What if the most powerful lever for systems change is not a policy, a technology, or a new organizational model—but our relationship to the places where we live?
Editor’s Note
In a week marked by escalating violence and destruction across parts of the Persian Gulf and Middle East, I had planned to write directly about questions of security. Instead, I found myself returning to this reflection on connection to place.
In moments when global events feel overwhelming and our ability to influence them limited, it may seem small to write about local relationships and landscapes. Yet perhaps this is precisely when the reminder is most timely: deepening care, collaboration, and stewardship in the places where we live is one of the foundations from which more secure and flourishing societies grow.
Reflections on Matt Biggar’s Connected to Place
At a time when many feel increasingly disconnected from each other and from the lands that sustain them, Matt Biggar’s new book Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Communities, and Local Economics Through Systems Change offers a simple but powerful argument: collaborative systems change grows when people are rooted in place.
Last month I had the pleasure of discussing this work with Matt Biggar, Scott Sampson, and other local leaders at Pegasus Bookstore in Berkeley. The conversation—and the book—left me energized.
I highly recommend Connected to Place to anyone seeking to deepen connection—to one another and to the earth communities where we live—and advance longer-term place-based change in transportation, housing, food, nature spaces, education, governance, and local economies.
Four Levers for Place-Based Systems Change
Matt’s framework is clear and practical. He names four powerful levers for place-based systems change: transforming land use, shifting power, resetting culture, and leveraging interconnected systems. And he reminds us that “local” is always nested within something larger. Place-based living is bioregional—embedded in watersheds, foodsheds, energysheds, fibersheds—the broader regional systems that sustain life where we live.
Connection to Place: The Bridge Between Well-Being and Systems Change
What resonated most with me is how he refuses to separate personal well-being from structural change. He shows that rootedness in place and systems redesign are not competing strategies—they are mutually reinforcing. As he writes, “Changing systems to change human behavior is the pathway to create the world we desperately need and want.” Yet those system shifts only support community flourishing when people are meaningfully connected to the places they inhabit.
His system-lens responds directly to a collective cry of disconnection and alienation in our digital corporate age. It builds on a widespread desire for authentic, embodied connections—with one another and with the physical, biological, and cultural landscapes we share. Biggar calls us toward place-based living as an antidote to fragmentation and loneliness.
“Strengthening our connection to place invites us to firmly embed ourselves in our physical surroundings and nearby human community… walking, biking, stewarding local nature, supporting local businesses, eating and using energy from local and regional sources.”
Connections to the places where we live do more than improve mood or lifestyle:
“Rooted in place, people not only enhance their personal well-being; they also start a virtuous cycle of regenerating community and nature. The more invested people become in their communities, the more likely they are to take care of their place and contribute to civic life… We protect what we love and love only what we know.”
This insight echoes throughout the book.
When we truly know our neighbors—human and more-than-human—and when we attend to the local infrastructure that enables meaningful interaction with the places we inhabit, we begin to discover ways to prosper together. We redesign the systems that fail us and strengthen those that nurture social, economic, ecological, and cultural well-being.
In other words, when people feel genuinely connected to their place—and when systems make healthier patterns easier—behavior shifts follow. Personal and collective flourishing reinforce one another, and a powerful sense of creative agency emerges.
“When people anchor their lives in a place, connect to all it has to offer, and help their community grow and thrive, they go from being part of the problem to becoming part of the solution.”
Beyond the framework, the real gift of this book is imagination. The concrete examples—across housing, local business, transportation, food, education, energy, governance, and nature spaces—demonstrate that systems change is not abstract. It is already happening.
From the ambitious transportation initiatives transforming Paris into a bikeable “15-minute city,” to the creation of new neighborhood nature spaces—such as the renovation of India Basin Waterfront Park in southern San Francisco alongside a new community center—each chapter invites us to consider what the next step toward place-based living might look like where we live.
By redesigning land use and shifting decision-making power, these initiatives did more than create healthier transportation systems and green spaces. They increased everyday encounters, physical activity, stewardship, and civic participation. Physical redesign altered behavior. Behavior strengthened community. And strengthened community helped protect and improve the system itself.
Why Land Use Is the Most Concrete Lever
In light of my recent work with a global network supporting local initiatives to collaborate across differences to end cycles of violence and heal their human and ecological communities, I found the book’s strategic clarity around the “transform land use” lever particularly helpful.
Land is the most immediate and tangible dimension of place. In rural communities, the challenge is often not access to land but sustaining prosperity within it. In urban settings, the question becomes how communities collectively designate, plan, redesign, and steward the spaces they inhabit for healthy living in dense settings.
Mapping how land is used—and how those uses change over time—can ground both preventative and reparative strategies. Land transformation can either reconnect communities or alienate people from one another and from the ecosystems that sustain them. Poorly designed land use can fragment communities, deepen inequities, and intensify conflict. Thoughtful land stewardship, by contrast, can help repair relationships between people and the earth communities they inhabit.
This is true across contexts—from rural regions devastated by conflict to rapidly growing urban centers. Whether changes to land arise from development, extraction, armed conflict, climate change, or biodiversity loss, the way communities organize and steward their land shapes the social systems that emerge from it.
Matt also offers a helpful corrective for those of us who get lost in measurement debates. Shared accountability matters—but keeping it simple is imperative. A few well-chosen performance metrics—rather than exhaustive dashboards—can sustain alignment and momentum.
For example, a green-space initiative might track only a handful of indicators: the number of new green spaces created, the number of people trained to steward them, and the number of residents regularly using them.
Place-Based Collaboration Restores Trust
Perhaps most urgently in today’s cultural climate—Matt reminds us:
“Place-based collaboratives can help us restore faith in each other, community, and local institutions and develop collective efficacy. At their core, they build trust and value for one another, increasing our collective ability to change systems.”
In a time when trust feels uncertain and the scale of global crises can feel overwhelming, Connected to Place reminds us where our work begins: start where you are. Root. Redesign. Regenerate.
And perhaps, especially in moments when the destruction of homes and communities elsewhere weighs heavily on our hearts, this reminder matters all the more.
If you love the place where you live—and are working to help others flourish where they are—this book deserves your attention.
With gratitude to Matt.
Thanks, Reuben, for this thoughtful and thought-provoking article.
I’ve lived in the same home for more than 30 years. It’s where Pat and I raised our children, built friendships with neighbors, and became deeply involved in the life of our community. Through our church, work in land conservation, and efforts to support those experiencing homelessness, I’ve come to appreciate how powerful a long-term connection to place can be.
Over time, the streets, parks, trails, and neighborhoods around us become more than locations—they become part of the story of our lives. The people, the land, and the shared work of caring for a community create a sense of belonging and responsibility that grows deeper each year.
Your reflection on Matt Biggar’s ideas helped me see this in a broader way. The connection between personal rootedness and systems change feels very real. When people feel connected to a place and to one another, they are far more likely to invest their time, care, and creativity into making that place flourish.
It left me feeling both affirmed and curious. I look forward to reading Connected to Place and thinking more about how these ideas might continue to shape the communities we care about.
One of the deepest ways to make change, I believe! Thanks for inspiring me!