When we set out to build Serenbe, we had the opportunity to rethink almost everything from the ground up. Most communities don’t have that luxury. They’re already built, and many are struggling to adapt to a changing climate, changing demographics, and changing ways of living.

That’s why I was eager to speak with Ellen Dunham-Jones on the Start In Your Own Backyard podcast. Ellen is an architect, urbanist, and longtime Georgia Tech professor who recently retired after more than two decades of teaching. Along with her co-author, June Williamson, she has spent years documenting what they call retrofitting suburbia.

Ellen describes three broad approaches to retrofitting. The first is redevelopment: taking an underperforming site, such as a dead mall or sprawling commercial center, and transforming it into a more compact, mixed-use, walkable place. The second is re-inhabitation, or adaptive reuse, finding new purposes for buildings and infrastructure that already exist, whether that means converting an office park, big-box store, or shopping center into housing, schools, community facilities, or something else entirely. Ponce City Market, in the former Sears distribution center, and Krog Street Market, a former 1920s warehouse, are two examples of highly successful adaptive reuse projects in Atlanta.

The approach I’m particularly drawn to (which will come as a surprise to no one) is regreening. Instead of assuming every piece of developed land needs to be developed and redeveloped, regreening focuses on giving land back to natural systems. Places like parking lots, vacant parcels, failed shopping centers, and other impervious spaces can transform into wetlands, parks, habitat, food-producing landscapes, or natural stormwater systems.

Regreening helps address flooding, water quality, biodiversity, heat, public health, and recreation while creating new forms of value. In some cases, the landscape itself can become the catalyst for new development around it.

Ellen points to the transformation of the former Meriden Hub mall in Connecticut as one example. The site became a large stormwater park with walking paths, public space, and ecological infrastructure and helped spur nearby development.

One other thing I really appreciate about Ellen’s approach is that she doesn’t spend her time demonizing the suburbs or dwelling on the issues. Instead, she asks a much more useful question: How do we make the places we already have work better for people and for the planet?

In my conversation with Ellen, we talk about abandoned malls, the importance of third places, stormwater parks, autonomous transportation, climate migration, and what the suburbs might look like twenty years from now.

If Serenbe is an example of what can happen when you have the opportunity to start with a blank slate, Ellen’s work asks an equally important question: What can we do with the places we’ve already built?

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I couldn’t think of a better person to kick off a new season of the Start In Your Own Backyard podcast than my friend, Price Bell Jr.

Price grew up at Mill Ridge Farm just outside of Lexington, Kentucky. Mill Ridge is a working thoroughbred farm, a place his family has cared for for generations, but when you listen to Price talk about it, you quickly realize it’s also a place shaped by family stories, horses, trees, open land, and a deep sense of stewardship.

His grandmother returned to Lexington in 1960 with very little cash and a lot of determination. With 286 acres, four broodmares, and a half-built barn, she laid the foundation for what Mill Ridge has become today. One of the great stories Price tells is how a horse named Sir Ivor, bred at Mill Ridge, went on to win the Epsom Derby in England, putting both the farm and his grandmother on an international stage.

But Price’s story is about far more than family legacy. Before returning to his family farm in 2011 (he was named General Manager in 2020), he spent years working in real estate and urban development, learning about the power of community, adaptive reuse, and what can happen when people work together toward a shared vision.

Now, the worlds of real estate and land stewardship have come together. What happens when a growing city begins to reach the edges of a place like Mill Ridge? Is there a way that development can actually strengthen relationships to the land, its history, and to the wider community? These are the types of questions that Price started to consider.

That’s when Billy Van Pelt, a mutual friend who I met through his wonderful work at American Farmland Trust, introduced Price to Serenbe.

Price first visited our Biophilic Leadership Summit without even knowing what the word biophilia meant. It was there that he began to see how Serenbe’s priorities – things like connection to nature, walkability, community, and opportunities for children to explore more freely – were really not that complicated. They’re actually remarkably simple and can be adapted to almost any community.

In our conversation, Price and I talk about what horses have taught him about patience, what Nashville taught him about the power of adaptive reuse and collaboration, and what Mill Ridge might teach us about the future of family land.

We also talk about something at the heart of Start In Your Own Backyard: the idea that change doesn’t always begin with a grand plan. Sometimes it starts with a walk, a conversation, a child’s curiosity, or even a backyard compost pile.

Price Bell Jr. isn’t trying to recreate Serenbe. He’s trying to take the lessons he’s found here and apply them to something that belongs entirely to Lexington and Mill Ridge.

Which is really what placemaking is all about: paying attention to your own backyard and having the imagination and patience to help it become something better.

I’m really pleased to kick off this new season with my friend Price Bell, Jr.

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When we began imagining Serenbe more than 25 years ago, there was no scientific term for what we were trying to create.

When we set out, we studied places where people had lived well through time. We questioned why certain places stirred an emotional response when we visited them and others did not. We stayed on English country estates and wandered through neighboring villages. We experienced the intimacy of Monet’s garden at Giverny and the beauty of Savannah’s historic streets and squares. We weren't studying these places at the time but simply enjoying them. The proportions, pathways, landscapes, and gathering places that made us want to slow down, explore, and connect stayed with us, and years later they surfaced as we imagined Serenbe.

Why did one street invite us to stroll while another encouraged us to hurry through? Why did a village square make strangers feel comfortable speaking to one another? Why did a view of trees or an encounter with water quiet the mind? Why did some buildings seem to welcome us while others left us feeling uneasy?

Our approach combined aesthetic judgment, personal observation, lessons from traditional places, and what I have often called radical common sense.

Now, science is giving that approach a name: neuro spatial design.

The term describes an emerging field that connects neuroscience, human health, and the built environment. It examines how space affects the brain and nervous system. Light, sound, texture, scale, pathways, access to nature, and the arrangement of social spaces are increasingly understood to influence human health.

Interestingly, this field emerged during roughly the same period as Serenbe. The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture was established in 2003, just as we were moving from our earliest ideas toward the first homes at Serenbe. At the time, however, we were not talking about neuroscience. We were responding to what we had experienced in our own lives.

When we first encountered biophilia, it too was an emerging concept, not yet part of the common vocabulary of architecture, landscape architecture, or community planning. Today, biophilic design is gaining much wider acceptance, but back in the early 2000s, it gave language to something many of us understood intuitively: human beings possess a fundamental need to connect with the natural world.

Much of the early conversation centered on preserving land, protecting natural systems, reducing environmental damage, and bringing nature into the built environment. Those principles were and still are essential to Serenbe, but our own experience was also deeply personal.

When Marie and I moved to the country, we watched what happened to our children when they were outdoors. They became more curious, independent, imaginative, and alive. We noticed how all of us felt calmer, more open in beautiful natural settings. That observation changed the direction of my life.

Prior to this, we believed we had created a nearly perfect life in Atlanta. On paper, that is. We had a home and neighborhood we loved, and I was leading the hospitality company I had founded, which had grown into a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. By every conventional measure, I had achieved success.

But watching our children come alive in nature completely changed my understanding of what success meant. It ultimately led me to step away from running a public company.

This was not the result of a scientific study or an intellectual research project. It came from paying attention to what was happening directly in front of me. When Richard Louv published Last Child in the Woods a decade after our move, his research confirmed what instinct had already told me.

That realization shaped Serenbe from the beginning. We preserved most of the land, clustered buildings into walkable hamlets, placed homes close to woods and farms, created paths rather than relying entirely on roads, and designed public spaces where daily encounters could occur naturally. We saw beauty, agriculture, art, food, movement, and community as parts of a single human ecosystem.

We did not have brain scans or biometric measurements to prove these decisions mattered. We relied on experience, intuition, and lessons embedded in places that had endured for generations.

The importance of this emerging field is underscored by a new Milken Institute report, Bridging Neuroscience, Health, and the Built Environment: A Giving Smarter Guide. Released in July 2026, the guide is the product of a partnership between the Milken Institute’s Science Philanthropy Accelerator for Research and Collaboration and the Pedersen Foundation. It describes neurospatial design as an interdisciplinary ecosystem connecting neuroscience, health, architecture, planning, and design.

Its opening premise is striking: we spend approximately 90 percent of our lives indoors, and those surroundings influence how we think, feel, and behave. The report identifies four priorities for advancing the field:

• Generate actionable evidence that designers and communities can apply.

• Develop a strong and diverse pipeline of researchers and practitioners.

• Integrate neurospatial principles across building types and industries.

• Expand public and professional awareness of how places affect human health.

This research matters because evidence changes professional practice. It can influence architects, planners, developers, healthcare leaders, policymakers, investors, and philanthropists. It can turn what was once dismissed as subjective preference into a measurable consideration in how we design homes, schools, workplaces, hospitals, neighborhoods, and cities.

Yet I find myself wondering why we need new scientific language to rediscover what our ancestors simply seemed to know.

Traditional villages were often organized around walking, shared spaces, local food, human-scaled buildings, and regular encounters with nature and neighbors. Their builders may not have understood the neurological mechanisms involved, but they understood the human experience. They knew that proportions mattered, beauty mattered, trees offered more than shade, and the places between buildings were often as important as the buildings themselves.

Modern development separated many of these elements. We divided living from working, people from food production, children from nature, and homes from daily necessities. We designed around the automobile and then wondered why people walked less, encountered their neighbors less often, and felt increasingly disconnected.

Now science is helping us better understand the unintended consequences of those decisions. It does not diminish the value of intuition or inherited wisdom. Instead, it gives us another language with which to explain, test, and defend them.

The most encouraging possibility is that this research can move these principles beyond a handful of unusual projects. If evidence can persuade conventional developers, financial institutions, public agencies, and professional design organizations to rethink entrenched practices, then this emerging science has real value.

That is why I am particularly excited about Serenbe’s forthcoming Aging in Place campus. When we formally announce the campus next year, we also expect to announce a research partnership, funded by a third-party nonprofit and conducted with a university research department, to explore human health. Researchers will follow participating residents, documenting lifestyle changes after moving to Serenbe and measuring selected health outcomes against those of the broader population.

We do not yet know what every result will show. That is the purpose of legitimate research. But we are eager to move from personal observation and lived experience to independently gathered and published evidence.

Our goal is not simply to validate Serenbe. It is to share what we have learned so that other communities, developers, planners, and public officials can better understand how the places we build influence mental and physical health. If the research confirms what we have observed, those lessons can extend far beyond Serenbe.

Perhaps the larger lesson is not that our ancestors knew everything or that modern science arrived too late. It is that observation, beauty, tradition, and science should never have been separated.

We need the wisdom to notice how a place makes us feel, the curiosity to ask why, and the discipline to measure what happens over time.

At Serenbe, we began with what we experienced, what we felt, and what seemed like common sense. Now we have an opportunity to test those observations, publish what we learn, and contribute to a growing body of evidence about the relationship between place and health.

The scientific name may be new but the human need is not.

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That is the remarkable story behind The Nature Record, an ambitious national effort to document the condition of America’s natural systems and the benefits they provide to our health, economy, culture, and daily lives.

The project began in 2022 as the National Nature Assessment, a federal undertaking modeled on the National Climate Assessment. Approximately 180 scientists had volunteered to develop its chapters, and an initial outline had been released for public comment. Then, on January 30, 2025 the initiative was canceled via executive order.

But the scientists believed the work was too important to abandon. With foundation support and review by the National Academy of Sciences, they reorganized independently, renamed their project The Nature Record, and continued their work. The first comprehensive assessment is expected later in 2026.

Dr. Neha Pathak recently explored this story in Yale Climate Connections through an interview with my longtime friend Dr. Howard Frumkin, the physician and epidemiologist leading The Nature Record’s chapter on human health and well-being.

The conclusions emerging from the research are both significant and deeply intuitive: Contact with nature is broadly beneficial to human health, but those benefits are not equally available.

Nature can reduce stress, encourage physical activity, strengthen social connections, and support mental and physical well-being. Healthy forests, watersheds, and tree canopies also provide clean water, cooler neighborhoods, better stormwater management, and protection from some of the growing effects of climate change.

Yet access to these benefits remains profoundly uneven. Lower-income neighborhoods and many communities of color often have fewer high-quality parks. Children in families of all income levels are spending more time with screens and less time outdoors. Older adults and people with disabilities often find that trails and natural areas lack stable surfaces, shade, resting places, and accessible facilities.

The Nature Record challenges us to stop treating nature as scenery or an optional amenity. Nature is essential public health infrastructure.

Howie’s leadership in this effort does not surprise me. He has been helping people understand the connection between nature, community design, and human health for decades.

I first met Howie through Dennis Creech, the visionary founder of Southface. Dennis participated in the September 2000 charrette at Serenbe, conducted by the Rocky Mountain Institute, to explore environmental principles that might help us protect the nearly 40,000 acres of undeveloped land in the southern portion of Fulton County.

At the time, Howie was professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, as well as a professor of medicine at Emory’s medical school. He brought a valuable perspective to our discussion – one that I had not considered before, but seems so obvious now: How we use land and design communities is a matter of public health.

Howie became a friend and volunteer adviser as we worked to establish the Chattahoochee Hill Country land-use plan and later developed Serenbe as a demonstration of how clustered, walkable development could provide needed housing while preserving large areas of forests, farms, streams, and open space.

His influence later reached the national level. From 2005 to 2010, Howie served in two important leadership roles at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He directed the National Center for Environmental Health and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and later served as special assistant to the CDC director for climate change and health.

Long before most people were discussing the built environment as a form of preventive medicine, Howie was helping us understand that where and how we live profoundly affects our physical, mental, and social well-being.

Could we design communities that made walking a natural part of daily life? Could children have the freedom to explore forests and streams? Could people encounter neighbors on foot instead of seeing one another only through car windows? Could housing be concentrated so that nature remained accessible to everyone?

Howie and I served together on the board of the Children & Nature Network, continuing to advance the message so powerfully expressed by our friend Richard Louv. Richard’s groundbreaking writing, particularly Last Child in the Woods, gave the world a language for understanding what children lose when they become disconnected from nature. His phrase “nature-deficit disorder” captured a condition many families were experiencing even if they could not yet name it, myself included.

This work has never been about children alone, although their needs are especially urgent. People of every age need meaningful contact with the natural world. Children need places to explore and develop independence. Adults need relief from stress and isolation. Elders need safe, welcoming places to walk, gather, and remain engaged with life.

And people with disabilities should have the same opportunity to experience the restorative power of nature as everyone else.

I can see many of these principles taking physical form around us.

Serenbe’s 20 miles of trails through preserved forests will soon extend another two miles across pastures, farms, and woodlands to New RiverLands Park on the Chattahoochee River. The park is being advanced through a collaboration involving the City of Chattahoochee Hills, Chattahoochee Now, and the Trust for Public Land.

It is part of the larger Chattahoochee RiverLands vision: a 100-mile regional network of greenways, blueways, parks, and tributary trails stretching from Buford Dam to Chattahoochee Bend State Park.

This project is so much more than a recreational amenity. It is an investment in conservation, mobility, public health, and human connection.

One especially meaningful element will be the Wheel Beautiful: RiverLands Scenic Universal Access Trail. This approximately one-mile trail is being designed to meet ADA and ABA accessibility standards, with a six-foot-wide rubber modified asphalt trail surface, resting places, accessible parking and restrooms, and an overlook of the Chattahoochee River.

In his conversation with Dr. Pathak, Howie also offered a hopeful observation. At a time of deep political division, the natural world remains one of the few places where people with very different beliefs can find common ground.

I have experienced this firsthand while attending and speaking at gatherings such as EarthX and Super South. Both welcome people from across the political spectrum, even though each tends to attract a different political majority. What has struck me is how often participants are saying essentially the same thing about conservation, but with different vocabularies shaped by their histories, values, and experiences.

One group may speak of environmental protection and biodiversity, while another speaks of conservation, stewardship, heritage, hunting, farming, or the responsibility of landowners. Some frame the issue through climate and public health; others through faith, property, tradition, or the obligation to leave the land in better condition for the next generation. The vocabulary may differ, but the underlying values are remarkably similar.

Hunters, anglers, farmers, campers, conservationists, public-health advocates, and environmentalists may arrive from different directions, but they all understand the importance of clean water, healthy forests, accessible parks, productive farms, and land preserved for future generations.

This has also been my experience in the Chattahoochee Hill Country. Protecting nature should never be a partisan issue, and I find it deeply disheartening that it has increasingly become one over the years. If we just listen beyond the familiar labels, we often discover that we agree on far more than we realize. This is about our health, our children, our communities, and our shared responsibility to those who will inherit the places we shape today.

I am grateful to Howie for his friendship, his counsel, and his willingness to keep following the evidence wherever it leads. I am especially grateful for his ability to translate complex science into a message that communities can understand and act upon.

For 25 years, he has helped reinforce what we were beginning to discover at Serenbe: The places we build can separate people from nature, or they can make nature part of everyday life.

That choice may be one of the most consequential public-health decisions we make.

Thank you, Howie, for continuing to help all of us see it.

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Earlier this month, The New York Times profiled former Senator Bill Frist. Most readers understandably focused on the political story: a former Republican Senate Majority Leader, long viewed as skeptical of climate action, had become an outspoken advocate for protecting the environment.

That is certainly newsworthy, but I think the more important story received far less attention. Bill Frist is not simply a former senator. He is one of America’s leading heart and lung surgeons, someone who spent decades treating patients whose illnesses were shaped by polluted air, degraded environments, and unhealthy lifestyles.

After leaving public office and working closely with conservation organizations, he has come to a conclusion that should not be remarkable: the health of people and the health of the places where they live are inseparable.

In the interview he remarked, “A healthier planet means healthier people. The science shows it. Our experience shows it.” He also acknowledged that national leaders, including himself, have been too slow to recognize the urgency of that connection.

What struck me wasn’t that a Republican had changed his mind about climate. Conservation has deep Republican roots, and having spoken over the past several years at EarthX, I’ve met many Republicans who have championed stewardship of our natural resources for decades. That wasn’t the revelation for me.

The remarkable story is that one of America’s most accomplished heart and lung surgeons had to leave the operating room before publicly concluding that the places we build may be one of our most powerful forms of medicine. If someone who spent a lifetime treating the consequences of disease arrived at that realization only later in his career, it raises a much larger question:

Why hasn’t the medical community connected the dots?

To be clear, I don’t pose this questions as a criticism of physicians. Practitioners perform miracles every day, restoring health and saving lives under extraordinary circumstances. The profession is remarkably effective at treating disease once it appears. Yet our healthcare system remains overwhelmingly organized around intervention after the fact, paying comparatively little attention to the environments that shape health long before a patient ever enters a hospital.

More than twenty-five years ago, my family and I set out to preserve the rural landscape surrounding our farm. The shortcomings of the American healthcare system were the furthest thing from our minds. Over the years, however, we came to realize we had unintentionally created something much more: a living demonstration that the design of a community profoundly shapes the health and well-being of the people who call it home.

Residents naturally walk more because daily destinations are within reach. Children spend much of their time outdoors. Farmers grow fresh food in the heart of the community. Neighbors know one another. Nature is a part of everyday life, not reserved for occasional recreation. None of these features were conceived as medical treatments, yet together they address many of the same chronic conditions our healthcare system spends billions of dollars trying to manage.

That realization — the connection between place and wellbeing — ultimately became one of the central themes of my recent book, Start in Your Own Backyard. The book argues that the places we build are not merely settings where life unfolds, they actively shape the physical, mental, and social well-being of the people who inhabit them. If we want healthier communities, we cannot focus only on hospitals and clinics. We must also pay attention to neighborhoods, parks, farms, schools, trails, and public spaces because these are where health begins.

What makes Bill Frist’s observation so important is that he reached this conclusion from the opposite direction. As a surgeon, he has said pollution contributed to virtually every coronary bypass operation he performed. Imagine the significance of that statement. One of America’s foremost heart surgeons is acknowledging that many of the diseases filling our operating rooms begin not in the body alone, but in the environments we create.

That is the story we should be talking about. Not whether a politician changed his position, but whether medicine itself is ready to embrace a broader understanding of health. If healthy people require healthy places, then physicians, planners, architects, developers, educators, farmers, conservationists, and politicians all become partners in healthcare.

The operating room will always be essential, but perhaps some of our greatest opportunities to improve human health lie far beyond its walls.

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When people first began visiting Serenbe, they usually arrived with a lot of questions. One of the more common ones was:

“How did you do this?”

In the early years, I was happy to answer it myself. I’d spend hours walking people through the trails, neighborhoods, farms, and village centers, explaining not just what they were seeing, but why it had been designed that way. Those conversations revealed something important. People weren’t simply curious about a single community nestled in the Georgia woods. They were searching for a different way to think about development.

As Serenbe gained national attention, those visits became more frequent. One of the most significant shifts came after the 2008 recession. As analysts studied which communities recovered first, they found that walkable, environmentally focused places were among those leading the recovery. Around the same time, Serenbe was increasingly recognized as an early example of this emerging model. Following the release of those reports, visitation increased dramatically. Developers, architects, planners, elected officials, researchers, investors, conservationists, and community leaders began arriving not because Serenbe was an interesting niche development, but because they believed the principles behind it might be applicable in communities across the country. That is when we started the Nygren Placemaking conference.

We witnessed a similar pattern during and after the pandemic. As people spent more time at home, they began re-evaluating where they lived and how their surroundings influenced their physical health, mental well-being, relationships, and overall quality of life. The built environment, long treated simply as a backdrop to everyday life, suddenly became part of the national conversation. Once again, interest in Serenbe accelerated as people searched for healthier, more resilient models for community development.

We welcomed those visits because they reflected the same realization we had experienced ourselves. Serenbe began as an effort to protect the countryside we loved from the encroaching sprawl surrounding Atlanta. We soon realized that preservation alone would never be enough. The real opportunity was to demonstrate a model of balanced growth, one that could accommodate new residents while protecting the landscape that made the place special. As we better understood how the built environment influences our physical health, mental well-being, social connections, and relationship with nature, we came to realize that the principles emerging at Serenbe were not unique to this one place. They could be thoughtfully adapted in communities almost anywhere.

You can’t simply copy and paste a place. Nor should you attempt to.

No two places are exactly alike. Every landscape has its own ecology, every town its own history, every community its own culture. Over the years, our consulting work has taken us from the Western United States to New England, and from Australia to Turkey. Those experiences have only reinforced what we discovered at Serenbe: while every place is unique, the principles behind great placemaking are remarkably adaptable. Ask what makes a place healthy, resilient, economically vibrant, and deeply connected to both people and nature, then adapt those principles in a way that is authentic to where you are.

That’s ultimately why we created Nygren Placemaking. Rather than simply giving tours, we began working alongside people who wanted to rethink how communities are planned, built, and experienced. Some are starting with undeveloped land. Others are retrofitting existing neighborhoods, downtowns, resorts, campuses, or aging suburban developments. While every project looks different, the conversations often return to the same fundamental questions:

How do you preserve more land while creating greater value?

How do you make neighborhoods that encourage walking instead of driving?

How do you weave food production, art, commerce, wellness, and nature into daily life instead of treating them as separate destinations?

How do you build places that people genuinely want to spend time in?

These are the questions that shaped Serenbe, and they’re increasingly relevant around the world.

Over the years, we’ve distilled many of those lessons into what we call the 12 Biophilic Principles for Community Design. This is a framework for thinking differently about development, one that views preservation and growth not as competing priorities, but as partners.

At Serenbe, those principles show up in tangible ways: protecting the majority of the land, designing neighborhoods around walking instead of parking, integrating regenerative agriculture, supporting local businesses, investing in the arts, conserving water and energy, and creating a mix of homes that bring together people in different stages of life.

But those ideas don’t belong to Serenbe. They belong wherever people want to create healthier communities.

The growing interest after both the Great Recession and the pandemic tells me something important. When society is forced to rethink its assumptions, people begin looking beyond individual buildings and asking whether the places we create are helping us thrive or quietly working against us.

I have long believed that the built environment has contributed to many of the physical, mental, environmental, and social challenges we face today. Yet I believe just as strongly that it can become one of our most powerful solutions. Economic success, environmental stewardship, and human well-being do not have to compete with one another. In the most successful communities, they reinforce each other.

Serenbe was never meant to be a one-of-one experiment. It was meant to demonstrate what’s possible.

If you’re working on a project and wrestling with these questions, I’d love to hear what you’re building. If you’re inspired to start your own community based on biophilic principles, I won’t mince words: It’s a massive undertaking. Yet I cannot imagine a more exciting, worthwhile, and richly rewarding one. That’s why I have made it my life’s work to help people exactly like you.

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The annual Nygren Placemaking Conference will take place in Serenbe, September 28-30, 2026.

Something remarkable happened over the last few weeks, and I’m not sure we stopped long enough to notice it.

In a single month, the world gave us three occasions to come together: Global Wellness Day on the second Saturday of June, the World Cup filling stadiums and living rooms across every time zone, and the Fourth of July with its parades and fireworks. In each of them, people who disagree about nearly everything stood side by side to cheer, to eat, to sing, and to be lifted. For a few weeks, the things that divide us the rest of the year simply didn’t matter quite as much.

Spirit is hard to define, but it’s also impossible to miss. It’s the current that runs through a crowd when the home team scores or through a town square when the fireworks begin. And it asks nothing of us. Not our political party, not the color of our skin, not the country we call home, not who we love. It asks only that we show up.

In return, it connects us to something larger than ourselves, and to each other. That connection is the heart of well-being.

Global Wellness Day may be the purest expression of spirit I know, because it has no real opposing side. Celebrated in more than 170 countries, it is a day set aside to celebrate lives lived well, with joy, gratitude, and wellness.

Some people carry that spirit with them all year long. I think of Belgin Aksoy, who created Global Wellness Day and whom I met at the Global Wellness Summit. She embodies that spirit of gratitude and well-being, and I look forward to catching up with her each year. I always leave our conversations lighter than when I arrived. Global Wellness Day is simply an extension of the way she moves through the world.

Between the two holidays came the World Cup, with a lesson I find beautiful: spirit can thrive even in competition. The tournament is built on tribes—national teams, colors, and anthems. Yet something in those stadiums and living rooms dissolves division rather than deepening it.

I’ve watched it in my own family. My grandchildren — some very into sports and others not at all — gather with family and friends to watch the games and cheer. At a young age they have an amazing knowledge of the players and teams, but what moves me is the gathering itself. The joy in that room doesn’t require expertise. It only requires being there. And when our team goes home, we find another to cheer for, because the cheering was never really about the team. It was about being part of something together.

Then came the Fourth of July. Whatever rhetoric fills the days leading up to it, the day itself belongs to everyone. Parades, potluck suppers, backyard barbecues, concerts, fireworks. We celebrate ancestors and leaders who fought for independence. And we do it together, regardless of party, race, religion, or who you love. Nobody asks how you voted before passing the plate.

These three celebrations share the same ingredients: ritual, gathering, and permission to set down our divisions without conceding anything. But they don’t create spirit. They reveal it. It was there all along, waiting for an invitation.

Which raises a question: does the invitation to connect have to be so grand?

At Serenbe, we’ve found that it doesn’t. We have a tradition so small it’s easy to overlook: the common courtesy of a wave. When you pass someone, you wave. Visitor or longtime resident, child on a bicycle or elder on an evening stroll, the wave is offered to you.

It costs nothing, but it means everything.

Watch the receiving end and you’ll see spirit at work across every generation. A young child lights up and waves back with the whole arm. A teenager breaks into a grin despite themselves. An elder stands a little taller, reminded that they matter. And the wave lifts both sides.

Spirit, like the wave, moves in both directions.

Why wait for the second Saturday in June, a tournament every four years, or a national holiday? The potluck, the shared walk, the wave: these are available every day. Spirit doesn’t require a calendar, only an invitation.

The world reminds us every June and July that connection is possible. The work is to remember it on an ordinary Tuesday in February.

Start small. Wave at someone today, and notice what it does for both of you.

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When I read the headline, 3,000 Different Species Are Killed for Supper. Why Do We Allow It? in The New York Times last week, I was briefly certain the piece would be about the dirt beneath our feet.

However, in his powerful opinion essay, Paul Greenberg argues for banning bottom trawling, the practice of dragging massive weighted nets across the ocean floor. The method kills an estimated 19 million tons of marine life every year. A University of British Columbia study found that roughly 3,000 species are caught in trawls annually, with at least one in seven considered vulnerable to extinction. The Newfoundland cod fishery, which sustained communities for five centuries, collapsed within decades of industrial-scale trawling. Greenberg places bottom trawling on a short list of human practices (alongside industrial whaling and the insecticide DDT) that society has ultimately recognized as too destructive to continue.

He is right. Yet the headline immediately sent my mind somewhere closer to home. Because the same underlying logic – extracting from a living system faster than it can recover, externalizing the costs, and keeping the damage largely invisible – is playing out in the very soil that grows our food.

When I developed Serenbe outside Atlanta in 2002, one of our foundational decisions was to build a working farm into the fabric of the community, not as an amenity but as a central organizing principle. Homes were sited along the farm’s edge so residents would live alongside the land that fed them. When The New York Times later wrote about Serenbe, it used the term agrihood, a word that has since come to define an entire movement of developers and community builders.

Our decision to build a farm within the community was never primarily aesthetic. It was a response to what we could already see emerging: industrial agriculture was increasingly treating soil as a substrate rather than a living ecosystem. And if soil was viewed merely as a medium for chemical inputs and crop extraction, the consequences for land, food quality, and human health would only compound over time.

In September 2022, at the invitation of Congressman David Scott, then chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, I helped organize a group to testify before the Committee as it prepared for the Farm Bill. Alongside me were Jeff Moyer, then CEO of the Rodale Institute; John Piotti, President and CEO of American Farmland Trust; and Rick Clark of Clark Land & Cattle in Indiana, testifying on behalf of Regenerate America.

We brought decades of evidence with us. Since 1981, the Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial, the longest-running comparison of organic and conventional farming systems in the United States, has documented what happens when soil is treated as a living system. Conventional farming steadily depletes soil organic matter and biological diversity. Regenerative systems rebuild both. In other words, the difference is not philosophical. It is measurable.

The damage caused by soil degradation is measurable, as well. A 2004 University of Texas study found consistent nutritional declines across 43 fruits and vegetables, linked in part to declining soil health and agricultural practices. USDA data similarly shows reductions in protein, calcium, iron, and key vitamins in many crops since the mid-twentieth century. The food often looks the same. What has changed is what it contains.

The consequences are showing up in our bodies. When people do not receive the micronutrients they need, hunger does not simply disappear. The body continues searching for nourishment through additional calories, a phenomenon researchers often describe as “hidden hunger.” We spend more than $170 billion annually on obesity-related illness, while the quality of the food system itself receives far less attention than the symptoms it helps create.

The Farm Bill remains one of the most powerful levers in American food policy. A serious response would tie subsidies to soil health outcomes, support farmers transitioning to regenerative practices, invest in regenerative research at a scale comparable to conventional agriculture, and require greater nutritional transparency so consumers can make informed choices.

The ocean floor damaged by trawling may take generations to recover. The soil beneath our food can begin recovering this season.

When we built Serenbe more than two decades ago, we made a simple bet: people who live alongside the land that feeds them will care for it differently. Twenty years later, that bet has been repaid many times over. We have seen firsthand that when people reconnect with the living systems that sustain them, stewardship follows.

What we need now are environmental and agricultural policies that make that relationship the rule rather than the exception.

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In a recent episode of The Daily, Michael Barbaro spoke with journalist Scott Anderson about how America failed to anticipate the Iranian Revolution of 1979, blind to the fury building in rural Iran as the Shah's modernization policies dismantled the traditional agrarian economy of the countryside. Their conversation was both illuminating and unexpectedly relevant to a concern that has occupied me for decades: the unraveling of the American agrarian economy and the neglect of the rural communities that sustained it. The anger building in Iran's villages and provincial towns went unnoticed by those in power until it was too late.

I fear we are repeating that mistake in America's own farm country, where decades of policy choices have hollowed out rural communities and left a fury that our governing class has been equally slow to recognize.

The consequences of America’s farm policy over the past half century are hiding in plain sight. The small towns that once anchored rural counties have hollowed out, their Main Streets shuttered, their young people gone. The opioid crisis carved its deepest wounds through the same communities where the farm economy collapsed. Life expectancy in rural America has fallen while it has risen almost everywhere else in the developed world. Political fury has replaced civic engagement as the dominant expression of rural identity.

These are not separate phenomena. They are symptoms of the same underlying injury: the systematic dismantling of the agrarian economy that once sustained not just livelihoods but the entire social and cultural architecture of rural American life.

Since the 1970s, federal agricultural policy aggressively favored consolidation. “Get big or get out,” as Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz famously advised. Corporate agriculture absorbed the acreage. Small towns absorbed the loss.

The family farm did not just disappear. It took with it the grain elevator, the implement dealer, the cooperative, the community bank, the diner, and the school with enough students to field a sports team. Money that once turned over five or six times inside a county now leaves on the first transaction.

For years, I have viewed these changes primarily through the lens of economics and community development. But Anderson’s account on The Daily offered a broader historical frame, one that sharpened the stakes of what we have been watching unfold.

The Iranian Revolution was not born in the universities or the oil ministry. It was born in bazaars, rural villages, and mosques, among people whose traditional economy and way of life had been steamrolled in the name of modernization. The Shah’s White Revolution of the 1960s redistributed land, industrialized agriculture, and disrupted the interlocking web of rural commerce and culture that had sustained Iranian society for generations. The people who bore the cost of that disruption were not consulted. They were managed, relocated, and retrained, then largely ignored by a governing class that measured national progress by urban growth, oil revenues, and Western approval.

At first glance, the comparison may seem unlikely. Yet the American parallel is not a metaphor, it is a structural rhyme.

The people living inside that collapse were told, generation after generation, that the solution was education and departure. Get a college degree and leave. It was individually reasonable advice and collectively devastating policy. Rural communities lost not only their economic base but the very people who might have led a local response to the crisis.

What remained was not a failed culture. It was a culture that had been systematically stripped of its future and then blamed for the consequences.

In Iran, the governing class and its American patrons were insulated from this reality by geography, class, and ideology. They took their temperature readings from the Westernized urban elite and concluded the country was modernizing successfully. They were shocked when it was not. The revolution that followed was not spontaneous. It was the organized expression of grievances that had been building for twenty years, waiting for a voice capable of naming them.

America, in its own way, repeated a version of that mistake.

The political and media establishment took its readings from college-educated metros and interpreted rural distress as a cultural lag to be overcome rather than a structural wound to be addressed. It, too, was shocked when a voice emerged capable of naming the grievance, regardless of whether that voice offered any genuine remedy.

This is where the parallel becomes most instructive, and most sobering. Khomeini did not create the rage that carried him to power. He channeled it. What he offered was not a solution to the economic displacement of rural Iranians but a narrative that gave their suffering a villain and their anger a direction. The result was a revolution that brought down one form of autocracy and installed another. The underlying economic conditions that produced the fury were never resolved. They persist in Iran today.

The lesson is not that America is destined for the same outcome. American institutions have shown more resilience than Iran’s did in 1979. But institutions do not absorb unlimited pressure indefinitely. The question is whether the governing class can develop enough self-awareness to address the structural cause rather than simply managing its political symptoms.

The path forward exists, and Will Harris of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia, has spent thirty years building it. A fourth-generation cattleman who converted a conventional industrial operation into a fully regenerative farm, Harris raises multiple species on managed pasture, operates his own USDA-inspected processing facilities, and sells directly to consumers under his own brand. Today, White Oak Pastures employs more than 150 people in a town of fewer than 100 residents and has become an economic anchor for Early County, one of Georgia's most historically impoverished regions. Will did not wait for policy to change. He rebuilt the supply chain himself, from soil to shelf, and in doing so demonstrated that a regional agrarian economy is not nostalgia. It is an intentional choice.

Rural American anger is not a communication problem or a cultural misunderstanding. It is the predictable result of a half-century of policy choices that dismantled a way of life and offered nothing adequate in return.

Until the economic foundation of rural communities is rebuilt, the anger will remain. And anger without remedy finds its own resolution, rarely the one anyone intended.

The harvest of neglect is already evident in our daily news feeds. The question now is what we plant next.

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Following the publication of Start in Your Own Backyard: Transforming Where You Live with Radical Common Sense, I’ve found myself speaking to an increasingly wide range of audiences. Some rooms are filled with wellness real estate developers. Others are executives and designers working in senior living, wrestling with how to create environments where older adults don’t just reside but genuinely thrive. Others are educators and campus planners shaping learning environments, or researchers studying human behavior and health through disciplines that may not appear, at first glance, to have much to do with place at all.

And yet, beneath their differences, these audiences share a growing realization: the built environment is inseparable from human wellbeing. Place is not peripheral to our health, our relationships, or our daily lives. It is part of both the problem and the solution.

The subtitle of my book references radical common sense, and what strikes me in nearly every room is how little common sense has guided the design decisions that produced our current conditions. The results speak for themselves: a global health crisis rooted not only in biology but in the environments we have built and the ways we have chosen to live in them.

The search for solutions is well underway, and it is drawing in disciplines that might not have considered themselves part of the conversation ten years ago.

One of the most important forums for that dialogue has been the Global Wellness Summit. I first spoke there in Marrakesh in 2012, when Serenbe stood alone as a project explicitly identifying as wellness real estate. The following year, the Summit formally recognized wellness real estate as an emerging category within the industry, an acknowledgment that what we were building at Serenbe represented a category, not just a singular project.

Since then, each invitation to speak has challenged me to explain Serenbe in ways that extend beyond its geography.

That has always been the communication challenge.

Serenbe is a deeply particular place. When people hear about it, they respond with enthusiasm and then almost immediately with a qualifier: That’s beautiful, but I’m building a hotel in the mountains, a senior living campus in the suburbs, or a university district in the city. I don’t have 2,000 acres of Georgia Piedmont.

The implication is that what we’ve done requires conditions they don’t have. That it isn’t transferable. But I’ve never believed that.

Serenbe’s principles are not geography-specific. But I struggled to articulate a framework that could communicate this clearly until I began preparing for the 2026 Real Estate Symposium.

The Symposium brings together people working across radically different project types and landscapes. It forced me to ask a simpler question:

What is the one thing any community can design for, no matter where it sits on the earth?

At first, the familiar answers came to mind: walkability, nature access, social infrastructure, local food. All essential. Yet each carries its own assumptions and constraints. A senior living campus operates under constraints that a residential community doesn’t. A university campus has rhythms and populations unlike either. What works in one context doesn’t translate cleanly to the next.

I needed something more fundamental. Something that precedes amenities and organizes them.

The answer I arrived at was the raindrop.

That principle did not emerge as an abstraction. It came from experience. Twenty-five years ago, as we planned Serenbe, we closely studied our stormwater systems. We wanted to honor how water naturally moves across the land. What we discovered was revealing: the development regulations of the time were built around a very different assumption. The rules on the books had been written for a different model of development, one that treated water as a nuisance to be removed rather than a resource to be welcomed.

We persisted because we believed (and still believe) that the laws of nature take precedence over the laws of man. Not in defiance of regulation, but in the conviction that good regulation should reflect natural systems rather than override them.

That experience shaped how I think about design.

The raindrop is not theoretical to me. It represents a real decision, made at real cost, to work with nature rather than against it.

I opened with the problem that has organized most of my conference speaking since the book came out: the fundamental paradox of contemporary health. We have more medicine than any generation in history, more programs, more specialization, more scientific understanding of disease at the molecular level. And yet we have more loneliness, more chronic disease, more metabolic disease than any generation in recent memory.

More medicine. More disease. This is not coincidence. It is, in significant part, a design failure.

Over the last century, we fundamentally changed how we live. Communities once organized around shared spaces, daily movement, and human connection became organized around the private automobile and the private home. As that shift happened, it changed how we age. The conditions that human beings have always needed to thrive — connection to nature, connection to one another, daily movement, purpose and belonging — were gradually designed out of the environments most people inhabit. That is true whether those people are young professionals, aging adults, or students on a university campus. The human need doesn’t change with the demographic. The design failure is consistent across them all.

At Serenbe, we attempted to design those conditions back in. Not because we were conducting a wellness experiment, but because we were trying to protect a rural landscape from sprawl and asking honest questions about what makes communities flourish.

The results are meaningful, but they come from one place. I knew the Symposium audience needed something larger than Serenbe itself.

So before introducing the idea, I asked the room a question:

Can you trace the path of the raindrop that falls on the building where you live or work? Can you follow it, in your mind, from the rooftop or the pavement, through the landscape, to the tributaries and streams and river in your area?

Almost no one could.

And that inability, I suggested, is itself a diagnosis.

The raindrop falls everywhere. It falls on mountain resorts and suburban senior campuses, urban universities, hospitals, research centers, and community buildings. It does not distinguish between market sectors or design philosophies. It simply falls and then something happens to it.

Most of us have no idea what.

That unknowing is not innocent. For too long, our design culture has treated natural systems as background conditions rather than foundational logic. When we do not know where our water goes, chances are we have not designed with it in mind. And when we have not designed with it in mind, we have likely designed against it.

The raindrop is a metaphor for that reckoning. Not a prescription for a specific kind of landscape or a particular set of engineering solutions, but a question that any designer, in any context, can ask at the beginning of a project.

Are we working with the natural logic of this place, or are we overriding it?

The raindrop makes that question concrete and universal at the same time. It asks us to begin with the systems that sustain life rather than imposing systems that ignore them. To understand hydrology before amenities. Ecology before infrastructure. Relationship before control.

And something remarkable happens when we do. Places designed with the raindrop tend to create healthier conditions for people as well. Water infiltration becomes green space. Green space encourages movement and encounter. Shade cools streets. Native systems support biodiversity. What begins as ecological responsibility becomes social and human wellbeing.

If we design our communities for the raindrop, people will thrive there too.

The title of my book is Start in Your Own Backyard, and by backyard I do not simply mean land. I mean your sphere of influence. The place where you possess real agency to act. For some, that is a development project. For others, it’s a campus, a policy framework, research agenda, or regulatory process.

The raindrop is a tool for acting there.

Its power lies precisely in its simplicity. Because it is a metaphor rather than a method, it translates across contexts. It asks whether the work before us aligns with the systems that sustain life or conflicts with them.

Every room I enter is filled with people who have a backyard in that sense.

The invitation is the same for all of us:

Start there. Ask the question. Follow the raindrop.

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In January 2007, on a cold morning in a Washington, D.C. metro station, a man in jeans and a baseball cap opened a violin case, rosined his bow, and began to play.

For 45 minutes, he performed six Bach pieces, some of the most intricate music ever written, on a Stradivarius violin worth $3.5 million. About 2,000 people passed through the station. Six stopped to listen. A few dozen tossed money without breaking stride. He collected $32.

The man was Joshua Bell. Two nights earlier, he had sold out a concert hall in Boston where the average seat cost $100.

The Washington Post had arranged it as a social experiment. The question they were asking: in a commonplace environment, at an inconvenient hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize genius when it arrives without announcement?

I’ve been thinking about that experiment a lot lately. And I think most of us already know the answer, because we live it every day.

There is a sunrise happening somewhere near you right now. And tomorrow it will happen again, same sun, same horizon, entirely different sky. Each one its own brief, unrepeatable painting. The full moon that rose the other night cast a light so particular, so alive, that the trees it fell through became something else entirely, not trees you pass on a path but an orchestra, branches swaying in a breeze that seemed to have arrived just to conduct them.

Children laugh in a way that adults have mostly forgotten. Not the polite laughter of social exchange, but the helpless, full-body laughter of someone who has no reason yet to hold themselves back. I hear it in my grandchildren and it stops me every time. The birds — if you slow down enough to actually hear them — are not background noise. They perform constantly, whether or not anyone is listening.

We walk past all of it. Not because we don’t care. But because we are busy, genuinely, exhaustingly busy, and beauty has a frustrating habit of not announcing itself.

I’ll admit that I stop more now than I used to. Perhaps it is the perspective that comes with age. Perhaps it is the fragility that the political and social tensions of these years have pressed upon everything I once took as permanent. Whatever the reason, I have found myself pausing more, at sunrises, at full moons, at the sound of a breeze moving through a forest, and finding in those pauses something that the busy hours cannot provide.

Recently, I had one of those days that reminded me why pausing matters.

It began with the first whisper of “Grandpa” as I woke, followed soon by a room full of laughter after a sleepover with my grandchildren. After breakfast, we walked to the Art Farm at Serenbe for a conversation with sculptor Curtis Patterson, standing before his powerful work Serenity for Shango, a few of the younger grandchildren in tow. That sculpture is part of Serenbe’s Black Art Project, which grew out of the pain and reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement, as an effort to let that moment produce something lasting and beautiful rather than simply pass. From there, on to the farmers market, where I bought fruits and vegetables from the farmers who grew them, meat and eggs from the farmers who raised them, and bread from the hands that baked it, with conversations woven through it all, neighbors, new residents, and visitors finding each other in the easy way that markets make possible. The day ended with an evening shaped by artistry in every form: the culinary creativity of Chef Nic at The Farmhouse before an Art Farm concert featuring spoken word artist Sarah Kay.

The rising full moon lit my path home and fell perfectly across Martin Dawe’s bronze sculpture The Dance.

By the end of the day I was full, not just fed, but genuinely nourished, in the way that only art, nature, food, family, and community can do together.

The next morning, on my walk, a couple stopped me. They had recently moved to Serenbe and wanted to thank me for creating what they called a garden of life. They were curious: how had I imagined such a place?

The honest answer is that I didn’t imagine it. I didn’t research it. I remembered it.

I grew up in a family where I knew five great-grandparents, their siblings, their lifelong friends, people whose entire worlds were built around deep, unhurried presence with one another. That taught me something I wouldn’t fully understand until much later.

My time studying architecture at the University of Colorado made me a student of what worked in built environments and what didn’t, what made people feel held by a place versus merely passing through it. A 90-degree turn into hospitality gave me something harder to name but equally formative. In that world I moved constantly between two very different rooms. In the kitchen, a man pulled off the street — perhaps sleeping rough the night before — worked the dish line with focused urgency, his whole world reduced in that moment to the next rack of clean plates. A few steps away, in the dining room, those plates arrived at tables occupied by people of power and generational privilege. The two worlds never touched but I moved between them, again and again, within the span of minutes. What I learned is that neither room held the answer. What I watched for, in both, were the moments of genuine connection, and those happened everywhere or nowhere, regardless of what anyone owned.

When the hospitality industry stopped feeding me, weekends in the country did something the city couldn’t. Walking through the woods. Listening to my own children, crowded into a small cabin at the edge of the forest. Visiting European villages and the American towns that somehow survived from the 1800s. In all of it, I kept noticing the same things: slowness, beauty, community, presence. People stopping for each other.

It was the accumulated memory of all those experiences, not a business plan, not a trend report, that gave me the blueprint for Serenbe.

Joshua Bell played for 45 minutes to an almost empty audience. But here is what I keep coming back to: the music didn’t change. The genius didn’t diminish. The Stradivarius sounded exactly as it would have in Boston. The only variable was whether anyone stopped to listen.

That is entirely within our control.

The sunrise will come whether you see it or not. The moon will light the path whether you walk it slowly or rush past. The children will laugh, the birds will sing, the trees will sway in their quiet orchestra.

Beauty does not ration itself.

The question is only whether we show up for it.

I am more convinced than ever that beauty is not a luxury, not something we earn after the important work is done. It is the important work. It is how we stay human. It is how we remember what we are building toward, and why.

So let this be an invitation: find one moment today to stop. Not to photograph it, not to post it, just to let it land. The music is already playing.

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Much of modern suburban development follows a familiar pattern: wide roads, homes set far back from the street, and rigidly separated land uses that place houses in one area and shops, restaurants, and workplaces somewhere else entirely. These environments are designed primarily around cars, leaving little room for spontaneous interaction or daily life on foot.

Front porches give way to garages. Sidewalks and gathering spaces are limited or absent. Everyday routines like meeting a friend for dinner, picking up groceries, or grabbing a cup of coffee, become organized around driving rather than walkability or community. We move from garage to grocery store, from school pickup back home, often without a meaningful exchange with the people living nearby.

Over time, that pattern can erode both physical activity and our sense of belonging.

When neighborhoods lack safe places to walk, gather, or connect, physical activity declines and social ties weaken. Limited access to healthy food and walkable infrastructure contributes to chronic disease. Loneliness and social isolation, particularly among older adults, are closely associated with depression and declining mental health. Left unchecked, these conditions ripple outward into a sense of hopelessness, and fractured communities.

Reports across disciplines, from public health to urban planning to social science, converge on the same conclusion: America is experiencing a profound mental and physical health crisis. Most point to the same root cause: the unintended consequences of how we have been designing and building places for people to live over the last several decades. The effects are felt across all ages, but nowhere more acutely than at the margins of life. Our children and teenagers, isolated in car-dependent suburbs with few third places to gather, and our seniors, increasingly relegated to age-segregated compounds cut off from daily community life, have paid the steepest price. Rather than being woven into the fabric of neighborhoods, learning from elders, mentoring the young, sharing in the ordinary rhythms of community, both groups have been quietly separated from it.

Even our homes themselves increasingly reflect this culture of privatized living. Amenities once experienced collectively have steadily moved behind closed doors. Garages reduce front-door interaction with neighbors. Home movie theaters replace trips to local cinemas or shared gathering spaces. Private pools and backyard entertainment lessen the need for communal recreation.

These conveniences are understandably appealing, but I believe they carry unintended consequences. The more life retreats inward, the fewer opportunities remain for the casual encounters that build trust, friendship, and a sense of belonging.

What makes this especially troubling is how thoroughly we have accepted it as normal.

Yet in our heart of hearts, many of us know something is missing. Human beings are wired for connection, not only with one another but with the natural world. Today’s suburban lifestyle often works against both impulses, encouraging separation and individualism where we once experienced integration. It is a striking example of how efficiency and convenience can override deeper human needs.

Our relationship with nature has followed a similar trajectory. Many neighborhoods still discourage or outright ban front-yard vegetable gardens or native landscapes, reinforcing the notion that chemically maintained lawns symbolize order and success. But these landscapes often provide little ecological value while distancing us from food, biodiversity, and seasonal rhythms.

The result is not simply environmental degradation or declining public health. It is a quieter erosion of something harder to measure but equally important: our sense of place, connection, and shared responsibility.

This is why the conversation about development and our built environment is so crucial.

At Serenbe, we chose a different path, as an exploration of what communities can become when human and ecological well-being are treated as priorities rather than afterthoughts. Our conservation-based planning preserves 70 percent of the land as permanent green space while concentrating development into compact, walkable neighborhoods. What is perhaps counterintuitive is that within that clustered 30 percent, we are achieving roughly 20 percent more housing per square mile than conventional development has produced across metro Atlanta, and indeed across most urban development patterns in America.

Density and nature, it turns out, are not opposites. They are partners.

The principles are straightforward: bring homes closer to daily destinations, preserve meaningful access to nature, and create places that encourage neighbors to encounter one another naturally. Front porches face sidewalks. Trails and pathways connect homes to restaurants, shops, and preserved landscapes. Shared greens and gathering spaces create the conditions for community life.

For decades, conventional suburban development has prioritized speed, separation, and private convenience. The unintended consequence has been an architecture of isolation that disconnects us from neighbors, from nature, and often from ourselves.

But if design helped create this reality, design can also help restore what has been lost.

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Just before Start In Your Own Backyard was published last fall, I sent advance copies to a few friends along with a blueberry bush. To me, that blueberry bush represents so much of what the book (and Serenbe) is all about. Literally, it’s a sapling ready to go into the ground, to be cared for and nurtured, with the fruits of that attention arriving over the years to come. Figuratively, it represents the seed of an idea, a promising beginning, a connection to nature, and a reminder of the systems that sustain us. Sometimes the smallest, most ordinary, common-sense ideas end up having the greatest impact.

Many aspects of Serenbe came from studying historic patterns of living rather than simply repeating modern development conventions. The role of the front yard in the early 1800s was one of those inspirations, beautifully recreated at the Atlanta History Center, where edible plants, herbs, and kitchen gardens lined the front yard and pathways. I was drawn to the idea that food was not separated from daily life, but naturally woven into the experience of walking home, visiting neighbors, and moving through the community.

Now, as I write this in late May, blueberry season is just around the corner. The first berries are appearing all over the bushes in Grange, and a few have already turned a deep shade of blue, though they’re still a little sour. By this time next month, they’ll hopefully be thriving. It’s one of my favorite times of year in Serenbe. For about six weeks each summer, the blueberries become a catalyst for community life. People are outside talking about the pies they’re baking, exchanging recipes, walking the paths together, and stopping to pick and eat fruit straight from the bush.

Beyond blueberries, we’ve added other edible plants throughout the community. First the serviceberries bloom, then the blueberries, followed by figs, apples, plums, and finally pecans. Through these rhythms, Serenbe’s children naturally learn firsthand about the seasonality of food. They understand that blueberries come from a bush, not a refrigerator shelf.

Think about your own community and your own backyard. Are there opportunities to organize produce-picking outings with family, friends, or neighbors? If berry bushes aren’t abundant nearby, what about orchards? Could you gather a group to pick apples, peaches, or other seasonal fruit together?

Beyond cultivated crops, the natural world also offers opportunities to gather food and connect to a sense of place. There’s a strong culture of foraging among Serenbe residents, who search our woods and trails for mushrooms, blackberries, muscadines, persimmons, and other wild edibles. Foraging is not only rewarding, but also a meaningful way to deepen our relationship with local ecosystems and the landscapes we inhabit. Just remember to do so responsibly and cautiously.

It’s amazing how something as humble as a fruiting plant can spark connection to nature, joy, and a genuine sense of community. It’s one of the many examples of the radical common sense solutions I explore in the book.

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This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for Children & Nature Network’s Finding Nature News.

In 1994, I made what some thought was a radical decision: I left my busy life in Atlanta, Georgia, and moved my family to our weekend farm — only forty minutes south, yet worlds away. The choice felt instinctual. I felt that something in modern life was fundamentally unhealthy for children and families. At the time, I didn’t have the language to articulate why. I just knew our environment and the very shape of our days felt awkward.

A decade later, Richard Louv’s bestselling book “Last Child in the Woods” landed in my lap and gave voice to the unease I had sensed. Louv coined the now-famous term “nature-deficit disorder,” describing the widening gap between children and the natural world. His insight rang true. He demonstrated how disconnection from nature diminishes attention, imagination, and emotional well-being. But he also pointed to something deeper: when children lose contact with nature, they also lose free, unstructured play, the essential hours in which they explore, create, negotiate, and build confidence in themselves and their surroundings.

Louv helped me understand what I had witnessed firsthand. Time in nature builds calm and curiosity, while isolation indoors breeds stress, fragmentation, and fear.

Read the full article here.

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Recently, while reading an article in CLAD on the growing movement to treat playgrounds as civic infrastructure, I was struck by how much the conversation around play has evolved. Increasingly, research confirms that play is not reserved for childhood. It is a biological and social necessity that supports human well-being across each phase of life.

For children, the benefits of play are profound. In Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv warned that disconnection from nature carries measurable developmental consequences. Neuroscience research now reinforces this idea, showing that children deprived of free, unstructured play often develop weaker stress-management skills and less robust neural pathways tied to creativity, emotional regulation, and problem-solving.

But the importance of play does not disappear with age. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has argued that play remains essential throughout adulthood, supporting adaptability, emotional well-being, and social connection. Adults who engage in playful activities consistently report greater life satisfaction and lower stress levels. Public health research echoes this, with organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics emphasizing that play strengthens relationships, buffers against toxic stress, and contributes to healthier communities overall.

Even across species, play appears deeply tied to survival and adaptability. More playful animals tend to be more socially connected and more capable of responding to change. In humans, the same principle seems to hold true. The conditions that support play, movement, curiosity, immersion in nature, exploration, social interaction, are often the very same conditions that support a life well lived.

And yet, despite mounting evidence, modern environments rarely prioritize play in daily life. A global study found that 78 percent of children believe adults do not take play seriously. Perhaps that’s because we continue to think of play as something separate from everyday living: an activity confined to designated playgrounds, scheduled recreation, or childhood alone.

What is beginning to shift, and what the CLAD article reflects, is a growing recognition that play spaces are not merely amenities. They are essential civic infrastructure that contribute to public health, social cohesion, and even climate resilience. But perhaps the more meaningful shift is understanding that truly healthy communities do not simply provide places for play. They create the conditions where play naturally emerges.

In Serenbe, we did not set out to create playgrounds so much as to create a place where play could become part of everyday life. That distinction matters, because play is not confined to a fenced area or defined by equipment. It happens organically when people are connected to nature and to one another.

From the moment you enter Serenbe, the philosophy is visible. Traffic signs read, “Drive Slowly, Children and Adults at Play.” Not just children, adults too. Throughout the community, opportunities for play appear in subtle and unexpected ways: trampolines set into the ground near gathering spaces, swings hanging among trees, treehouses tucked into the woods, slides emerging from the landscape, trails weaving between homes, farms, and commerce. None of it is labeled “play infrastructure,” and yet all of it encourages movement, spontaneity, and connection.

Our newest hamlet, Spela, expands on this idea. Named after the Swedish verb meaning “to play,” whether playing a game, an instrument, or performing, Spela reflects a broader understanding of play as creativity, expression, movement, and joy. The hamlet is organized around a four-acre park designed for all ages, with spaces for children, movement equipment that supports aging bodies, meditation gardens, pollinator habitats, and quieter natural edges that encourage reflection and connection.

Two decades ago, much of this approach was guided by instinct, observation, and a belief in the importance of human connection to nature. Today, science increasingly affirms it. Communities that embed play into daily life are not simply more enjoyable. They are healthier, more resilient, and more connected. And perhaps most importantly, they remind us of something we have always known: we are at our best when we never stop playing.

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The world’s Blue Zones, places like Okinawa, Sardinia, Ikaria, the Nicoya Peninsula, and Loma Linda, have earned their reputation through decades of proven longevity. Serenbe is still too young to claim that kind of data.

What Serenbe does offer is a clear and intentional framework for living well and design rooted in common sense, where the built environment actively supports health, connection, and purpose.

Across the Blue Zones, certain patterns consistently emerge. People move naturally throughout the day rather than relying on structured exercise. They have built-in rituals to reduce stress. They live with a sense of purpose. Their diets are largely plant-based and rooted in local food systems. Interestingly, they often do drink alcohol but moderately and almost always in social settings. And perhaps most importantly, they are embedded in strong social networks of tight-knit friend circles, family units, and a wider community that shapes behavior and reinforces belonging.

When you step back and look at that framework, Serenbe begins to feel like a modern interpretation of those same principles.

Natural Movement
In Blue Zones, movement is integrated into daily life. People garden, walk to neighbors’ houses, and run errands on foot. That same philosophy underpins Serenbe’s design. Compact village centers, homes oriented toward sidewalks, and an extensive network of trails make it easy and inevitable to move throughout the day. Daily needs are within reach, and the path between them is often as meaningful as the destination itself. The built environment here nudges you toward a more active, engaged way of living.

Stress Reduction
In the Blue Zones, stress isn’t absent but it is managed. Rituals to shed stress (called Downshifting) create space for release: prayer, rest, time with friends, even a daily pause to reflect. Serenbe offers its own version. Whether it’s walking through the woods, volunteering at the farm, joining one the many meditation circles, or simply running into a neighbor on an evening stroll, opportunities to decompress are never far away. The environment itself is also quiet, green, and human-scaled, a buffer against the chronic stress so commonly found in modern living.

Sense of Purpose
A defining trait of Blue Zone communities is that people remain engaged in their communities well into old age. There’s no sharp divide between working years and retirement, just a continued sense of usefulness and connection. In Serenbe, spaces for creativity, learning, and contribution are everywhere: from arts classes and programming to volunteer opportunities and community-led initiatives. Aging becomes a continuation of living well and contributing meaningfully, not a step back from it.

Healthy Diet
Food in the Blue Zones is simple, seasonal, and often local. Meals are typically plant-forward and shared among family and friends. Serenbe takes this principle and builds it directly into the landscape. Residents live alongside a working farm, with access to fresh, seasonal produce through a CSA and weekly farmers markets. This shortens the distance, both physically and psychologically, between what we eat and where it comes from. Many residents also plant their own gardens and enjoy the edible landscaping that can be found throughout the neighborhood. Here, food becomes less transactional and more relational, reinforcing both health and community.

Social Connection
If there’s one throughline across all Blue Zones, it’s this: relationships matter. Whether it’s the lifelong “moais” of Okinawa or the family-centered culture of Sardinia, strong social ties consistently correlate with longer, healthier lives. Serenbe’s built environment is designed to make connection the default rather than the exception. Front porches sit close to sidewalks, mail is centralized, greenspaces are shared, and events are frequent. Small design choices create countless opportunities for interaction. Over time, those moments build into real relationships. In a world where many people don’t even know their neighbors, that’s no small thing.

There’s also an intergenerational dimension to the community. In Mado, plans for aging-in-place are integrated directly into the fabric of daily life, not separated from it. Children and elders cross paths naturally. Many homes feature Accessory Dwelling Units, allowing families to live near one another while maintaining independence. These aren’t just conveniences, they’re structural supports for connection and wellbeing across all stages of life.

Nature as a Missing Link
One element that’s often understated in discussions of the Blue Zones is access to nature — and yet, it’s quietly present in all of them. People spend time outdoors, tend gardens, and remain connected to the rhythms of the natural world. At Serenbe, this connection is foundational. Miles of preserved forest, trails, and open land ensure that nature is always within reach. And while gardening is often categorized as “natural movement,” at its core, it’s about a relationship. A daily act of care, patience, and reciprocity with living organisms that ties us to something larger than ourselves.

Serenbe may never be officially designated a Blue Zone, and that’s okay. That’s not really the point. The goal isn’t to chase a label or even a number of years lived. It’s to cultivate the kind of environment where those years feel full, connected, and meaningful. Longevity is certainly compelling, but quality of life is what we experience day to day.

And if a place can help us move more, stress less, eat better, connect deeply, and stay engaged with both people and nature, then it’s already doing something extraordinary.

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Last weekend, as I was sitting in the Fox Theatre listening to Yo-Yo Ma, it became clear this was not simply a concert. Ma is widely regarded as one of the greatest cellists of our time, but this program, Reflections in Words and Music, was something different. It moved beyond the traditional format of a soloist performing with a symphony orchestra into a weaving of music, story, and reflection. At moments, it felt like a conversation. A quiet cultural statement. What made it powerful, however, was not the argument. It was the emotion.

That evening reinforced something we have been practicing for more than twenty years at Serenbe: people are not moved to change by information alone. They are moved by what they feel.

For decades, planning and development has leaned heavily on logic. Efficiency, engineering, data, return on investment. These are necessary tools, but they are not sufficient to create places where people truly thrive. We have built environments optimized for convenience, yet many people feel more isolated, more anxious, and less connected than ever before.

At the core, much of modern development suffers from a lack of emotional engagement. You can present compelling data about health, sustainability, or community design until you are short of breath and yet still fail to inspire change. Logic may inform, but emotion is what motivates.

This is why art is such a powerful tool for change. Art bypasses debate. It speaks directly to memory, identity, and belonging. It creates shared experiences where people are not defending positions, but feeling something together. In that shared space, perspectives begin to shift. What Yo-Yo Ma demonstrated through Reflections in Words and Music is that music, story, and reflection can reach people in ways policy papers and public meetings rarely do.

The most universal and accessible form of art has always been nature itself: the pattern of leaves, the sound of wind through trees, the rhythm of water. These are daily experiences that should be available to everyone, yet too often they are designed out of our communities. When people reconnect with nature, they reengage with a form of art that restores attention, reduces stress, and reminds us of our place in a larger system.

This is not a new idea. Every place that has sustained cultural vitality over time has embedded both art and nature into daily life. The difference today is that we often treat both as amenities rather than necessities.

At Serenbe, we made a different choice. More than twenty years ago, we established a simple but lasting framework: one percent of every home sale and resale, and three percent on undeveloped lots, directly supports arts and environmental programming. The goal was not simply to fund performances or installations, but to create a culture where art and nature are part of everyday life. Not philanthropy, but necessary infrastructure.

When art is embedded in a place, and when nature is accessible and present, people begin to engage differently. They become more observant, more reflective, and more open. It creates a shared language that can hold complexity, difference, and even disagreement. Instead of turning to endless debate, people turn to expression.

The Serenbe Black Art Project offers a powerful example – and notably, it did not originate from a transfer funding fee, but from within the community. In the summer of 2020, as the nation faced a long-overdue racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, a group of residents began gathering. They came together not only to process the moment, but to ask a deeper question: how could their response be authentic, lasting, and inclusive?

At the center of those conversations was a shared intention to communicate that Serenbe is a place where people of all races, backgrounds, and experiences are genuinely welcomed and valued. From this, a clear idea emerged: to commission a public artwork by a Black artist, installed at the community’s entrance as a lasting symbol of belonging. What followed was a grassroots fundraising effort and a thoughtful, juried selection process, culminating in Serenity for Shango, a striking sculpture by internationally recognized artist Curtis Patterson.

The project reflects a broader culture that values both art and the natural world as pathways for connection and exploration. Through creative expression, it opens space for diverse perspectives to be experienced in ways traditional dialogue often cannot.

That influence continues to evolve. Three years after Serenity for Shango was installed at Serenbe’s entrance, a larger vision is taking shape. Under the direction of the Serenbe Art Farm, plans are underway for a sculpture garden in the nearby area, further integrating art into the landscape and reinforcing the idea that these expressions belong not in isolated venues, but woven into the rhythms of daily life and the surrounding environment.

People listen differently when they are moved. They open differently when they feel seen. What might be resisted in a formal conversation can become accessible through art and often further grounded through shared experiences in nature.

If we want communities that are resilient, inclusive, and connected, we need to think more broadly about what infrastructure really means. Roads and utilities are essential, but they do not create belonging. They do not build empathy. They do not help people understand each other. Art and nature, I believe, are cornerstones of the world we hope to build.

The next generation is not simply asking for housing or jobs. They are asking for meaning, for connection, and for places that reflect shared human experience.

What happened on that stage at the Fox Theatre was not just a performance. It was a reminder that people connect through emotion, story, and shared experience. We have seen the same dynamic play out over two decades at Serenbe.

If we are serious about building communities that endure, we should be designing for that kind of connection every day.

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I kicked off 2026 with a post about optimism. But as I sit down to write this, the headlines tell a much different story. There is a steady undercurrent of anxiety about war, about human rights, about leadership, and especially about what comes next. And always, in the background, there’s climate change. Quieter in the news cycle but always kind of… there.

It’s enough to completely overwhelm even the most grounded among us.

And so, we reach for our screens. We scroll, refresh, and search for clarity and reassurance, for a piece of information that might help us make sense of it all. That instinct is understandable. We want to feel informed. We want to feel prepared. But somewhere along the way, we’ve mistaken constant input for connection. We’ve traded genuine human connection with shallow, often combative digital interaction.

The irony, of course, is that the very tools we’re turning to for connection are deepening our sense of isolation.

This isn’t meant as criticism, but rather a recognition of the unintended consequences of past actions. Look at the landscape we’ve built and it’s no wonder we turn to screens. For decades, we’ve designed communities around separation. Homes are over here, commerce over there, all connected by roads that prioritize speed. In many places, you can go an entire day without a single unplanned interaction. And yet, that kind of connection is exactly what we’re wired for.

Human beings are inherently social. We thrive in networks of relationships. Family and friends, yes, but also neighbors, acquaintances, and the familiar faces we pass each day. These “weak ties,” as sociologists call them, are actually quite powerful. They build trust, foster empathy, and create the kind of social fabric that makes communities more livable and more resilient.

When those threads begin to fray, the consequences are all too real. The former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy identified loneliness and social isolation as a public health crisis, carrying risks comparable to smoking or heart disease. Disconnection doesn’t just affect our minds, it hurts our bodies and our collective ability to function as a society.

So where do we go from here? For me, the answer begins with remembering something we’ve always known, but too often forget: we are not separate from nature. We are a part of it.

Nature has a powerful way of bringing us back to ourselves and to each other. Spend time in a park, on a trail, or in a garden, and you begin to notice it. People make eye contact. They smile. They strike up small conversations that would never happen in a parking lot or a hallway. There’s a softening that occurs. A lowering of defenses. Nature invites us to be more open, more patient, more present.

There’s science behind this. Time in green spaces has been shown to reduce stress, calm the nervous system, and interrupt cycles of rumination. It creates what researchers call soft fascination, a gentle, attentive state that allows the mind to quiet and reset. But just as importantly, nature literally creates the conditions for pro-social behavior. We’re more likely to help a stranger, to engage in conversation or to feel a sense of shared experience when we’re grounded in a natural setting.

Even small, everyday interactions like chatting with a neighbor while walking the dog begin to rebuild that sense of belonging. These moments may seem insignificant, but over time, they form the foundations of trust, connection, and community.

Midtown Atlanta offers a powerful example of how this can be achieved at scale. Its emergence as one of the most successful square miles in the country is rooted in an early commitment to zoning that prioritized the pedestrian experience, intentionally creating nooks, green spaces, and places for people to gather, both planned and spontaneous. That vision continues today, as seen in the newly unveiled four-acre park along 14th Street, reinforcing the importance of ongoing investment in places designed for human connection.

But reconnecting with nature isn’t just about going outside. It requires a shift in mindset from convenience to intention, from isolation to participation. It means choosing to walk when we could drive. Designing places that invite gathering rather than discourage it. Valuing shared spaces as much as private ones. And perhaps most importantly, recognizing that connection to each other and to the wider natural world are the very things that make us human in the first place.

Especially in times like these, for all the reasons I outlined above, resilience isn’t built in isolation. Nature reminds us that we are part of something enduring. It grounds us to something tangible when the world feels chaotic and it reconnects us to that which is elemental and life-giving.

And in a moment marked by division, uncertainty, and noise, reestablishing that connection is one of the most important resources we have.

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Throughout history, builders and architects didn’t think of beauty as a luxury. Spaces were designed not only to function, but to uplift. What we’re now learning through science is that this instinct was right all along. When we’re surrounded by beauty, whether in nature, art, or architecture, our brains respond in measurable ways, releasing chemicals like serotonin that support pleasure, calm, and overall well-being.

This connection between beauty and the brain is at the heart of a growing field called neuroaesthetics, which explores how our surroundings shape the way we feel, think, and behave. I was first introduced to this work through Dr. Anjan Chatterjee at the Biophilic Leadership Summit, and have followed his research closely ever since. As Director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, Dr. Chatterjee explains that our experience of a place often comes down to three essential qualities: coherence, fascination, and what he calls hominess.

Coherence is about clarity. When a space feels legible, organized, and you instinctively understand how to move through it, then it is coherent. Fascination speaks to richness and complexity, the kind that draws you in and makes you want to explore. And hominess is a sense of ease, the feeling that you can fully relax and be yourself in a space. When these three qualities come together, the result is an environment that feels both engaging and deeply comforting, supporting us psychologically, not just physically.

The sad truth is that in much of modern development, these qualities are often overlooked. Today, many places are built primarily for efficiency and return on investment. Standardization, speed, and cost-cutting tend to drive decision-making, which can lead to environments that are technically functional but emotionally flat. When beauty is treated as optional or as an unnecessary expense, we end up with spaces that meet our basic needs but fail to nourish us. Over time, that absence matters. A lack of visual harmony, texture, and human-scale design contributes to feelings of stress, disconnection, and even loneliness.

At Serenbe, beauty has been foundational from the beginning. When I first began thinking seriously about what Serenbe could become, I found myself drawn again and again to the English village; these are places that have evolved over centuries with an inherent logic, beauty, and efficiency. That’s why working with Phill Tabb was so meaningful. Phill brought a scholar’s lens and a land planner’s rigor, studying these villages not just for their charm but for what they teach us about energy use, walkability, and community form.

When we broke ground, we looked first towards the architecture of the Southern rural vernacular, drawing inspiration from the late 1800s and early 1900s: wide porches, natural materials, simple, enduring forms. These elements shaped our earliest neighborhoods, Selborne and Grange, and established a sense of familiarity and warmth.

From there, we built intentionally, layering in a diversity of architectural styles so the community would feel as though it had evolved over time. Just as important as the buildings themselves was how they related to one another. Relationships between structures, how streets unfold, how public and private spaces interact, all come together to create a sense of authenticity and timelessness.

One of the tools that helps guide this is the transect model, which organizes land along a gradient from rural to urban. It allows for a natural progression of density, where cottages, shops, and larger buildings can coexist without feeling abrupt or out of place. The result is a more connected environment that mirrors how towns historically grew.

We also embrace mixed-use design, something that was once the norm but has largely been lost in modern zoning. At Serenbe, homes, shops, restaurants, and workplaces are interwoven within walking distance. This creates a natural rhythm of life and movement, bringing energy to the streets and fostering connection in a way that isolated, single-use developments rarely can.

Architecturally, we welcome variety. When proportions are thoughtful and materials are handled with care, very different styles can live side by side. A Queen Anne Victorian might sit across from a Scandinavian cottage, near a more modern or even Brutalist-inspired home. What ties them together is intention and how each structure contributes to the larger whole.

All of this context points back to a deeper question: why does beauty matter so much? Dr. Chatterjee often frames it by asking us to imagine a world where every functional need is met, but beauty is absent. Buildings provide shelter, clothes provide warmth, and food provides nutrition. Everything works but nothing delights. In that kind of world, something essential is missing.

What his research makes clear is that beauty isn’t superficial. Experiences of awe, curiosity, and wonder are central to a meaningful life. They bring richness and depth to our everyday experience in ways that purely functional environments cannot.

In a culture that often prizes efficiency above all else, beauty is easy to overlook. The cost is often subtle at first but cumulatively, it starts to add up. Over time, the places we build begin to shape not just how we feel, but how we relate to one another. Beauty, as it turns out, isn’t superficial. It plays a quiet but powerful role in our emotional lives, helping us make sense of the world and find meaning within it.

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Later life is no longer defined by the quiet closing of a professional chapter or social withdrawal. It is an evolution into something fuller, a distinct life stage shaped by contribution and connection. As life expectancy rises and vitality extends further into our later years, the question is no longer where can I slow down? but where can I continue to live with purpose, energy, and engagement?

Retirement is a financial milestone. Elderhood is a human stage.

To see it this way is to recognize elderhood as a period of continued growth, cultural relevance, and contribution. While the environments we inhabit can either support or limit this experience, the most important transformation is a cultural one. That shift begins with acknowledging that this chapter of life holds its own inherent wisdom and exciting possibility.

Too often in America, we push our elders toward retreat, even when it is not what they want for themselves. We have come to believe that older adults need to be placed in eldercare facilities in order to be safe. Yet this version of safety often comes at a cost. Too frequently, it produces isolation, removing people from the very support systems that sustain them. This sense of isolation, as we know, is deeply unhealthy at any age. When older adults are separated from family, friends, and daily life, they lose access to the interactions and activities that keep them vibrant and engaged.

Over time, that disconnection can lead to loneliness, depression, and cognitive or physical decline, the very outcomes we hoped to avoid in the first place.

The more intuitive solution is to keep elders embedded within the life of their communities. When remaining in one’s longtime home or neighborhood is no longer practical, rather than retreating into the separation that has become common in many age-restricted settings, the more meaningful path forward is to seek an engaged, multi-generational community that sustains continuity of purpose and belonging.

When elders are supported in maintaining their vitality, they become a powerful force for the betterment of society. They spend time with children, care for family members, contribute to their communities, continue working in ways that feel meaningful, and volunteer for causes they believe in.

At its best, elderhood is a deepening of presence and participation.

This belief has shaped my approach to developing Serenbe, especially as I enter elderhood myself. One of my central goals is to support aging with dignity while preserving each person’s rightful place within the community. A crucial part of that effort lies in the built environment. When daily life naturally encourages movement and connection, aging feels less like decline and more like a continuation of living well.

Designing for a life well lived starts with land preservation. Protecting the natural world is an overlooked cornerstone of human health, even though research consistently shows that regular contact with nature reduces stress, supports cardiovascular health, sharpens cognitive function, and improves emotional well-being. With more than seventy percent of its land permanently preserved as forest, meadow, and agricultural space, Serenbe offers an environment defined not by noise or congestion, but by wooded trails, open skies, and long, uninterrupted views.

Equally important is the structure of the village itself. Serenbe’s hamlets are designed for everyday movement and connection, with sidewalks and trails linking homes to cafés, restaurants, wellness spaces, and gathering places. Even the simple presence of stairs in daily living offers a gentle but consistent way to support mobility and vitality over time. As seen in the world’s Blue Zones, health is often sustained not through structured exercise, but through natural movement in everyday life. For those in elderhood, this accessibility supports independence while making social interaction feel effortless and ongoing. The path between places becomes as meaningful as the places themselves.

From this, a rich social fabric naturally emerges. Front porches, courtyards, and pedestrian pathways invite spontaneous interaction throughout the day, while farmers markets, art openings, lectures, and shared meals create natural points of connection. For those transitioning out of professional life, these experiences offer a new kind of network.

Looking ahead, this vision continues to evolve. New aging-in-place residences and adaptable housing models are being designed within walking distance of services, nature, and social spaces, reinforcing continuity and belonging. The goal is not to manage aging, but to support it as an active, integrated experience.

Underlying it all is a commitment to stewardship. Serenbe was founded on the belief that preservation and development can coexist in ways that enrich both ecological and human well-being. Living within that ethos provides a sense of purpose. Care for the land becomes an extension of care for one’s own life and community.

This is what elderhood can be. A stage where individuals remain neighbors, mentors, collaborators, and stewards, fully part of the world around them.

Serenbe offers one expression of this idea, but the larger message extends beyond any single place. Elderhood is not a retreat into leisure or a withdrawal into isolation. It is a period to remain curious, engaged, and fully alive.

If this topic interests you, I invite you to check out my interview on the Retire Southern podcast.

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