photo by Joanna Brown

We have created this virtual gathering place to highlight the people, places, research and resources of the emerging field of study and practice we call the powers of place.

You might think of this website and our interactive platform, the Field, as a constellation of “living centers,” to use the language of architect Christopher Alexander. Each of the centers is different and each is alive, or coming alive, through the stories, questions, images, conversations, and invitations to action you bring to them. And yet, as they stand together, they are whole, a cohering field of study and practice.

We are a gathering place for people— a place where you’ll find others whose thinking and vision is similar to your own, yet also dynamically different in ways that challenge and inspire your thinking. We have identified and mapped particular places where powers of place are easily evident and where meaningful events and collective learning have transpired.

We also present you with resources: materials you can use, a place that reminds you of what you already know and that validates your own experience while pushing the edges of what you believe possible. This site is also a place where a variety of research and different disciplines are brought together, seen side by side and enabled to converse and further their inquiry together...

We're connecting through our collaborative site, the Field, where our stewards are joining with others to deepen our collective inquiries and understandings through a number of focused working groups and shared stories, a collective calendar of events and other kinds of interaction.

We hope that these Powers of Place centers will become a kind of home to you--- places where you can offer what you know and invest your time and spirit with what you most care about in the areas of respect for environment, place, space and surroundings.

We invite you to look around, take some time to discover and absorb what is offered here, and let yourself be carried away by your imagination and curiosity. Follow your intuition. Feel your resonance and notice with which concepts, stories, images or conversations it occurs. Look for patterns, themes and threads that may not be obvious at first.

This space will grow and evolve as we together come to see and learn more, and as we mature in our reverence and understanding of our relationship with place. We hope that our work here sparks your interest, validates your experience, engages your attention, and enlivens you. You are warmly invited to contact us and offer what you know – or who you know – that would enrich the field. Thank you for visiting us!

Sheryl Erickson
Founder and Director, Powers of Place Initiative