Booked on Planning

Spiritual Wellness and the Built Environment

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 24

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What if city design could prevent harm before it happens—and even lift our sense of purpose? We sat down with architect and planner Phillip Tabb to explore spiritual wellness as a practical, universal lens for shaping healthier streets, homes, and public spaces. Phill draws a clear line between spirituality and religion to focus on experiences we all share: safety, serenity, awe, belonging, and meaning. We unpack the wellness pillars—physical, mental, emotional, social, environmental, spiritual, and financial—and why social connection may be the strongest longevity factor. That insight reframes planning choices: front porches close to sidewalks, paths that prioritize pedestrians, and public squares that can hold both quiet lunches and electric festivals. Housing rounds out the conversation with a hard truth: bigger isn’t better if it separates us and prices out workers. If design is preventative care, then spiritually healthy places are ones that help us breathe, connect, and find purpose every day.

Enjoyed the conversation? Subscribe, rate, and share the show—and tell us what design move would bring more serenity or awe to your neighborhood.

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Stephanie Rouse:

You're listening to the booked on planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into housing function by talking with authors on housing, transportation, and everything in between to join us as we get booked on planning. This is a deep dive into the concept of spiritual wellness, not to be confused with religious wellness, and it's just one of the many wellness pillars that Phil actually touches on throughout the episode.

Jennifer:

Yeah, you know, in many of our other conversations, we've talked about health and other things like that, but we've never really touched on wellness before in the planning and built environment. So it was a very interesting look and somewhat of a rare opportunity as there's not a lot of research in this area right now.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah, which is exactly what we would talk about in the episode and how Phil has actually applied a lot of this in his work throughout the years as an architect, but that it really hasn't come on quite as much. And I think he mentions that like a lot of things that don't catch on, it's it all comes down to cost.

Jennifer:

Yes, which is very unfortunate because I think thinking about wellness as opposed to just health. As Phil points out, wellness seems to be more of a preventative idea. And there's not a lot of money or research in preventative as there is in curative. So that's very interesting.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, before we jump into our conversation, we wanted to pitch a quick idea to our audience and get your feedback. One of our listeners a while back pitched the idea of doing a book summit, and we love the idea and are looking into ways to make this happen. We need to hear from you to help shape this event that would likely take place sometime late next year. Would you travel for a two-day book summit with authors, publishers, and others to hear directly from the authors on things like housing and transportation, learn about the writing process and the process to get a book published? Or would you join something like this online instead? We would love it if you could send your ideas to us at bookedonplanning at gmail.com or comment on any of our social media posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, and our Instagram pages.

Jennifer:

We really do uh appreciate your guys' insight on that. And we're very excited to get planning for it. And now let's get into our conversation with author Philip Tabb on his book, Spiritual Wellness and the Built Environment.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, Phil, thank you for joining us on Book Done Planning to talk about your book, Spiritual Wellness and the Built Environment. There's a distinction that you make between spiritual and religious in the book. Can you explain the difference and more specifically what you mean by spiritual wellness?

Phillip Tabb:

Yes, uh that's a difficult and sometimes contentious question. And uh the reason that the book is not focused on the religious side of the definition is that there's too many, I guess, interpretations and practices that are religious. I tend to feel that spirituality or spiritual has a more universal, I guess, appeal. Saying that, you know, most of the people in the world are religious. I read some fact more than 60% are in fact religious. But uh that doesn't mean that uh religious people aren't going to be sympathetic to spiritual ideas. I just think that some of the problems that we have in the world are religious-based problems, and that somehow spirituality or spiritual transcends that and is common to every religion. So the other distinction I think is that uh religion tends to be a little bit more structured and more practice-based, where in my sense, uh spirituality is a more of an inner path and a path towards uh wellness and transcendence. So that doesn't mean that religious experiences don't have that either. But I like the idea that it's a universal quality.

Jennifer:

That makes a lot of sense, and it is such a fascinating area of study that I hadn't really encountered before. So can you share your journey with us and how you came to focus on it?

Phillip Tabb:

Yeah, I grew up in a fairly religious family. We went to church every Sunday, all the way through high school, and you know, I was indoctrinated to the traditions and even this time of year, you know, singing Christmas carols and so on still kind of gets to me. And uh, but once I went to college as a young boy, I hated going to church in the morning. I'd rather go out and play baseball. Anyway, once I got to college, I got so focused in my studies in architecture that I really didn't have time to go to church. And, you know, I was kind of in the middle of campus, and I'm sure there were churches around, but nobody uh in my class was very religious either. And this was a time during the 60s, and so I kind of got away from it and uh really focused on my studies for six to seven years. Later on, I moved to Boston and worked there a couple of years for an architectural firm and then moved to Colorado. And Colorado is where my parents grew up, and I have a lot of relatives, and so I thought it was a good place to go. I ended up going to Boulder, which is a fairly interesting, quite beautiful small city, and had a focus on such concepts as creating community, uh, wellness, health, and spirituality in various forms. And one of the forms that was interesting during the time that I was there was the influx of uh Buddhism. Trumpa Rinpoche was sort of assigned to bring uh Buddhism to America and decided to, you know, center it in Boulder. So a Buddhist school was established there, an Europa Institute. At some point, I actually started teaching a class there. It was kind of a continuing education class on sacred places. So both teaching to Buddhists and and uh focusing on that subject, sacred places, was one of the things that led me into this field. Also in the mid-80s, I had the opportunity to attend a series of workshops by Dr. Keith Critschlow, who at that time was probably one of the world's leading architects and scholars on sacred geometry. And they were done in southern Colorado in a beautiful, very, very natural setting beneath the uh Sangrieta Cristo Mountains. The workshop was two weeks in duration and focused on lots of different concepts about sacred places and sacred geometry, but began kind of with the Pythagorean ideas and Plato, and then moved uh into Islamic patterns and Christian, let's say, and Sufi ideas, all the way to some esoteric ideas. And it was really interesting for me to understand or begin to understand that there were many sacred principles that were common to every religion. And probably another reason that I sort of focus on spirituality because the geometry is such an integral part. And uh, one of the questions was asked in the workshop: if God had a language, what was it? And the answer in this workshop obviously was that the language of God is geometry. That gave another kind of power to my interest in this subject, partly because geometry is such an integral part of both planning and architecture. Another facet of it, I think, is that my professional career grew in in Boulder. And I worked for several firms and then started my own firm and had a partnership. It was a kind of crazy partnership because we tried everything that was going on in Boulder, especially in the healing arts area. It was really kind of fascinating to mix our personal lives and our personal healing and health and wellness with our practice. And we focused mainly on solar energy and solar energy projects. This was from about 1974 until 1980. So that too provided a kind of a spiritual instrument for us to begin to follow, the idea of creating a healthy solar world.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, your work really has surrounded wellness for many years and decades. Its application to spiritual wellness pillar and the design fields is still somewhat rare. I mean, we have a lot of focus on health planning, but not necessarily really more specific to wellness planning. Why do you think that it hasn't really caught on in the same way?

Phillip Tabb:

I think it's the money, to tell you the truth. Uh, where's the money in spiritual planning and architecture? Where there's a heck of a lot of money in health architecture. Texas AM was one of the two or three schools in the country that's a leader in health architecture. But uh the program focuses mainly on large buildings, you know, hospitals and hospice and all this sort of stuff. And I had no interest in that stuff. I think most of those building types are pretty ugly and from my viewpoint, not very healthy. But I really like the idea of wellness because it's more preventative. It's preventative action, and design can be preventative. Both planning and design can be preventative. So I thought there was a correspondence there. It was really good. About three to four years ago, I linked up with the Global Wellness Institute and was part of an international group of uh people from all over working on a white paper for GWI on wellness architecture and urban design. I really felt like this was a good opportunity for me to learn the wellness lingo and to find out what other people are doing across the world. We had a woman from Hong Kong and uh Singapore, London, Dubai, Milan, Canada. So it was really interesting to get these various viewpoints from people. It took us two years to develop the white paper, but it gave a structure to the wellness discussion that was primarily focused on the seven pillars of wellness, of which spirituality is one of them. In the process of writing this paper, it was moving so slowly, I contacted uh the lead editor of the white paper and I said, why don't we just publish this as a book? And then I ran up through Rutledge, who's my publisher, and they said, sure, it seems like a really good idea. And what happened was we blasted through the book way before the white paper was published, which is kind of interesting because it was just really sort of faltering. But it's still a good paper. We began to focus it a little bit differently than where the white paper was going. In particular, the case studies that we had went into great amount of depth. I did a case study on the wellness community here at Sarandi, and she did a case study on a healing retreat in Bali. And so we were able to really kind of, I guess, apply the wellness concepts and strategies to specific examples. And so that book was then published, and I began thinking and going through it and saying, you know, it's funny, most of the literature today on wellness and the pillars in particular do mention spiritual wellness. But as you try to dig deeper into that, there's just very little written and very little research. So I said, wow, wouldn't that be an interesting subject to kind of dig into, especially from a wellness point of view? And again, I flipped it to my editor and they thought it was a good idea. So it enabled me to kind of focus on that particular topic. So, you know, there's very little on the spiritual qualities in research. There is some research now being done on, let's say, spiritual experiences, especially using neuroscience. While AI and neuroscience is a hot area subject, but it's something that I was really beginning to feel like two things. One is that I'm not really that qualified, or nor am I interested, nor do I have a team of people that can begin to do that kind of research. And I am a bit more of a qualitative researcher rather than quantitative. And I feel that spiritual research in a way can be very qualitative. And I recalled in my uh doctoral work on village planning, uh, one of the definitions of a village, and I was looking for every definition that I could find on what is a village, and in particular what is an English village and what makes it uh unique. The definition came up. If it feels like a village, then it's a village. And I like that because it relies on your feelings and your perception of a place. So, in a way, I think spiritual wellness is focused a lot on that as well.

Jennifer:

Well, and now that you've brought up the wellness pillars, I had never heard of wellness pillars either. So, how should we think about them in the context of the built environment and what are they, I guess?

Phillip Tabb:

I can't remember how far back the wellness pillars go, 50s or 60s. I think there were six or eight, and sometimes nine, seven. They kind of vary depending on what you want to slip in there. But in a lot of the early wellness, early, I mean like within the last 10 years, focused on mental, emotional, and uh physical health. And of course, within each one of those are many different strategies and things that you can do. For example, stop smoking will help your physical health. And exercise will help both mental and emotional and physical health. So there was a lot of um, I guess, literature and products that were developed that would help enhance those particular pillars. Moving from those, which really focus more on the individual person, moves into the social realm, which I think is really interesting. And some of the literature now that's coming out is showing that uh, let's say the longevity literature is showing that the social interaction aspects of wellness are the most effective for living a longer life, more so than a flu shot, more so than exercise, more so than diet. That's pretty interesting. And of course, the social aspect of wellness really fits with planning and architecture as well. A huge piece. So then the next piece was, I guess, environmental. If you have a healthy environment, then uh we can be more healthy as well, in correspondence with that healthy environment. The next one was the spiritual wellness. Again, like I said, there is a lot of lip service towards that, but uh they were acknowledging the fact that being spiritually well was important. And in the spiritual wellness literature, one of the things, for example, is if you have a purpose in life, that's going to contribute to your health. If you have life satisfaction, that's going to contribute. So there's a number of factors that begin to affect the spiritual side of wellness. And of course, these can be influenced by the physical environment. And then the last one got slipped in. I think it was a part of the earlier pillars of wellness was financial. I think early on it was occupational, but I think it's moved to financial. And I totally agree with it. Uh if you're not financially well, it can bring on all kinds of problems, both mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and so on. But that's a hard one to equate in a way, well, not really, to the environment, especially if you when you have areas and cities that are really not doing so well, and you have the discrepancy between those that have and those that don't, and you have racial issues that come in. So uh these can be, let's say, addressed by planning and design. So that side, the financial side, began to be acknowledged as an important wellness pillar. So again, you know, going through them all, I got back to the spiritual one on, you know, like really what is that? And since the title of the book is Spiritual Wellness and the Built Environment, it was my job to kind of make a connection between what spiritual wellness is and how it can affect the environment. Originally, the publisher wanted the book to be spiritual wellness in the built environment. And I I felt that spiritual wellness is a larger umbrella than the environment. And maybe that comes from my own spiritual sense of the world. So I thought it would be better that it would be and. And the idea that spirituality is in the environment kind of to me diminishes it. You know, oh, we can put some spirituality over here rather than something that's far more encompassing. To me, the obviously the the ideal, of course, this was part of an ideal when I started doing my studies in English villages. I came out of it from living in Boulder and and studying sacred geometry and the like, thinking that in a way what we're seeking is a contemporary version of a urban, natural garden of Eden, which is the planet that we live on. So, how can the earth become this incredibly refurbishing environment where everybody can live in peace and quiet? And of course, that's very idealistic. And we have to deal with where we are today. So the strategies are focused on some of the things that we can do today.

Stephanie Rouse:

One example of a built environment element that can impact building inhabitants and their overall wellness is color. For example, here in Lincoln, we just finished up our first city-owned permanent supportive housing project for chronically homeless individuals. And color was a very important part of the design of the building. And we used light blue, which is kind of a calming color. So, what are some of the other healing benefits of color and how can we start to apply these in our projects?

Phillip Tabb:

That's a great question. And uh I uh studied biophilia for a couple of years and wrote a book on biophilic planning and studied Stephen Killert's uh work on biophilic design. And in that book, he identified 72 biophilic attributes. And I went through them again just the other day because I want to make sure that I was correct. And color was not an attribute of biophilia. And I felt, wow. I mean, you know, we as humans can see in color when some other animals don't. They just see in black and white, and it's such a wonderful experience. And uh, why isn't it a biophilic aspect? And color is such an integral part of nature. I mean, just remember watching TV in the 1950s in black and white, nothing like today. Color all of a sudden came to me as being something really important. And then I started reading some of the feng shui uh literature. In some of that literature, they do identify vital color, which I kind of said, okay, well, that's kind of like natural color, although it doesn't necessarily have to be totally natural. But I think that's where, in a way, that's the source of color is from nature. And if you're trying to do something biophilic, it seems to me it's such an integral part. In my studies earlier on, I studied things like numerology and and number theory and symbolism and so on. And of course, color has its own symbolisms. And very often it's related to natural sources. But you mentioned that blue is a calming color. And uh just looking, I'm looking at right now, I can see the blue sky, and it is very calming. As are the cooler colors tend to be more calming, and then the uh warmer colors tend to be more stimulating. So your red, orange, and yellows are more stimulating. And the closer to the vibrancy of that color, again, that's more stimulating as well. And you can look at blues that are very, very bright blues in a way, even though it's a calming color, it could be very stimulating. So I think each one of the colors has its own kind of symbolism, and there's a bit of literature, you know, on the color symbolism. And again, like I said, it comes from natural sources. In my book, I think I cited two recovery rooms in the Vidar clinic in Sweden, designed by architect Eric Asmussen. It's a beautiful building. And one of the rooms had sort of reddish to pinkish colors all around, and the other one had the bluish colors. And you could see with the bluish room, it was very calm. There were some flowers on a table, I think, in the book. And in the other room, you saw a wheelchair. And I really liked it because to me, the wheelchair identified that this person needed a stimulating environment. I don't think you necessarily want to be calm in a wheelchair. It's about movement, right? Being in a wheelchair. So, in a way, maybe I was jumping to things there, but uh, I really saw how sometimes your healing needs to be uh stimulating and sometimes it needs to be soothing. And that led me back to. Remembering the research on my book on Thin Places that dealt with two kind of opposite emotions. One was awe and the other was serenity. And there's a lot of research out there on both those emotions. I'm talking about scientific research. In the 1960s, the nursing association studied serenity as a healing aspect. And they came up with different, let's say, attributes that would contribute to a healing environment that promoted serenity. And then awe experiences. The awe experiences for them were things that were vast, very stimulating, highly emotional in that sense. And it could be anywhere from meeting a movie star to going to the Grand Canyon, those sort of things. Or, you know, seeing a huge, beautiful building. And the serenity was the opposite. It was, you know, how do you calm those things? And nature, natural and more intimate, let's say personal spaces were far more calming. Although you can be by a beach and see the ocean and have a quiet surf coming in, or you can have a very violent surf coming in, and both of them are sort of stimulating those two emotions. I started studying the emotion wheel. It varies sometimes, 30 to 40 different emotions. And those two really stood out as being the kind of emotions. I mean, there's other ones like love and anger and so on that are in there. But I felt that uh all emotions and serenity emotions were the ones that were most, I guess, applicable to both planning and architecture. Uh in cities, since you're planners, it's creating parks as a way of providing some tranquil places. And then on the other hand, it's creating public places. And I think I cited in the book like uh the compo in Siena is like the center of the city. And I showed two photographs. One was three people sitting in the center, sitting down, having lunch, and having a very quiet conversation. And so they were able to mask out all the noise around them and create a very personal, to me, serene social space. And at the other hand, there was the palio, which is this the horse race, and had thousands of people there really uh excited. So this same space could could nurture both the serene and the awe-oriented uh emotions.

Jennifer:

I did really appreciate the way you used photographs in the book to try and pull the concepts through. There were a few times where you were trying to express, I can't remember exactly, I think awe, and you just had like the universe or a picture of a galaxy, and it really did help pull all of that together. So I thought that was a good design aspect.

Phillip Tabb:

Thank you. Well, some of the strategies, in a way, were difficult to illustrate. One of them would be serendipity. Serendipitous experiences are considered, according to the literature that I was looking at, as contributing to spiritual experiences. So when you have a serendipitous experience, something happens inside you and it triggers something that's different than the ordinary. Yet, uh, how do you illustrate that? Uh and numinous, again, some of these are pretty interesting. Or how do you illustrate purpose in life? It's really hard. Uh people know what it is, but again, it was hard. You know, like I said, some of these were difficult to illustrate.

Jennifer:

Of all the modern wellness concerns, and we've talked about a few of them here: loneliness, stress, sleep deprivation, which might be one that I am personally experiencing right now, dang it, lack of time with nature, et cetera. Which do you think is actually the biggest threat to our spiritual well-being? And how are we as planners really exasperating these issues with our modern planning practices?

Phillip Tabb:

That's a hard one. The thing that came to mind at first was being safe. And it's kind of a very ground level that if you don't feel safe, how can you be well? I mean, that's like a foundational. And if you don't feel safe because of your race or gender or position, your degree of wealth or lack, then that can be really devastating because it's really hard for you to open up to some of the, let's say, higher level wellness aspects. It's almost like Maslow's hierarchy that the base level has to be satisfied before the first, or like the biological one. If you don't have air, you know, and so on, if you can't breathe, then you know, how can you be spiritually well? I mean, you have to have these basic things. So I I would say to some degree, uh safety and comfort are down there. But going up to the higher level wellness aspects that planners and architects is creating the opportunities for those wellness experiences to occur and to honor the sites within a city that are either historic and sacred. Now, this isn't news. I mean, this is something you would probably want to do anyway, but to really put it as a high priority and to create access, I think accessibility is critical. And that's something that in architecture and in planning uh we can get to. The automobile, I think, is in our country a major contributor to non-spiritual experiences, unless you're sitting at a red light doing a mantra or something. I mean, you can. I had an old Porsche at one time and taking it out in the country and driving around with the top down. I mean, that was a spiritual experience. But the impact of the automobile on American cities is just terrible. I had the opportunity to live in London and to live in a hill town in Italy. And I lived in Halifax for a while and just loved being a pedestrian in uh both those cities. I was a pedestrian and in Italy, I would be a pedestrian for four months at a time. And we would take the train or the bus on occasion, but uh just walking around. And you become so much more connected to your environment than you do, like in America, we're in our car and then we go into air-conditioned office buildings, and you're so removed from nature. And of course, this is a problem with in biophilia as well as in spiritual architecture and planning. So accessibility I've always found uh being something that is really important. Bringing nature in, I mentioned doing parks, but that's like a piecemeal thing. You stick a little piece of green in an urban fabric, and it's less that, and it's more how do you bring the natural ecological processes and let them filter in and through the city. So almost that nature's breathing through the urban fabric and that the urban fabric is responding to that. Look at how many cities are located along rivers. And there's a point at which you just forget about that it's a river, it's part of nature, and you just go over the bridge to get to your office building. But more and more cities, you know, like San Antonio, that have refurbished uh the river and really created it as an environment and a place for interaction. And more and more cities are doing this worldwide. Monteverde in uh Spain took the old town and converted it. Uh, about 90% of it is pedestrian. The automobiles can come in, but they're very limited. And the transformation of that city is amazing. They put signs up in the city, maps up, and all the maps are based on the underground or walking distances. So to get from this place to that isn't a roadmap, but it's the number of minutes it takes to walk. And uh these sort of changes, I think, are really exciting and contribute, I think, to spiritual wellness. I've always loved small towns. I lived in Chicago and Boston and London and uh enjoyed that at a certain time in my life. But I grew up in eastern Idaho. Idaho at that time had less than a million people. I lived in the second largest city of 35,000, and I could see the Tetons from our living room. I had a huge connection to nature and fairly low density population. Now in my life, I live outside of Atlanta in a community that I designed. It's concentrated like an English village, but we have 30% built and 70% natural space in this development. And I prefer that. And I know that large cities can't do that. You can't have 80% nature in a large city. But it led me to a statistic I came across that uh something like 50% of Americans live in the space between rural and urban areas, suburban, exurban, and the transition between those. That's a huge amount of people. And much of that is suburban living and it's you know single-use development. And that's a huge problem, uh, especially in terms of accessibility, because when you have large areas of single uses, the other critical uses you need to get to are far away, and therefore you have to get there by automobile in this country. And that just is a planning situation that just continues to create an unhealthy situation. My solution, in a way, is to use the transect as a model for planning, where you have the lower density into that transect that interfaces, let's say, with nature and rural lands, as being smaller nucleated villages. And then you move into larger nucleated villages to even larger neighborhoods that are nucleated with connections to mass transit and to employment. And then eventually you interface with an inner core of a city. And somehow a transect seems really sane, doesn't it? But it seems really difficult to do, especially from a transportation point of view. When Americans can get from one place to another easily without using the car, is when we're going to have a huge amount of change, I think. So, in a way, going back to the question, I think transportation is probably one of the largest problems to spiritual wellness.

Stephanie Rouse:

So you just mentioned that cars are one of the major issues and barriers to spiritual wellness. Another one that you had identified in the book is housing and the modern day need to build mass housing to lower housing costs. How can we balance this need for affordability and construction with a true need to design for wellness?

Phillip Tabb:

That's a really good question. I've just now started to focus more on affordable housing. I live in a non-affordable housing place. It's uh many of the houses here are well over a million dollars. Mine isn't, but and it was necessary in order to actually create the development context for this place. And we're a series of neighborhoods that are interconnected. They're like little hamlets that are interconnected, and each one is themed, and one's on wellness and one's on the arts, and one's on agriculture. We have our own farm. Another one is on play and families and has a huge park in the center of it. And then uh I did a design for one adjacent to that that was based on affordability and workforce housing. And two hotels are being planned for our community. There are five restaurants now, and there'll even be more when the hotels come in. And everybody has the needs for nannies and landscaping and so on. And so the workforce housing, most of the is occurring from you know, miles away, that creating a workforce housing hamlet would be really a good idea. I still think it's a great idea. The initial design was to design one that limited the automobile. And so it's a pedestrian, it's an automobile-free environment, but also accommodates the automobile in pockets. And in a way, it seemed kind of ideal. And uh my skepticism was that a lot of the low-income families are not going to want to be walking very far from their F-150 pickup trucks. And I understand that. We have a lot of golf carts in our community. So we had golf cart connections to this affordable housing Hamlet, and we were kicking around the idea of having a transit so that the transit would come and pick up workers and take them to the two hotels there or other places in Sarinbe. So going back to the original question, I think Americans are so sold on the idea that our status is a function of size and amount rather than quality and function. And my house is small, it was 1,600 square feet for three bedrooms and three baths and workspace. And I just don't understand why people can't live smaller, maybe not 1,700 square feet, but why they have to have three and four and five and six thousand square foot houses filled full of rooms that only have two to four people that use them and have all these multiple rooms. It just seems crazy to me. And all the resources it takes to make those. You know, think of students when they live in apartments. Many of them just have a room that they're sharing with two or three roommates, and there might be one or two bathrooms that they have to share too. They learn to do that. And then as we grow older, we tend to need more and more space. And then we become more affluent, then we think we need, you know, uh TV rooms and theater rooms and indoor swimming pools and all that. And it just seems crazy to me. It seems to me you can have a swimming pool in a community and have one that's shared by everybody. I think it's this insatiable need to have big things and to have a certain amount of uh isolation, you know, a lot of space around you. The average lot here at Sarinby is about an eighth of an acre at the most. And uh most houses are about uh 10 feet from the sidewalk. There's no front lawns, it's all natural landscaping. And the backyards, there's no backyard, it opens up to forests, and everything is as natural as as can be. We didn't think people would really go for it so much, but people are really embracing it. And the other one is the, you know, the garage. We have more than half of the houses here that don't have garages. They park on the street right in front of their houses. And I'm talking about in many cases very expensive cars. Again, at the beginning we didn't think that was going to work, but it certainly has. You'll see $200,000 Porsches out in front of a house. So that's another aspect of just building too large. And another big problem, I think, is the lack of mixes of use. The mixes of use, you know, as a planner, you're sure I'm sure you're aware of this. But for me, it's the critical land uses that you create accessibility to, where you live and draw a circle around it. And can you walk to the critical land uses that support your life? For the most part, you can't. When I was teaching in Texas AM, I asked my students in a placemaking class to identify their village. And I said, identify all the land uses, things that you go to: a pub, the church, the grocery store, the restaurants that you like to go to, the movie theater, whatever it is that you like going to, and consider your home where your apartment is and your work being school. And so they drew these circles around, you know, where they had placed these places on the map. And it was amazing. Most of them are around a six-mile diameter. Well, you can't have a walkable community in a six-mile diameter. And even in a college town where you think you have a concentration of mixes of use, you don't. You have some, but you don't have all of them. And when I was studying English villages, I found that there were like 10,000 villages in Great Britain. Many of them grew into towns, but most of those were about a mile in diameter and had about uh two to three thousand people in them and were relatively self-sufficient. And several hundred years ago, well, let's say about three to four or five hundred years ago, they were self-sufficient. They provided everything. And in many cases, in the early villages, most people never went beyond their village or their precinct. That's because that place supported them. And in our suburbs today, they are totally devoid of having the real support systems. So I think that's another really big problem. I go for the idea of this is a Leon Career idea, that you should grow by multiplication rather than by addition. And multiplication for me means that you're you're growing nucleated, mixed-use neighborhoods and uh villages and hamlets, and then you find ways to connect them. And the space in between is the ecological fabric. To me, that's kind of a model, especially of uh outside of the dense urban cities that we have.

Jennifer:

Overall, spiritual wellness ultimately is a subjective experience, as you kind of alluded to at the beginning of the podcast. So, how can planners and architects effectively measure the success of the built environment in fostering that sense of spiritual wellness?

Phillip Tabb:

I don't know. I always feel like uh proof is in the pudding here at Sarinby. The early intention was to create community. And when you design something, you don't know whether you're going to create community or what kind of community you are going to create. You know, it just kind of happens on its own. And for us, when I walk down the street, people wave and say hi. When I go to the mailbox, I have a 10-minute conversation with a neighbor. Everybody loves being here. We wave, people are on golf carts and you will stop and talk. Even during COVID, because the porches, every house has a porch, because the porches were about six to ten feet away from the sidewalk. There was still a lot of uh socialized socialization going on because we had the COVID distance between us. Going back to the question, there is this great sense of community here, and there is no need to measure it. I mean, when you go to your Nebraska volleyball game, is there a sense of community? Shall we measure this, you know, by finding out the decibels of sound? Uh you don't need it. I I understand the question though, but somehow uh I'm not a quantitative person in that sense.

Jennifer:

I think that's fair. I think that's absolutely fair. Yeah.

unknown:

Yeah.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, and and I think too, you know, some of the design aspects that we've talked about throughout this episode that you were kind of explaining of is this an area that you can walk to everything you need in your daily life that's gonna impact, you know, that's the built environment fostering the sense of wellness there is that you're able to meet your daily needs and that you're able to interact with everyone else. So how we design our land use and our transportation systems and everything, and and include landscaping and biophilic design, all of it is like little elements that work together to create a really well community.

Phillip Tabb:

Building on that idea is I've been involved in a number of charettes over the last few years, and and there are people that have come to Sarin B and really love it, and and they've got a piece of land somewhere and uh they want to recreate Sarin B. They can't because Sarinbi is a one-off deal, you know, it's unique to this place and to the developers and and to the design. But when we enter this, they're hiring us because they think we can create that something special that might be special for them and their piece of land. And that's what I would like to think that that we do. And it seems to have these common components to it, like you were just mentioning, you know, accessibility, nature, a sense of a center, a good sense of bounding, elimination of the negative environmental aspects, and so on. And yet it's almost like you have to have all of those things together. It's not just one thing or another. When we go into these designs, we think of all of these things and we try and find a concept that is very fitting uh the climate, the specific site within which it exists. I was talking to a friend about, I don't know if you're familiar with uh Constantinus Doxiotis's work on acistics, but it it's you know in the 40s and 50s and 60s. It was based on the I Achistics is the science of human settlement. And he came up with this, these components of it cells, connectors, nature, human interaction. Those are the basic things, you know, that we try to do in in any kind of design, I think. And sometimes we forget them. And when you eliminate one, if you eliminate nature, I mean that's a huge thing, that a huge possibility that you're missing.

Stephanie Rouse:

And as this is booked on planning, what books would you recommend our listeners check out?

Phillip Tabb:

I've struggled with this one because I'm not a planner, but I am. My degrees are in architecture, but my PhD was in village planning. I was really influenced in my master's work on the Findhorn community. And there's a book called The Findhorn Garden. And they eventually created an eco community. And it's an intentional community and you have to be vetted to go into, which I'm not really crazy about, but it was the beginning of really kind of integrating agriculture and community. And it was probably one of the first agrihoods, you know, modern agrihoods. I should say. Most places way back were aggravids. But that book was influential. I don't know if you are aware of Tim Bately's work at the University of Virginia. He heads up a thing called Biophilic Cities, and he has a journal called the Biophilic Journal. And he has a biophilic cities network of cities all over the world, and it's growing. That includes places like uh Paris and Singapore and uh others that have a strong interest in creating uh healthy places. Singapore is probably one of the healthiest places uh in the world, healthiest cities. So that would be another one. And um are you familiar with Fritz uh Steiner's book on Nature and the Cities? It's a really good book. Of course, Jane Jacobs book. Yeah, I almost have to say that without I mean mention that, especially from the social side. You could almost go through and identify using the pillars. Again, I don't know what would be a good book from the point of view of uh financial uh wellness from a planning point of view. But I think I mean that's probably the subject of another book by somebody who's really into that. I think that uh, you know, financial wellness and the uh urban environment would be a fantastic subject. I think biophilia really addresses the the relationship of nature and wellness. And the social side, again, is a a huge one, and probably one of the more important ones that would affect planning. And how do you create places that are really on one hand safe, and on the other hand, stimulating interaction and different kinds of interaction? Because again, if if you go back to the transect, how do two houses next to one another create a social space for interaction? How does a street create, and you know this is planners that you know most most of our streets are deadly, but there are many streets that are there are like social places, and then neighborhood centers and neighborhood places, and then you get to you know urban places and so on, that can stimulate interaction. When we think of interaction, social interaction, you know, you think of stadiums and you know, large places like that, churches, I guess, and shopping centers. For Americans, that's the sports, shopping and religion. Let's interact. There's other ways to do it too.

Stephanie Rouse:

Bill, thank you for joining us on Booked On Planning to talk about your book, Spiritual Wellness in the Built Environment.

Phillip Tabb:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you guys and your your interest in this work and the book.

Jennifer:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Philip Tav on his book, Spiritual Wellness in the Built Environment. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Rutledge by supporting your local bookstore or by supporting us at bookshop.org slash shop slash bookdone planning. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review, and share the show. We thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time on Book Done Planning.

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Jennifer Hiatt

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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

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