A Placemaking Journal

There’s an app making the rounds right now called BePresent. Its premise is refreshingly honest. Rather than scolding users for being glued to their phones, it acknowledges what everyone already knows but rarely says out loud: we’re chasing dopamine. So the app tries to redirect that chase. Less scrolling, more living. Put the phone down, earn points. Go outside, unlock badges. Stay offline longer than your friends, climb the leaderboard.

It’s clever. And a little depressing.

Not because the app is misguided, but because of what its existence implies: that the physical world has become so unrewarding, so predictable, so thin on surprise, that we now need a digital intermediary to make real life feel worth engaging in.

That should give placemakers pause.

The competition we didn’t plan for

For decades, we’ve treated screen addiction as a personal failing or, at best, a parenting problem. Set limits. Turn it off. Try harder. But that framing misses the larger context. Phones didn’t win because people suddenly became weak-willed. They won because they are exquisitely good at delivering stimulation, novelty, and reward on demand.

And meanwhile, we’ve been quietly building places that offer very little of any of those things.

Long stretches of sameness. Poorly scaled buildings. Public spaces designed primarily for movement, not lingering. Architecture that demands nothing from you emotionally and gives nothing back. Environments optimized for efficiency, liability reduction, and visual neutrality. Places that are technically functional, but experientially empty.

So of course people retreat into their phones. At least something interesting happens there.

What if the problem isn’t willpower?

What if the real question isn’t “How do we get people off their screens?” but rather “Why would they choose to be anywhere else?”

BePresent, in its own way, is an admission that we’ve offloaded too much of life’s richness onto the digital realm. It’s trying to recreate, artificially, the kinds of micro-rewards that used to come standard with everyday life: chance encounters, visual delight, small moments of recognition, the feeling that something unexpected might happen if you step outside.

Those experiences weren’t gamified. They were spatial.

Architecture and the emotional contract

Which brings us, inevitably, to architecture.

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that people don’t just notice the built environment — they respond to it emotionally, physiologically, even neurologically. A recent visual preference study conducted in the Netherlands found that people overwhelmingly prefer traditional architecture to modernist alternatives, often by large margins. In every image pair tested, respondents favored buildings with human scale, symmetry, texture, and recognizable patterns over abstract, minimalist forms.

That preference wasn’t about nostalgia. Respondents described traditional buildings as warmer, calmer, more inviting. Modern buildings, by contrast, were frequently characterized as cold, sterile, or alienating. These aren’t aesthetic quibbles. They’re emotional signals. And they matter.

Because when we consistently build environments that people subconsciously experience as stressful, dull, or indifferent, we shouldn’t be surprised when they seek relief elsewhere.

The quiet retreat from civic life

This is where the conversation about screens intersects with the future of community.

Civic life depends on friction — not conflict, but contact. Seeing others. Being seen. Sharing space in ways that are unplanned and unscripted. That kind of interaction doesn’t happen easily in places that feel hostile, monotonous, or vaguely uncomfortable.

Historically, cities and towns offered constant low-level stimulation: varied storefronts, ornament, changes in scale, layers of activity, people doing different things at different speeds. You didn’t need an app to feel engaged. The environment did the work.

But much of what we build today actively discourages that engagement. When architecture is stripped of detail, when public space is reduced to circulation, when every corner looks like the last one, the message is subtle but clear: don’t linger. Keep moving. Or better yet, go inside.

And once inside, the phone is waiting.

Gamifying reality vs. enriching it

What’s striking about apps like BePresent is how carefully they replicate the mechanics of good placemaking — just in digital form. Points. Progress. Status. Belonging. All things that physical communities used to provide organically.

The irony is hard to miss. We’re using technology to simulate what we’ve engineered out of our surroundings. But the goal shouldn’t be better apps. It should be better places.

Places that reward curiosity and invite exploration. That feel distinct enough to be memorable and layered enough to sustain attention. Places where strolling feels preferable to scrolling, not because you’re earning XP, but because there’s something to look at, someone to run into, some small pleasure waiting just ahead.

Can the built environment compete?

The honest answer is: it has before.

For most of human history, the physical world was the primary source of stimulation, identity, and connection. That didn’t require spectacle. It required care. Craft. Attention to human scale and sensory experience.

We don’t need to choose between innovation and beauty, or between density and delight. We do need to stop pretending that aesthetics are superficial, or that people’s emotional response to place is irrelevant compared to the spreadsheets that inform construction.

If we continue to manufacture environments that ask nothing of us and offer nothing in return, we will keep driving people toward the glowing rectangle in their pocket. And no amount of digital detoxing will fix that.

The goal isn’t engagement. It’s disengagement — from the devices that have filled the void we helped create.

The real work of placemaking is making sure there is no void to fill.