What Makes This Place Different?

The first thing I do in a new place isn't open a masterplan or study the demographic data.

I walk. Usually without much of a plan. I'll stop for coffee, wander into side streets and photograph things that probably seem completely ordinary to everyone else: an old sign, a corner where people naturally gather, a lane that's full of life while another, only a block away, feels strangely quiet. If I can chat with someone about their business, their street or the neighbourhood, even better.

For years, I thought I was simply filling time before the "real work" began. I've since realised this is the work.

Recently I wrote an article for Hoyne about why we're building more homes than ever, but not always places people will remember. The piece argued that identity isn't something added at the end of a project through branding, public art or activation. It's shaped much earlier, through the decisions that influence how a place will eventually be experienced.

But I've found myself thinking about what comes even earlier than that. Before we shape a place's future, surely we should understand what already makes it different.

Every place is already telling a story. Not necessarily the polished version that ends up in a project vision or marketing campaign, but the one that's been developing over decades. It's found in the businesses that survived when everything around them changed, in the shortcuts locals take without thinking, in the café where the owner knows half the customers by name, in old photographs tucked away in a library archive, and in conversations with people who've watched a neighbourhood evolve over generations.

It's tempting to dismiss these things as nostalgia. I don't think they are. They're often the clues to what gives a place its point of difference.

As planners and designers, we're trained to solve problems. We produce frameworks, strategies, diagrams and masterplans. They're all important. But I think our first responsibility is something much simpler: to pay attention, to be curious and to ask better questions.

• Why do people care about this place?

• What would disappear if it were gone?

• What makes this place unlike anywhere else?

The answers are rarely found in an office. More often, they're uncovered by walking, looking closely and being genuinely curious about the place that's already there.

Perhaps that's why I've always been drawn to photography. A camera has a way of slowing you down. It encourages you to notice details you might otherwise walk straight past. The same is true of writing. Both are, in their own way, exercises in paying attention.

The more projects I work on, the less I believe our job is to invent identity. I think our job is to discover what already gives a place its point of difference, and then make sure we don't accidentally design it out.

Looking back, I think I was doing this long before I knew it could become a career. For my Year 12 geography project, while most of the class researched from behind a computer, I rode around Balmain with a camera, interviewed the local firefighter, searched out old history books and tried to understand why the suburb felt the way it did. At the time, I thought I was simply completing an assignment. In hindsight, I think I was following a curiosity that's never really left me.

Perhaps that's where good place strategy begins.

Not with a masterplan. But with curiosity.

Against Placelessness: Identity is decided earlier than we think

We are building a lot of city. Quickly, efficiently, and in many cases, quite well.

New precincts are rising across Australia that meet the codes, deliver the numbers and respond, dutifully, to the pressures of growth. They are dense, considered and technically sound. And yet, for all of this, many of them still don’t feel like somewhere.

You can walk through them and recognise that they work, but struggle to remember them afterwards. They are perfectly functional, often quite beautiful, and oddly forgettable. They could be anywhere. Sometimes, they are.

This is placelessness. Not the absence of design, but the absence of feeling.

Sirius in Sydney with defining views to heritage.

When we talk about identity in cities, we tend to reach for the visible things. Materials. Architecture. Branding. Public art. Activation. The finishing layer that gives a place its “character”, or at least something to photograph. But by the time we get there, most of the important decisions have already been made.

Identity isn’t something you apply at the end, like a coat of paint or a clever name. It is something you set in motion much earlier, often long before the first building is designed, through the decisions that shape how a place is organised, how it is encountered and how it unfolds over time.

At its core, identity is structural. It sits in the alignment of streets, the framing of views, the positioning of public spaces and the relationships between them. It is in the sequence of movement through a place, the moment you turn a corner and see something unexpected, the pause at an edge, the pull of a destination just out of sight.

It is not just what a place looks like. It is how it reveals itself. And we don’t always give this the attention it deserves. It is easier, after all, to talk about buildings than it is to talk about what happens between them. Easier to focus on objects than on experience. But these early decisions are doing most of the work, whether we acknowledge them or not.

Get them right, and something begins to click. People return, not because they have to, but because they want to. They build routines, recognise others, and begin to feel a sense of familiarity that slowly becomes attachment. Over time, the place becomes part of their daily life, and then part of their identity.

Framed view of One Barangaroo

Get them wrong, and no amount of design refinement, branding or late-stage activation can quite fix it. You can dress it up, but you can’t change what it is.

As our cities grow denser, this matters more than ever. We are asking more of our neighbourhoods, and in turn, people are expecting more from them. The public realm is no longer incidental. It is where life happens, or doesn’t.

And increasingly, it is what people are willing to pay for.

Places that feel like somewhere behave differently. They hold attention. They build attachment. They create distinction in a crowded market and sustain relevance over time. Placeless places, however well executed, struggle to do any of this.

If we want better outcomes, we need to shift how we think about identity. Not as something layered on at the end, but as something embedded from the beginning, in the structure of the place itself. Because identity isn’t delivered at completion.

It is decided much earlier than we think.

Public benefit without meaning?

I came across this over the weekend. A new space delivered as part of a masterplanned precinct in Sydney. A DDA-compliant ramp. Some steps. All leading to… a fire hydrant. It probably looked fine on a plan. And I imagine the council ticked it off as public benefit.

But what is it actually for?

Not every public space needs to be a big statement like public art, a destination playground, a water feature. Most don’t. But it should still have a job to do. Something small, even. Otherwise it’s just a missed opportunity.

This is a small example. But we see versions of this everywhere, and sometimes at much bigger scales. When we're so focused on controls, compliance and approvals, it’s easy to forget to ask a few basic questions: Who is this for? What does it offer the community? And how might it actually support the place, and the developer, over time?

If we don’t ask those questions, we end up creating spaces that technically work, but don’t really do anything at all.