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Place matters. Alluring or repellant, welcoming or off-putting, beautiful or ugly - the look and feel and personality of a city are among the key qualities that determine its economic well-being.
In recent days I sat in on two discussions with different purposes. Surprisingly, they echoed each other and pointed to a common theme.
One, a breakfast on Wednesday, was convened to examine new results from "The Soul of the Community," a three-year Gallup study, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, exploring which qualities in 26 U.S. metro regions (including Charlotte) make people feel loyalty and passion for where they live.
Research has shown a clear relationship between a city's economic growth and how connected residents feel to the city, although the research can't yet pinpoint which is the cause and which the effect.
So, which factors matter most in making people feel attached to where they live?
Aesthetics - the look and feel of a place. Social offerings - what's there to do? Openness - believing different groups of people are welcome. Those three factors are consistently the top "attachers," survey consultant Katherine Loflin said.
In this region (Anson, Cabarrus, Gaston, Mecklenburg, Union and York counties), the factor people most valued and saw as a strength was aesthetics - physical beauty and the availability of parks and green spaces.
Openness was seen as important, but not perceived among the region's top attributes. Instead, education (the quality of K-12 and higher education) and social offerings were top "attachers" and top strengths.
If you burrow into the data at www.soulofthecommunity.org you may note that students feel much less attached to the community than other groups. Asked if, given a choice, they'd leave, 38 percent of students said they would.
Hearing all this Wednesday, I knew it was sounding familiar. Rewind the tape to a provocative discussion Nov. 10 among about three dozen steering committee members for the Center City 2020 Vision Plan.
They were chewing over results from an Oct. 21 public forum where several hundred people offered hopes and ideas for central Charlotte. Among repeating themes were to embrace the growing international flavor, make all kinds of people feel welcome downtown - and give them fun things to do - and protect and improve the green natural areas.
"What would make us love Charlotte?" consultant Chris Beynon asked.
The discussion roamed over the lack of whimsy (former Mayor Harvey Gantt: "I don't think there's as much whimsy here as we think") and the importance of small things, of welcoming places, of parks and green spaces and community resilience.
Then architect/developer David Furman said he thought an important goal would be for Charlotte to become "a place where my kids would have stayed."
Ken Lambla, dean of UNC Charlotte's College of Art & Architecture, agreed: "My daughter left," he said. She had said Charlotte doesn't seek challenges to the status quo.
Discussion turned to whether Charlotte is "inclusive." We're inclusive if you play by the right rules, said Vi Lyles of the Lee Institute, noting her own child also had left. "Inclusive, yes. Embracing the differences, I'm not so sure about."
Physical place, said Furman, is key. Young people decide where they want to live, then they get a job there.
You might even call it - aesthetics? Openness? Social offerings? What makes us love a place? Sound familiar?
The audience at the Oct. 21 workshop for the 2020 Plan had taken a "visual preference survey" - you view pictures of places and rank how much you like them. One spot almost everyone liked was a people-filled, tree-shaded public plaza in Amsterdam.
Handily, its popularity illustrates those "Soul of the Community" themes: social offerings, openness and aesthetics.
I think David Furman is right. Physical place is key - and it's key to more than just whether we have a downtown we enjoy visiting. Our places illustrate whether we're open, whether we're social, and whether we value beauty. And by doing so, I submit, they hold the keys to unlock the soul of our community.
