Our spaces broadcast who we are and what we care about — whether we realize it or not. A warm kitchen built around a big table signals a family that values shared meals. An elementary school with an elaborate playground tells parents that outdoor exploration matters here. A walkable city suggests residents who care about health and environmental impact.
We can’t always control what our physical surroundings say about us. We may not be able to force the school board to build a bigger playground or make the mayor close streets to cars. But our voice matters more than we realize.
Exercising that influence doesn’t necessarily require chiming in at city council meetings or lobbying the parks department, though that’s time well spent. We can do a lot just by getting our own house in order. Because our spaces don’t just show our values — they spread them. When we take down the fences between our house and our neighbors’, other homeowners notice. And the more people see fences coming down, the more people tear down their own.
What spaces say about us
Every year, I look forward to the three late spring weeks I get to spend in the college town of Lund, Sweden. One of the small city’s crowning features is the big downtown park — the one that comes up on the “best things to do in Lund” lists. It has fountains to splash in and fields of perennials to stroll through, plus a playground, skate park, climbing wall, spinning platforms, self-serve zip lines, and, best of all, hiking paths for kids. The way the trees were pruned created tunnels they could blaze through freely, whereas anyone over four feet tall had to duck and move slowly (or risk getting concussed by an overhanging branch).
That magical space isn’t even an anomaly in Lund — there’s another great park just like it right next to the dorms where we stay. This one is smaller but has a soccer rink perfect for four-on-four games, plus a three-story play structure built from massive timbers (think the Swiss Family Robinson’s treehouse at Walt Disney World) and outfitted with the longest enclosed slide I’ve ever seen.
These places send a clear message about how kids — and unstructured outdoor play — fit into Swedish society. Sure, American cities have playgrounds too, but the difference is in the quality and ambition. In the States, zip lines and climbing walls are mostly found indoors — usually in suburban strip malls that require a car ride and a parent with a credit card. In Lund, providing places for kids to play is more a civic priority, less a business opportunity, and the investment shows. Multistory timber play structures, free zip lines, and pruned hiking tunnels aren’t just amenities — they’re infrastructure. This extends to private spaces too: The pizza place has courtyard games, and the seafood restaurant has a koi pond. In Charlottesville restaurants, parents wanting to entertain kids while waiting for food hand over the iPad. In Lund, kids can run around, explore, and grow while grown-ups sit and talk.
I’m leery whenever I hear someone assert: “We should just do things like they do in X,” with X being any neighborhood, city, or society that has an entirely different population, politics, and geography. No two places are exactly alike, and there are plenty of reasons Lund has more and better parks than most American cities, like Sweden’s higher taxes and its long history of nature preservation. But history and economics aren’t the story here.
The reason Lund has so many places for kids to play isn’t just that the public funded them; it’s also that the public wanted them. City residents expect spaces that provide “private necessity and public luxury.” And so they build them.
Physical spaces have always embodied what societies care about — from those first stone monuments that hunter-gatherers built to demonstrate loyalty to each other and to higher powers. Every civilization since has carved its priorities into its surroundings: Mesopotamian towers reached skyward to honor gods while elevating priests above the common folk; Egyptian pyramids showed pharaohs’ power through sheer scale; Greek town squares spread democratic ideals with open spaces where citizens could gather as equals.
Dictators and authoritarian regimes have weaponized this dynamic, using infrastructure to broadcast ideology. For Hitler, the autobahn was a concrete expression of German efficiency and nationalism. For Mussolini in Italy, new grand boulevards and imposing architecture signaled an ideological connection to Roman imperialism.
Physical spaces have always embodied what societies care about — from those first stone monuments that hunter-gatherers built to demonstrate loyalty to each other and to higher powers.
Our spaces continue to express our values: Skyscrapers tower as gleaming monuments to free enterprise, while stately government buildings remind us of the law and order that makes it possible. And it’s not just grand megaprojects. Our homes and offices tell revealing stories, too.
After World War II, millions of men returned home to a building boom in the United States. The common layout for single-family homes — mine included — relegated kitchens to the rear of the house, where women could cook and clean out of sight. Meals miraculously appeared through the kitchen door into the dining room, where they were eaten at a rectangular table with the eldest male at the head. When the meal was over, dirty dishes returned to the kitchen with the women. It would be hard to misinterpret those gender roles.
Similar messages are everywhere: Manicured lawns broadcast very different values than backyards left “wild.” Cafés with elbow-to-elbow laptop workstations send a different message than ones with couches arranged around coffee tables. Even our Zoom backgrounds — from carefully curated bookshelves to living spaces with kids and pets running around — announce our priorities.
Whether we’ve deliberately designed our spaces to broadcast certain values or simply stumbled into arrangements that mirror them, we need to know what our spaces are telling the world, so that we can make sure we approve the message.