locally-owned chef-driven restaurants are one of the first and most important ingredients to revitalization. 

Any recognition of the revitalization we see here today is grossly remiss if that heritage is not prominently recognized.

New Discoveries Related to An Excursion 26 Years Ago

It crossed my mind recently as I commuted the short distance from a lakeside retreat in northeastern Person County back down to Durham, NC which has been my home since 1989, that it was horses and a good steak that caused me to first make the journey up there 26 years ago.

I wanted to see a pasture full of Percheron, a breed of draft horses.  Back then these teams spent a good deal of time on the road, pulling an old 1900s farm wagon through small town parades on behalf of Southern States, a farmer’s coop.

By the time I was born, a fifth generation Idaho horse and beef cattle rancher, the bottom was falling out of the market for horses.

When my great grandparents had homesteaded and assembled that spread along the Henry’s Fork in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, there were more than 22 million horses in the United States.

By the time I came along four decades later the number had dropped from nearly 12 million at the end of World War II to just 7.6 million in the late 1940’s.  By the time I turned 12 years old there were barely 3 million nationwide including our three working saddle horses.

My paternal grandfather who had bred and trained draft horses back when there was a market for them also had a reputation earned as a trainer for saddle horses.

He kept three teams of draft animals for nostalgia while I was coming up playing among them and my favorite had been a beautiful, black and gray speckled, purebred Percheron named Dolly.

By the time I arrived in Durham in mid-1989, recruited to establish my fifth community destination marketing startup (two from scratch) in my now long concluded career, the community was already well on its way to earning a national reputation for great restaurants.

In fact, most people where were here by then agree with Dr. Nathan Vandergrift, the head of Duke University’s Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Center, who once noted regarding that era”:

"…what's put Durham back on track is food…"

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble but Durham’s re-emergence including the resurrection of Downtown began in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

My subsequent arrival and the founding of DCVB to distill Durham’s personality and manage the community’s reputation as well as foster and leverage Durham’s sense of place, including its food scene, into demand-side economic development certainly played a role.

But revitalization was firmly underway more than two decades before the founding of Downtown Durham Inc. to champion the supply-side and three decades before tax incentives spawned newer developments often credited today.

I definitely wasn’t the second coming for Durham, nor was anyone who followed.  That designation belongs to sense of place preservationists including the late 1970s DNA that spawned its reputation for great chefs.

So what was I doing at a steak place clear up in Person County so soon after my arrival?  Northern Durham County and much of adjacent Person County remind me of my rural roots.

Anywhere I’ve lived, it is settings such as this that still ground me when I gravitate to them.  It may be why I am also so intrigued by Person County’s Sunset Ridge Buffalo Farm and the fact that as late as 1728, Buffalo still inhabited the bottoms of what is today’s Hyco Lake. across the from our retreat on Lake Mayo.

On the way back from seeing those Percheron back in 1990, we stopped at a restaurant in outer Timberlake that had been opened by the Cash’s three years earlier now called the Homestead Steakhouse and Country Store, one of two notable steakhouses in Person County.

By the time I arrived or soon after, the Cash’s had also opened a great breakfast diner I frequented in uptown Roxboro called Farmers Supply which, unfortunately, a subsequent owner took under by not remitting sales taxes.

Our lakeside retreat is in Holloway Township but it is within a nice drive through countryside to Roxboro, a town of between 8,000 and 9,000 or a fifth of  Person County’s population.

Yanni, a chef-friend of ours in Durham recently put us onto a great new restaurant up in little ‘ole Roxboro named Brookland Eats.

It was recently founded by two Northern Durham High School classmates after returning to North Carolina, one with roots up there, who opened in a restaurant space in a restored 113-year-old building at the intersection of Old Durham and Allensville roads.

They lured a well-known chef with them back to his native Person County.

Technically, Brookland Eats is in Brooksdale, a township of Person County that is incorporated into the Roxboro town limits.  The old building used to be a Fox & Co. general merchandise store back in the day.

The proprietor, G.M. Fox, married a Brooks, the family for whom the now neighborhood is named.  The name Brookland Eats is a nod to Brooksdale I suspect and sense of place.

Good restaurants understand the monetary value of accenting authentic sense of place.

Designations, including postal and statutory, but not authentic sense of place.

More in the next post on the earlier DNA of Durham’s 1980s era culinary reputation that is so evident in its chef driven restaurants of today.

The Surprising Market Potential For Going Mainstream

In this essay I’m going to touch on the proportion of the traveling public that prefers chain stores, which is, coincidentally, the same proportion drawn to mainstream attractions.

This proportion of travelers are the aim of communities that seem bent on surrendering differentiation and sense of place to generic development and mainstream facilities and events.

Surveys have shown repeatedly over the past 20 years that residents of Durham, North Carolina, where I live, identify a museum of local history as the community’s #1 cultural facility need.

In part, this may be due to Durham residents historically placing a higher value on authenticity of sense of place.  Studies show that on the continuum of authenticity, attractions such as history museums rank as among the most authentic.

But here, too, some developers, as they have across the country, often use their considerable clout with local government to push instead for mainstream facilities, which are rated in surveys of the general public as the least authentic on that spectrum.

A majority of communities long ago surrendered distinctiveness driven by a relentless envy to mimic other places and, in doing so, made them indistinguishable as just one of many.

As Seth Godin noted in a recent post entitled, The Average, “Progress is almost always a series of choices, an inexorable move toward mediocrity, or its opposite.”

Even among advocates for proposed local history museums such as Durham’s, it has not been uncommon to even hear some advocates dismissing more authentic aspects such as artifacts and collections while promoting digital alternatives.

Ironically this would, in the view of many, make museums, well, less authentic.

Museologists such as digital specialist Dr. Ross Parry view digital not as the end of older technologies such as display cases and labels, for instance, but as an extension.

In fact, Dr. Parry has contended for at least the last few years that museums are already “post digital,” meaning that this technology is now “normative” or mainstream.

It has become what University of Chicago cultural policy analyst Gwendolyn Rugg terms as “assimilated, embedded, naturalized.”

In fact, I am persuaded by an essay that was posted here in America about the same time as Dr. Parry’s declaration which eloquently makes the case that on the authenticity continuum, which is always relative, artifacts will always be more authentic.

Unfortunately, over the eight decades since a museum of local Durham history was first proposed, many priceless artifacts and even potential collections have vanished.

Communities face forces that likewise see development as the end of one thing and the beginning of another.  This is why they so easily dismiss nearly temporal place-based assets as they replace them with mainstream palaces.

It isn’t just a portion of developers and architects as well as chambers of commerce, destination marketers and officials which have become mainstream sycophants, but especially financial institutions and chains that hedge loans by insisting on cookie-cutter developments.

Ironically, when it comes to appealing to travelers as well as residents who are stayers vs. just boomers, these mainstreamers are forcing a majority of communities now into mediocrity and a future with very limited appeal.

So what do the numbers say about which is most precious and popular, authentic or mainstream, when it comes to positioning a community to generate visitor-centric economic and cultural development, which was my now-concluded career?

Is it really just “six of one or half dozen of the other” or do mainstreamers have the advantage they seem to think?

According to studies, about 1/5th of travelers actually prefer to frequent experiences at the less authentic end of the scale such as mainstream events, sports or performing arts.

This compares to 73% who prefer real or authentic experiences such as museums, historic sites and natural areas.

Visitors are also very clear when it comes to what is authentic. 

The data show that destinations and attractions considered real, authentic and genuine have “historical truth.”  These are places that are “original in origin or design,” places that are “natural” and “unique,” “non-commercial.”

Researchers have also found that authenticity is also not a moniker easily attained.  For example, fewer than half perceive the beach or science centers or aquariums to be authentic.

Interestingly, even 74% of those who experience casinos, which are considered the least authentic on the spectrum, preferred real and authentic to fantasy or mainstream experiences.

Another indicator of the relative popularity of communities that have surrendered sense of place and authenticity to emulate mainstream comes from retail studies.

They show that 29.5% of consumers prefer to buy from mainstream national or regional chain stores.

So it appears that surrendering sense of place and authenticity for mainstream means a community has actually narrowed its appeal to somewhere between just 21% and 29% of Americans.

Meanwhile, the few communities that still struggle valiantly to differentiate as well as protect and foster a distinctive sense of place, appeal to between 73% and 80% of Americans.

Developers, architects, financial institutions and politicians should take note. It pays to foster sense of place and authentic and real attributes. In other words, to list only a handful:

On balance, always favor the real and genuine over the mainstream;

Encourage architecture with respect for local settings, neighborhoods and indigenous districts rather than cookie-cutter designs or franchise/ego architecture;

Value an indigenous cultural ecosystem over events and facilities that may be so-called “world class” by mainstreamers, which are certain only to erode differentiation and homogenize sense of place;

Always favor scenic preservation, tree canopy and natural areas over impervious surface; and

Listen to residents who are “stayers” vs. “boomers” when it comes to safeguarding sense of place and community character.  Aim your appeal toward travelers and relocating or expanding businesses who value place based assets.

Before Adios, A Word About Engagement

Regular readers know that over the course of a year I manage to research and write one of these little essays every 1.4 days.

On average, it takes me four or five hours to research and write each one, which is about the amount of time Americans spend working and commuting each weekday.

It’s what I do in retirement; one of the things I enjoy for fun.

I take some extended breaks each year and one of them, give or take, will be over the next four weeks, as I do about this time each summer.

According to a Harris Poll, 90% of Americans take breaks this time of year, one-in-five over last week’s July 4th holiday.  Nearly a third of us (31%) take a plane and 75% of us use a car to travel.

One of ours will be in the Jeep and the other a cross-country flight.  Both will involve family in various parts of the country as will 46% of trips this summer.

Americans traveling this summer will, on average, travel 660 miles round trip.  Each of our trips will far exceed that.

Even though my career involved marketing destinations to potential visitors and then encouraging them to circulate as much as possible, it took the fun out of travel for me.

I’ve always been more of a homebody-lake-excursion person anyway, but in retirement I am now free to enjoy a trip without it feeling like work.

It is probably higher by now, but a 2012 survey found that 71% of travelers are attempting to make more environmentally-friendly choices when it comes to transportation, lodging and food sources.

While there are still some destinations and visitor features that hypocritically practice desecration marketing (such as using roadside billboards) while claiming be eco-friendly—a  few even featuring exhibitions about the environment—they are more noticeable now as exceptions.

I’ve had my eye on a UK company in particular that offers water management solutions and software to hotels and other customers called Waterscan.

The company has found that a hotel, for example, will typically use about 53 gallons of water per day for each occupied guest room.

That can be reduced 30% by harvesting rainwater which can be treated and fed back into the building for non-potable purposes such as irrigation, vehicle washing and flushing toilets.

The amount of water used can be further reduced another 40% by recycling gray water from showering and bathing.

This involves an ultra-filtration membrane system using three underground tanks.

One collects and treats the gray water and feeds it to a filtration tank while the third is a reservoir from which it is fed back into the hotel, again, for non-potable uses.

I suspect it could also be used to treat storm water.

This is especially efficient for hotels because there is an equilibrium of uses and a cost savings of 70% on water use.

For nearly a decade now, Gallup has studied what makes some customers engaged while others are indifferent or even actively disengaged such as being passive aggressive.

Fully engaged customers, researchers have found, are “emotionally attached and rationally loyal” as contrasted to those who are indifferent or neutral with a take it or leave it allegiance.

Activity disengaged customers are detached emotionally from a product or service and may become virulently antagonistic.

I believe those who actively seek out environmentally-friendly brands are likely to be fully engaged and it makes a big difference to the bottom line.

In visitor-related industries, for instance, Gallup found that fully engaged patrons of casual dining restaurants make 56% more visits per month than actively disengaged customers.

Even for fast food restaurants, it is 28% more visits per month.  In hotels, guests who are fully engaged spend 46% more per year than actively disengaged guests.

While many many brands hope to change consumer perceptions by “embarking on big traditional advertising and marketing campaigns,” even social media, according to Gallup has a great deal of influence on only 5% of purchasing decisions and no influence at all on 62%.

But it is the currency of actively disengaged consumers.   Fully engaged consumers are far more attracted by concerns that are aligned with their values.  Fully aligned brands also have double the “share of wallet.”

Communities, businesses and features such as museums, athletic teams and theaters should take note, especially those using desecration marketing such as billboards or those that flippantly cast aside sense of place seeking to be mainstream.

For hotels, as an example, only 28% of guests are fully engaged while 25% are actively disengaged.  The other 47% are indifferent.

Nearly half (45%) of economy hotels as well as 38% of those in midscale properties and 22% of those in upscale properties are actively disengaged.

Even in luxury properties where 38% of guest are fully engaged, 13% are actively disengaged.  Recently, the Ritz Carlton in Charlotte was called out for discrimination after it applied a special service charge during a tournament for a league of historically black colleges.

Some called it a “black tax.”  The hotel apologized and made a charitable contribution to the tournament when challenged.  But there, most likely the service charge was added because studies have shown that black people are notoriously poor tippers, even when holding constant for social economic factors.

While the hotel was probably trying to watch out for its service staff, many of whom were probably also minorities, it may have strayed from its values.

One way or the other, it will now have a lot of actively disengaged consumers over those dates next year.  There is only room for one person at a time to stand on principle.

It is clear that the road to differentiation and alignment begins with knowing who you are as a community, business or organization and then remaining true to that brand.  That doesn’t include paying huge subsidies to attract groups for whom that makes little or no difference.

Unfortunately, only 46% of managers and 37% of non-management employees strongly agree that they know what their organization, business or community stands for and what makes it different, or in other words, a staff that is aligned.

More on this when I get back but read Gallup’s State of the American Consumer.

The Birthright for Being Hostile and Mean

Some of my most conservative friends undoubtedly rolled their eyes and muttered something dismissive such as “politically correct” when they heard news reports in advance of a warning issued by Pope Francis.

But ironically, isn’t ideology of any kind, itself, a form of political correctness?

All the hub bub has been about climate change, but the Pope’s warning was far more strategic than even that.

Readers of these essays who also actually read the Pope’s document before I did were sure to bring to my attention that it dealt with something about which I often write: community sense of place.

But first, it is important to put it in the context of the Pope’s earlier warnings about ideology.

In the course of delivering a series of morning meditations back in October 2013, Pope Francis warned about the corrosive effects of ideology, the excesses of which Catholics know something about from the church’s own history.

I don’t descend from a Catholic culture, at least going back more than four centuries.

In fact, nearly every line of my ancestors fled to America in the 1600s to escape religious persecution, often at the hands of Catholics, and always at the hands of other Christians.

They came to these shores as Remonstrants, Puritans, Quakers, Amish, Palatines, Huguenots and other forms of Christian faiths before helping to found yet another in the early 1800s, a restorationist Christian faith nicknamed Mormons.

I think they would all agree with Pope Francis when he noted repeatedly in 2013 that “In ideologies there is not Jesus: his love, his meekness.”

He noted, “When faith becomes an ideology, it makes Christians hostile and arrogant…it is a serious illness.”

No argument there.  But of course, those on the left claimed he was talking to those on the right while those on the right pointed right back at the left, all the while making the Pope’s point.

As moderates though, we know he was talking to all of us regardless of ideology.

In Chapter 4, part II, paragraph 143 of the encyclical or clarification of doctrine released a week ago is a paragraph that emphasizes “sense of place” (I’ve added some breaks for ease of reading):

“Together with the patrimony of nature, there is also an historic, artistic and cultural patrimony which is likewise under threat.

This patrimony is a part of the shared identity of each place and a foundation upon which to build a habitable city.

It is not a matter of tearing down and building new cities, supposedly more respectful of the environment yet not always more attractive to live in.

Rather, there is a need to incorporate the history, culture and architecture of each place, thus preserving its original identity.”

Unfortunately, far too many of my former colleagues in community destination marketing are devotees of an ideology that enables, if not fosters, the destruction of sense of place to worship instead at the altar of mainstream sameness.

It is an ideology with roots in the late 1930s which, after a hiatus for WWII, mounted an all out assault on sense of place still underway today.

Intriguing is a series of graphs that chart the average ideological positions of members of various U.S. Congresses dating back to 1947, the year after my dad returned from that war and the year before I was born.

They not only show the positions of the two major parties, but also the average for each chamber over the years since.

You can see for instance, that as former GIs took office after the war, the Congress, on average, became more liberal overall, possibly due to first hand exposure to the excesses ideology can inflict.

This is also the period when legislators in South Carolina, angry at desegregation across the nation took the Confederate flag from inside their chambers where it had been hung since 1938 in the House and 1956 in the Senate, raised it in defiance above the Statehouse.

Estranged from voters by special interests, Congress is far more conservative today even as Americans are again becoming less so.  The advantage on social issues is down to 4 points and lower than it was on economic issues at the turn of the century.

Actually, the percentage of Americans who are extremely conservative on either metric is back down to what it was in 1999 while the percentage who are very liberal is three times what it was.

But neither, according to Gallup, is more than a single digit fringe.  Another survey appears to quantify the percentage of Americans who are just generally intolerant, I suspect due to ideological estrangement.

This, I suspect, would also be the same hard core 7% at one end of the spectrum, who, on average, say they would never vote for a Catholic, woman, Black, Hispanic or Jew for President.

Apparently, this is lost on news outlets, who fail to read the actual survey results, give this tiny, hate-filled sliver undue influence and cover.

There is also reason to believe this 7% is a measure of the number of Americans who are truly racist.

A testament to the fact that we do evolve as Americans is that in 1958, just after segregation was declared unconstitutional, more than half of Americans would not vote for a Black to be President.

In 1937, 64% of Americans would not vote for a woman to be President.

Far From Being Mainstream

When I arrived in Durham in 1989, the farm to table movement was well underway, pioneered earlier in the decade by chefs such as Barker and Bakatsias who were already spawning a nationally recognized colony here with similar sensibilities.

My job was to weave this aspect into overall sense of place and give it prominence as a point of Durham differentiation, the essence of the community destination marketing which I was brought here to jumpstart.

Durham was one of the first destinations anywhere to do so but an attribute now claimed by even the smallest hamlets in North Carolina, making it seem that it has become mainstream.

But it hasn’t.  In fact, it’s far from it.

I’ll come back to the farm aspect of Durham’s farm to table in a minute but a new report entitled Farm Factory Nation documents the incredible growth, between 1997 and 2012, of what those intimately involved prefer to call “concentrated animal feeding operations.”

It has been due to consolidation, little or no environmental oversight and especially the powerful influence given special interests by Congress over food policy.

As a result, factory-farmed livestock now annually generate 13 times as much sewage as the entire U.S. population.

Unlike sewage in towns and cities where most of us live, this animal waste doesn’t undergo any wastewater treatment, passing along huge hidden costs to other taxpayers downstream, so to speak.

While my most conservative friends have an uncanny way of making every societal ill the fault of government, in this case, according to the report, they may be right.

While many of us became drawn to locally sourced foods, the U.S. Congress was doing the bidding of huge agribusinesses and as a result, shifting the food chain away from small, family producers to factory farms.

This is evident when you look at hog production, which is big business in sections of North Carolina.  During the 12 year span in the study, the number of hog farms fell by half, while the number of hogs sold each year increased by 39%.

During just the latter half of the study period, the number of hog farms in North Carolina decreased from 2,836 to 2,217 while the number of hogs in production increased from roughly 8.9 million to 10.1 million.

Another way to look at it is that the number of hog growers fell by 90% over the last three decades but the number of hogs produced remained about the same.

North Carolina’s share of national hog sales declined during the second half of the study period but it remained the second largest producer.  One county, Duplin, was the source of three percent of the hog sales in the United States.

Just one producer there generates more manure than all of the people in North Carolina put together.  Duplin, with a population of just 60,000 people, generates more sewage than the entire metro area surrounding New York City.

Another way to look at the transition to factory farms is that just 8 corporations and 7 huge partnerships now control 57% of all hog sales in the United States.

Of course, conservatives would spin this by saying the result of attempts by the EPA to deal with the issue of hog waste drove small producers out of businesses.

If that view has any merit at all it is because the protective regulations were drawn too broadly because small pasture producers don’t create a problem.  It is more likely that large producers insisted on a “one size fits all” approach to eliminate competition.

While the investigative analysis has a liberal bent, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make an excellent point.

It is the very nature of how factory farming is done that concentrates and intensifies the pathogens.  From farrow-to-finish, a 1,000 lb. hog generates an average of 9.3 lbs. of manure a day including 2 lbs. of solids that never degrade.

Most are sold before reaching that weight but you get the point.

Hog waste consists of 13 essential plant nutrients that are used by plants that originate in the feed, water and some supplements ingested by each animal.

Small scale, pasture production naturally regulates the waste in amounts that can be productive for soil and vegetation.

Even in a county where the state’s fourth largest city takes up more than two-thirds of its relatively very small land area, Durham is fortunate to have 232 farms averaging about 90 acres each.

The number of farms in Durham fell rapidly from the 1600 in 1910 to a low of just over 100 by 1950.  During several of those decades the city was the fastest growing in the state.

Since then, the number of farms has stabilized and even inched back above 200.

Meanwhile, the city, though constrained the county’s small land area, has continued to be one of the fastest growing in the state, including #1 again in the 1990s following my arrival.

Today on 45% of Durham’s farms, the primary occupation of the operator is “farmer.  Farmers on 133 of these operations work elsewhere for about a third of the year.

Durham County has a farmland protection program as part of its strategic approach to open space including voluntary agricultural districts in three priority areas.

Nine Durham farms are preserved now under conservation easements.

Even as one of the state’s most dynamic and nationally recognized communities and the center for one of its most appealing metro areas, Durham farms remain an essential ingredient of its sense of place.

They are also unsung contributors to Durham’s “foodie” reputation and appeal for the visitor-centric economic cultural development which has been so successfully leveraged by the community’s destination marketing organization over the past 26 years.

Many Durham farms either raise livestock and crops for sale to local restaurants and/or at various Durham farmers markets including the big on downtown.

Others raise feed such as hay and corn for those who do.  Around 38 use irrigation while for the most part the farmland is protected as a means of protecting the watershed.

Durham farms includes 46 that grow cattle for beef, 15 that grow sheep and lambs and only 5 that grow hogs.  But there is nothing remotely close to factory farms here.

In 1997, the animal waste scorecard showed Durham farms generating 32,000 tons of livestock waste, making it 84th out of 100 counties and less than any other urban county.

To put this in perspective, Duplin County, which is about an hours drive southeast of Raleigh, generated 4.5 million tons of animal waste. They are one of four counties that generated more than a million tons each in 1997.

Overall that year, livestock generated 31 million tons of animal waste in North Carolina, ranking in the top 10% nationwide for hog and poultry waste and nitrogen expelled into the atmosphere.

Waste is a fact of life but our widely dispersed, factory-driven food supply chain is not sustainable.  Powerful special interest lobbies stand in the way.  But this is one area where we need to return to a better way.

The Overlooked Sense of Place Ingredient

When I was recruited to Anchorage, where I spent most of the 1980s, I hadn’t yet given much thought to the “commons,” including the spectacular views in every direction.

But it was clear someone there had by the time I arrived in July of 1978.

Often, as a hobby and for my work in community marketing I would snap photos from the tops of tall buildings - the Alaska Range across Cook Inlet, Mt. McKinley to the north, the Chugach Mountains backdrop or Mt. Saint Augustine, up inlet to the southwest.

It wasn’t necessary to be on top of a building to see these views but something else struck me from up there, just how long a shadow they cast.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn recently that towers being erected today in Midtown Manhattan will cast a shadow nearly a half mile long, enough to block out the sun in Central Park.

A few towers in Anchorage of 14 stories or so had been built in the 1950s.  Hotels of 15 or more were built in the 1960s, followed by several others, some as high as 18 stories in the 1970s.

But several office building of 20 or more stories were going up just as I arrived.  So it is in this context that I first became aware of viewsheds as part of the commons and a community’s sense of place, a term just coined back then by Wallace Stegner.

From comments in passing, I get the feeling that officials in Durham, North Carolina weren’t too worried about either viewshed, sense of place or blocking much of this district from the morning sun when they approved a new 26-story City Center tower here.

Renderings were careful, it seemed, to show only the angles from where the sun was setting.

Officials and developers here have been sensitized to the importance of Durham’s sense of place by the community’s destination marketing organization but currently boomers seem to have more sway than stayers and boomers seem rarely concerned with the “commons.”

Unfortunately, friends of mine in high office has a few months earlier slapped down those who wanted to preserve even the skyline, let along viewsheds.

Maybe this lack of concern for commons is because most boomers fall under the spell of building icons when they should be concerned with creating settings, according to acclaimed architectural expert Witold Rybczynski (pronouned Vi-told Rib-shin-skee) in his book Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities.

In another book entitled, How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit, former Penn dean of architecture Rybczynski reminds us, as well as developers and architects, that new buildings should seek coherence with place not personality cult.

It isn’t just blight such as roadside billboards that rob us of viewsheds.  I don’t actually have anything against billboards, I am just very pro scenic character and preservation.

So I try to read not only from the viewpoint of developers and architects but also from those who are concerned about the privatization and surrender of the commons.

Important to preserving a community’s sense of place is the ability to hold contradictory viewpoints and perspectives.  Leveraging a community’s sense of place requires differentiation and differentiation of place requires continuity.

But according to researchers at the University of Michigan and Georgia State, we have a natural defense mechanism to avoid cognitive dissonance or having to admit we may be wrong.

The study concluded that it is far more comfortable for many of us to be close-minded than to endure the ambiguity and uncertainty of being open-minded.

What makes me pessimistic that Durham may be on the slippery slope to surrendering its sense of place is an increasing unwillingness to engage in discourse about attributes such as viewsheds for fear it may result in losing a project.

Researchers led by social ecologist Dr. Paul Piff at the University of California, Irvine have found that things that inspire “awe,” such as gazing up at a grove of huge trees, significantly more than say a tall building, have the effect of lessening our self-absorption.

They encourage us to forgo self-interest, be more ethical and take action to improve the lives of others, our neighborhoods and communities, what the researchers call prosocial behavior.

This gives me reason to believe that community discussions of the commons is worthwhile, including developers, regardless of whether they are incentivized with public funds or have so-called “air rights.”

Anyone concerned with preserving a community’s distinctiveness is well advised to include viewsheds as an ingredient and the subtle “awe” created by these settings.

Puzzling Folly Is North Carolina’s Tragedy

It isn’t clear why a powerful North Carolina senator from Onslow County, has been relentlessly working over the past five years on behalf of the billboard lobby, but it is extremely puzzling.

Whatever the motive, this seemingly good and otherwise reasonable official, has been a highly effective at battering North Carolina’s sense of place and overall appeal, which is so essential to tourism and other forms of economic development.

Maybe it is, in part, payback for copious campaign contributions?  Makes sense.  Because he owns auto dealerships which have in the past used billboards?  Possibly.

Because billboards are so effective?  Very doubtful, unless he has been living under a rock.  Here’s why.

The automobile sector is one of the few where traditional advertising was still found to be clinging to effectiveness when a 2010 longitudinal study found that this element of marketing had fallen to a negative return on investment, following a three-decade free fall.

By 2012, two years into the senator’s push on their behalf, roadside billboards had clearly fallen out of favor with consumers, when only 2/10ths of one percent found them useful to purchase something.

That percentage climbs to only 4.6% when you take into account other types of less destructive outdoor ads such buses and kiosks but it is clear that huge roadside billboards, the focus of the senator’s zeal, are the least effective of the least, barely clinging to life support.

By 2013, when the senator set his sights on overriding popular billboard bans in some towns and cities, his own automotive industry was rapidly shifting its advertising elsewhere, online in fact.

It was clear by then that even around town, nearly two-thirds of consumers had shifted to smartphones to find products from roadside and according to analysts the trend was rapidly growing.

While traveling, this percentage is now over 75%, meaning Cracker Barrel could be saving a lot money instead of paying for the 1,600 billboards it claims to have rented as of 2014, making it one of the top source of blight among restaurants.

The chain is traveler-driven with pass-through visitors representing 40% of its business.  But it obviously hasn’t updated its marketing plan for a few years. On the road, 3-in-4 are now using smartphones instead, resulting in a conversion rate of 85% for restaurants.

A 2012 Nielsen study found that mobile advertising and online searches reached 62% of automotive consumers before they had made a decision as well as 38% of those who knew exactly what they were looking for.

More significantly, 49% made an automotive purchase related to using their mobile device.  By year end, even dealerships such as the senator’s had shifted as much as 40% of traditional advertising to digital.

Let’s see:  use billboards and influence 2/10ths of one percent or mobile advertising and influence 49%?

No brainer.  So why are a few legislators so bent on forcing billboards down the throats of Tar Heels and their visitors while levying a hidden tax from the destruction of thousands of acres of public roadside forests?

In 2013, auto manufacturers and dealers spent more on online advertising than traditional advertising and at a rate of nearly three times the growth of overall advertising.

During 2015, they will spend $7.30 billion online.  That amount will increase to $12 billion by 2019, more than double the amount of annual spending there the year the senator’s onslaught began, at tax payer expense, to keep billboards on life-support.

The automotive industry’s online spending is 60% on direct response such as email and 40% brand advertising.  Nearly half is mobile related and half PC related.

It will be the third highest industry in mobile ad spending this year, at $3.43 billion, several positions above even the early adopting travel sector.

Online ads are considered viewable when half of the pixels are in view for one second, according to experts, only 40% as long as it takes to decipher a message on a billboard and they do not contribute to blight and deforestation.

It isn’t a coincidence that the time it takes to decipher a billboard is   the span of inattention found just prior to 80% of crashes and 65% of near-crashes.

The senator’s most recent push on behalf of billboards is to permit them to clear the view of trees along exit ramps each of which average 1,200 crashes each per year, which is already influenced by visual inattention as a contributing factor for 93% of rear-end crashes.

The most convincing evidence of the complicity of billboards on accidents came from a study of locations before and after they were removed.

Flippantly, many lawmakers dismiss the senator’s illogical obsession by testifying, in jest, that billboards will soon be entirely irrelevant, abandoned by their out-of-state owners.

What the heck, it will only take 50 to 60 years for North Carolina’s roadsides to recover.

Jurassic Marketing

I couldn’t help but smile recently by a headline in my email reading “Digital Pushes PR and Marketing Closer.”

Actually, tactical activities such as PR as well as other forms of promotion such as sales and advertising were tucked under the heading of marketing nearly 60 years ago.

But someone a lot younger than I am obviously still hasn’t received the memo.

Social historians, such as Dr. James Stoddard, a marketing professor at Appalachian State University where I will guest lecture on strategy next week for one of his colleagues, gives us insight into how marketing evolved over the last 150 years.

The period from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s, is known as the “production era.”   Then the Great Depression ushered in the “sales era” where promotion became a tool to unload products.

That all changed after WWII, but many marketers, including far too many in my former profession of community destination marketing, are still stuck in the 1930s.

These DMO’s are made obvious by their obsession and that of the communities they represent with mega-facilities, mega events and then paying subsides in order to get visitors to come.

This creates a never-ending cycle guaranteed to hollow out any sense of place in these communities, robbing them of their innate appeal.

Marketing had turned the corner from these techniques by 1960 when Dr. Theodore Levitt published Marketing Myopia in the Harvard Business Review, which was expanded into a book during the first decade of my now concluded career.

That means my former peers have had more than three decades to shift gears.

So why are so many marketers, though much younger, still stuck so far back in the past including those hoping to be enabled by a handful of legislators in North Carolina eager to facilitate long since obsolete forms of “desecration marketing” along roadsides?

Shortly after I landed my final marketing gig for Durham, North Carolina, Dr. Levitt famously wrote in another article entitled Advertising: The Poetry of Becoming:

“People don't take vacations to get away from it all but to escape from modern commercialism.  And the chief culprit is advertising.”

We know now from longitudinal studies that this was five years after the effectiveness of traditional advertising tipped into its long slow decline to where it now has a negative return on investment.

Urban Institute researcher and friend of mine, Ed McMahon put it another way in an article published last month in Virginia Town & City entitled Responsible Tourism:

“To understand mass market tourism, think about mega hotels, theme parks, chain stores and the new generation of enormous (4,000 to 5,000 passenger) cruise ships.

Mass market tourism is about quantity.  Mass market tourism is also about environments that are artificial, homogenized, generic and formulaic.

To understand responsible tourism, think about unspoiled scenery, locally-owned businesses, historic small towns and walkable urban neighborhoods.”

Gallup not only conducts research into workforce engagement but also “customer engagement,” which is a primary objective of marketing.

Across a variety of industries, Gallup finds a “powerful link between customer engagement and key business outcomes.”  Fully engaged customers represent a 23% premium over the average.

On the other hand, actively disengaged customers who work against you represent a 13% discount.

The three areas Gallup finds as key to customer engagement are:

• Company [organization or community] always delivers on what they promise.
• I feel proud to be a customer.
• Company [organization or community] is the perfect one for people like me.

In his new white paper entitled Contextual Marketing and the New Marketing Contract, analyst Brian Solis teases out that “empathy makes engagement personal” and when paired, it is “context that makes things relevant,” regardless of the marketing technology used.

Beginning decades before the Internet, marketing became not just a way to follow customer orientation. according to Stoddard, but the means to guide an organization’s direction.

For a community destination marketing organization that isn’t stuck in the distant past, this means that marketing is a tool not just for promotion but the means to safeguard a community’s distinctiveness.

The road to marketing empathy for a community begins with being comfortable in your own skin and seeking not the masses but only those for whom you strike a chord.

It is this overarching strategy that has enabled Durham, a relative latecomer, to leap frog much more established destinations in North Carolina, most of which are trapped in the pre-WWII sales driven world.

It is a world that exchanges distinctiveness of place and empathy for pure mass and homogenization, trading authenticity for mainstream until there will be no reason to go there or no one left in that dwindling market segment.

Sales obsession is what leads some communities to sacrifice soul for envy, build structures that draw fewer than those they replace, recruit events that displace more tourism than they bring.

In other words, a river of no return.

In the words of Solis, various technologies such as email, social media, digital advertising or creative content are a means to engagement but they can “miss the potency of context and empathy.”

The folks at StrongView define context in a marketing sense as “the unique combination of the consumer’s disposition and situation, coupled with the business’s disposition and situation.”

It is part of the continuing evolution from the product focused marketing of the early 1900s to the customer-centric marketing that emerged after WWII.

In a community marketing sense, it begins by not trying to be something you community isn’t but seeking appeal instead to paraphrase McMahon in urban forests, historical context, locally-owned businesses and organic districts, history and people-scaled settings.

In the words of McMahon, it is focusing economic development on what you have rather than what you don’t have even if in tourism it means “ lower volume, lower impact, but higher yield.”

In other words, context.

Discounts that Can Also Spell Doom

I shudder whenever I hear local officials announce there won’t be a property tax increase.

Since nothing is really free, and we, as property owners, are always banking on “quality of place” driving values each year, I am suspicious when someone exclaims that the value of those services stayed stagnant.

I would feel better if these “no tax increase” pronouncements were accompanied by a laundry list of what we’re not going to get next year because of it.

This would hopefully include a list of efficiencies achieved, of course, and a list of deferred maintenance, along with a list of what's being hollowed or starved out as well as a list of the things we should be doing but now won’t due to holding the line.

Of course, we’re to blame, or at least those few souls who go apoplectic whenever there is a change, such as the recent announcement where I live of a $7.50 annual rental fee on optional yard waste roll out carts for those of us who don’t own them.

Unfortunately officials spend far too much time and energy placating this tiny but vocal minority rather than listening to the overall silence among the vast majority of residents.

We all like a discount, such as the one I received at my grocery store on Thursdays for being over age 60.  But what if that discount comes with a steep price, such as lower grade produce?

Then, maybe, not so much.

It also makes them see things tactically rather than strategically, e.g. viewing curb appeal as merely planting a few flowers rather than overall appearance or viewing trees as “nice” but not as “green infrastructure.”

This is why even though it seems to have retained more than so many other places, I am not very optimistic that Durham, North Carolina where I live will do what it takes to preserve what’s left of its sense of place.

The “canary” or sentinel warning of its demise is not its “built” or even its “cultural” aspects, two in the trinity of place-based assets that when woven distinctly give a particular location its overall sense of place.

The early warning of its demise is the way local officials view its tree canopy, the most visible and distinctive element in its “natural” aspect, that completes the trinity.

“Infrastructure,” according to Webster’s Dictionary is “the substructure or underling foundation…on which the continuance and growth of a community or state depends.”

So I refer to this trinity as sense of place infrastructure, and the most fragile component is “green infrastructure.”  Trees, for instance, can convey sense of place without buildings but buildings really can’t without trees and vegetation

This isn’t new.  The term “green infrastructure” has been used in government now for more than two decades and taught in various disciplines, such as planning and public administration, long before that.

It emerged as a tool in management of urban settings some 150 years ago.

Yet it appears some in government still haven’t received the memo.  So a few months ago, the EPA connected the dots by publishing a guide to “Green Infrastructure Opportunities that Arise During Municipal Operations.”

It is written for “old schoolers” who still see infrastructure only as streets, sidewalks, curbs, parking and storm drains as well as sewer and water lines.

It reminds me that when Durham inventoried the status of its buildings not long ago, no one thought to include an assessment of the landscape surrounding each structure, including trees, signaling how endangered this aspect of sense of place is.

It is a myopia currently undermining a proposal to inventory the community’s overall urban forest canopy, by limiting it to just the trees on the property the City, itself, owns rather than a more strategic best practice “ecosystem” approach.

The former is a public works view of urban forest, a dumbed-down misuse of the term.

Urban forestry has been a discipline since the 1960s when it took on an ecological meaning, although its roots go back 100 years earlier.  It came to refer to a community-wide ecosystem in the 1970s.

It was embraced by city planners in the 1980s.  A strategic, community-wide approach was made a priority in 1990 at the Urban Forestry Research Summit.

Cities, including Durham began appointing urban foresters.  Some such as Chicago in the early 1990s took the ecosystem approach and began to develop assessments and urban forest management plans.

A few such as Durham took the less strategic approach and have yet to develop assessments and plans for “city-owned” trees until now, a quarter-century after a more comprehensive approach should have been on its radar and despite clamoring from residents.

Anything is a start, I suppose, but in the meantime, Durham’s ecosystem is losing 18,000 trees a year just to man-made destruction.  That doesn’t count tens of thousands more being clear cut just for pulp or to make shipping pallets.

It suggests a lack of urgency as well as strategic insight that leads me to wonder if Durham’s sense of place is ultimately doomed.

I suspect some in local government are prone to resist the idea of green infrastructure because it isn’t yet a perspective held by residents, but this overlooks local government’s role in community education as part of its role in the stewardship of place.

Infrastructure moved beyond streets and mains in the lexicon of public administration and planning in the early 1990s to incorporate trees and other elements of green infrastructure.

But even many officials who earned degrees more than two decades ago seem to have missed out on the coursework common then regarding green infrastructure.

It would be interesting to know if schools of government such as the one at nearby UNC-Chapel Hill teach this concept of inventory to newly elected public officials during orientation.

Not everything “green” is considered green infrastructure.  For instance, some parks, such as Rockwood down the hill from where we live, are while many others aren’t.

Of course trees are not the only sure-fire elements of green infrastructure.  It also includes constructed or restored wetlands, storm water initiatives such as rain gardens, green roofs and walls, permeable pavements, etc.

Trees are symbolic of green infrastructure because they create windbreaks and shade to reduce energy costs, eliminate air pollution, sequester carbon, slow storm run-off and erosion, increase property values, curb crime including domestic abuse, defer street maintenance costs and reduce healthcare costs.

The aesthetic and other psychological benefits - such as vitality - that they bring to entire neighborhoods and business districts as well as their economic development appeal should be enough to justify the preservation and fostering of urban forests.

But it is their role as green infrastructure that should guarantee them a much higher priority in cities including savings of billions of dollars over traditional infrastructure.

Frankly, any community that fails to safeguard them is more than likely doomed to surrender overall sense of place.

Just Missing By A Hair A Monumental Shift

Our local paper speculated this week that the downtown “loop” has been a matter of “civic discourse for at least a couple of decades.”

Actually, it has been more like six decades if you count the discourse leading up to creating it in the mid-1950s.

It took a couple of decades to create it but after a little more than a decade in use, the same group that pushed for it, now under a different name, began advocating its demise, ironically using the same rationale used to create it.

Tragically, it’s too late for the hundreds and hundreds of historic structures that were destroyed to create the “loop,” including the iconic Durham Union Station (shown in a County Library photo below).

But the story of the “loop” is not only the story of a near miss but that of an era.

More than three decades before the early 1990s founding of today’s Downtown Durham Inc., a predecessor was formed, first as a committee of the Merchant’s Association, then as the Downtown Development Association.

When I arrived in 1989 to jumpstart Durham’s first community destination marketing agency, I gathered intelligence by interviewing many of those earlier bygone commercial activists.

Refreshingly, they were willing to look back on regrets as well as achievements.

The “loop” was meant to save downtown Durham when it was envisioned in 1958.

Forest Hills Shopping Center had just opened on the southern outskirts and by the next year, even the increasingly “Black” neighborhood to the east would have a new shopping center, Wellons Village.

Rumors, soon founded, were that the Rand family was planning another to the north.

Of course, we know now that it was television that was changing the retail landscape by promoting to viewers the misperception that vast regions were centric.

This included the notion of driving a hundred miles to buy something consumers could easily find at home, thereby robbing their own local business climate and tax base.

But it wasn’t just competition that worried downtown advocates in the mid-1950s.

Durham had been the fastest growing county in North Carolina during the 1930s and second fastest during the 1940s, just behind Mecklenburg.

But what had Durham leaders worried was how fast Durham still continued to grow into the 1950s, while the number of jobs hadn’t grown since the end of World War II, more than a decade.

Poverty had first taken root in Durham in a neighborhood now called Edgemont in 1938 after a mill closing there brought on by the Great Depression.

But Durham continued to grow economically during the war years, thanks in some part I supposed to four cigarettes including Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields being included in each WWII ratio kits.

However, that growth abruptly ended in 1947, while the flood of people moving here didn’t.

There is evidence that this imbalance is the root of Durham’s generational poverty rate today.

By 1960, when downtown advocates formally proposed creation of the “loop” to local officials, 1-in-3 Durham residents lived in poverty, as did 1-in-4 North Carolinians and about the same proportion of Americans.

One rationale used for the “loop” back then was that it would make the Research Triangle Park more attractive to tenants.

It was a new project carved out of southeast Durham pinelands just four miles from downtown that Durham leaders such as George Watts Hill and Yancey Milburn, members of the downtown group, had been furiously working to create.

The report was shaped in the immediate aftermath of a transition from federal grants for Urban Redevelopment, which had been pushed in the late 1930s, finally passed in 1949 and then re-branded as Urban Renewal in 1954.

The program, which had to overcome opposition from rural lawmakers, incentivized communities to tear down old buildings to make way for parking lots and then sell surrounding parcels to private sector developers.

However, Urban Renewal was already in disrepute by 1956, when architectural journalist Jane Jacobs gave a presentation at a Harvard conference leading up to creation of a new discipline.

It was called urban design, a fusion of architecture and planning that would focus on overall settings rather than icons.

As downtown Durham advocates began meeting to plot its salvation in 1958, they should have been reading a new book based on a series of articles that Jacobs and others had been writing in Fortune Magazine.

Entitled The Exploding Metropolis; A study of the assault on urbanism and how our cities can resist it, the essays in the book might have helped Durham not only avoid a huge mistake but leapfrog to a new paradigm.

Economic development was just beginning a transition from the 20th century’s obsession with “what you don’t have” to what urban researcher Edward T. McMahon calls the 21st century model of focusing on “what you do have,” a transition even today that so many communities have failed to make.

Instead, Durham’s downtown advocates issued a report in November, 1960 based on the falling-out-of-favor Urban Renewal, just as Jane Jacobs was putting the finishing touches on a book that would be published a year later entitled, The Death and Life of American Cities.

It rewrote the book on rebuilding cities.  In fact, Durham’s Downtown Development Association members would have had access to excerpts published months earlier in Harper’s and the Saturday Evening Post which were very popular at the time.

Jacobs advocated an organic understanding of how districts evolve, the way Ninth Street evolved in Durham during the 1970s and the way downtown Durham evolved before WWII.

She articulated the importance of innate character and what would two decades later be christened as sense of place in an essay by Wallace Stegner.

By a matter of days if not hours, Durham was caught instead on the far side of the paradigm shift and soon set about destroying vast swaths of its organic character only to discover that Durham was able to populate RTP and become an economic engine again without it.

But a decade later, what I term a sense of place revolt dramatically slowed the destruction and birthed historic preservation here, just as the movement swept across America, as much in reaction the carnage of Urban Renewal as the nation’s upcoming bicentennial.

Within a few years a new breed of private developer including a couple who taught business at Duke emerged and began to adapt historic structures to new uses rather than destroy them.

By the 1980s they were populated with offices, galleries, restaurants, artists studios, apartments, music venues and stores.

The last Durham project predicated on the destruction enabled by Urban Renewal was a convention center and adjoining hotel, which opened in 1989 just as I arrived.  They looked as though they just didn’t fit and still do.

As a seeming nod to that bygone era, every decade or so since, Durham has continued to erect an icon that doesn’t fit.  It is as though the developers, often the local governments that should know better, are still defiantly objecting to sense of place.

They seem to forget, to quote from Witold Rybczynski in Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, that “The real challenge for cities today is not to create more icons, but rather to create more such settings.”

But as downtown advocates regrouped in the early 1990s to complete the task of revitalization, they were still plagued by the same inertia faced by predecessors nearly forty years earlier.

Back then a survey found that 76.9% of Durham residents community-wide supported the redevelopment of downtown including 57.7% who would support a new tax levy to do it.

But ironically only 41.8% of the merchants and property owners downtown were positive in regard to either redevelopment or a tax to fund it.

Fast forward four decades and the biggest suppressant to bringing downtown fully alive were landowners who didn’t have the means or interest to do so but were sitting on properties hoping others would.

This time, fortunately, the federal government came to the rescue with a new secret weapon, New Market Tax Credits, which when joined with historic tax credits and tens of millions of dollars in local government funds, created the turnaround.

Even as this second renaissance of downtown Durham took root, many were clearly still under the spell of outmoded Urban Renewal thinking such as the need for icons and very slow to grasp what Jacobs saw so clearly about the importance of sense of place and organic evolution.

In a twist of irony, Durham ended up preserving the highest proportion of its historical assets and converting them to adaptive reuse of any of North Carolina’s urban areas and most nationwide.

Yet officials, even today, seem prone to fixate on big projects rather than the little things that facilitate organic revitalization and sense of place such as the upkeep and overall community appearance noted in that 1960 downtown report.

They fail to understand that Americans, regardless of age, prefer protecting neighborhoods to revitalizing them.