Is there such thing as a soulless place?
A colleague recently shared a New York Times piece titled “The Case for Strip Malls, the Antidote to Shiny, Soulless City Luxury.” The word soulless caught me. A few days earlier, an architecture student had asked me whether DC’s Wharf was soulless. And I realized I’ve used the term myself throughout my adulthood, especially to describe my hometown of Las Vegas. It’s been a convenient word for what I think motivated career choices and what I wanted to avoid as an urban planner: soulless places.
I imagined a conversation with my younger self, where I examined what I really meant when calling a place “soulless.” I realized the word was an easy shortcut. It’s a way of saying a place seems new, inauthentic, mass-produced, or unoriginal. Those words often describe a lot of the built world, much of which isn’t bad. After all, the Times article was defending strip malls, once the very symbol of the soulless, as antidotes to a newer generation of polished, predictable retail. Apparently, even soullessness has cycles.
My imagined conversation reminded me that when I was in high school, my friend Omid and I spent hours at our neighborhood Barnes & Noble. It sat in a brand-new strip mall, which I know I dismissed back then as soulless. But how could it be? It was where Omid and I argued about politics (he was wrong, of course) and where I discovered a Carl Sagan book that was far above my head. That store wasn’t quirky or historic. It was utterly standard. But the way we inhabited it gave it life. We gave it soul.
As I tried to pin down the word, I came to a conclusion that felt radical to me: anything that brings us into physical space constrained by gravity, weather, and the messy presence of other humans has soul. This new idea helped me re-examine how I think about the elements that make up the soul of a place.
Soul is more than historic
What I realized is that people often conflate the soul of a place with the history of a place. Some of my favorite places have deep histories. They can be haunting, sacred, or simply fascinating. It’s really what the National Register of Historic Places is all about. I can’t imagine there are many people who enter Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and don’t feel something profound.
We just moved from a house built in 2012 to one built in 1877. I can not only see the marks of previous generations on the old hardwood floors, in the dugout cellar, and in the carriage house, but I can imagine their experiences here in DC, through the end of Reconstruction, through the Gilded Age and Progressivism then two World Wars and a half-century of relative calm and prosperity.
These buildings and places, whether houses or cathedrals, help connect us with our predecessors. After all, creating places to gather goes back to the beginning of humanity. So no doubt these old, historic places, with their generations of visitors and numerous stories, have soul. I think it would be more accurate to describe these places as authentic connectors to our past.
But just as we have the concept of young and old souls in humans, I think the same can be said of places. Our house built in 2012 did have a soul, we were just helping write it from scratch.
The Wharf in DC is a new large redevelopment and, according to many Reddit commentators, soulless. What they mean, I think, is that it’s not what they want. They may long for the cozy authenticity of a century-old building with a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the basement. But every building can’t be 100 years old, and most new ones can’t even legally mimic that form.
Walk the Wharf on a Saturday night, though, and you’ll see hundreds of people eating, listening to music, and enjoying the water. Reddit shows that it’s not everyone’s taste, but it’s not soulless.
Soul is more than authentic
The Las Vegas Strip, my go-to example of inauthentic, recently constructed (and blown up and reconstructed) architectural pastiche. It loves to imitate other, older, authentic cities and it is not my cup of tea. But it’s animated every day by millions of people seeking connection, escape, and luck. Despite being artificial and far from my ideal vacation destination, it still hums with human energy. I’ve realized that even the Strip has soul, despite my feelings about it. Soul is bigger than any individual’s taste.
Soul is more than unique
There are, of course, new places that are banal marked by design sameness, predictability, and lack of quirk. A place can be banal yet soulful if people fill it with laughter, protest, flirtation, breaking bread, or even quiet study. That’s what my friend Omid and I did in the Barnes & Noble during our high school years in Las Vegas, which was otherwise a chain store in an unremarkable building that could have been plopped anywhere in the United States.
Policy is important but soul is bigger
Of course, not every place makes it easy for people to inhabit. Design matters. Some environments invite people to linger, talk, and connect, while others push them to move along or stay away. Some places invite a broad mix of people to coexist, while others quietly signal who isn’t welcome there. I remember being seventeen and getting kicked off the Strip for curfew, a reminder that even the most crowded places decide who belongs.
These questions of access and inclusion are the domain of policymakers, real estate professionals, planners, and designers. They set the stage, write the rules, and build the places. But the soul of a place doesn’t come from codes, materials, or master plans. In fact, it happens despite all of those things. It comes from people showing up and from the unpredictable ways they inhabit and animate a place.
The idea that all places have soul is powerful as we witness the ongoing onslaught on the digital world on humanity. The infinite-scroll attention economy of social media is rapidly morphing into an online world created by literally soulless artificial intelligence. If this is what the future of our economy will look like, it only underscores the value and necessity of real, physical places.
So I’m retiring soulless from my planner’s lexicon. The next time I’m tempted to use it, I’ll ask instead: Who is here? What are they doing? How does this place make them feel alive, even if it’s not my place of choice?
I have come to see that despite zoning and design and policy, every place with people has the capacity for soul. Taste is personal, but soul is something we imbue in a place when we inhabit it.
