The Language of Places
The landscape that has stayed with me most vividly this year is Lac de Sainte-Croix in southern France.
More than anything, it was the color of the water. The turquoise comes from fine limestone particles carried by the Verdon River, scattering the sunlight as it hits the lake. Over two days, I looked at it whenever I had the chance: from behind the wheel, from the top of a mountain, from the water itself, from a hotel terrace. Before sunrise, the lake was a deep teal; once the sun came up, it turned a vivid turquoise. No matter how many times I saw it, it was difficult to look away.
On our first evening in the area, we visited its most famous village, Moustiers-Sainte-Marie. I deliberately went later in the day, hoping the crowds would have thinned, but it was still busy. And yet I immediately understood why people went out of their way to get there. It had an unmistakable sense of place, the feeling that nowhere else could quite look or feel like this. I remember thinking that next time, I could easily spend a night there.
The following day, we were due to head towards the lavender fields of Valensole. But I wasn’t quite ready to leave the lake. I wanted to see it one last time, so I searched for somewhere we could stop along the way and found Plage de Bauduen. The view of Lac de Sainte-Croix from there was, for me, the most beautiful of all.
As we drove away from the beach, we passed through the small village of Bauduen just above it. We barely spent any time there, but something about the atmosphere immediately appealed to me. I had the distinct feeling that if I ever returned to this part of France, I would rather stay there than in Moustiers.
Both were beautiful places. One was so striking that I would recommend it to almost anyone. The other simply felt, in a way that was harder to explain, right for me.
Why do some places go beyond being good places and somehow become the right places for us?
This essay begins with that question.
AI has made it much easier than before to find places that seem suited to us. We can ask, “Recommend a café in Gangneung that I would like,” or “Tell me about a travel destination that isn’t widely known yet, but would suit my taste,” and get surprisingly convincing answers.
But these questions almost always begin with us. What do I like? What kind of experience am I looking for? Which trips have stayed with me? AI takes what it knows about us and tries to find a place that might fit.
So what about the other side of that equation: the place?
Much of what we know about places consists of traces left by other people: reviews and blogs, travel essays and articles, information accumulated on maps, photographs and captions posted to social media. There is no shortage of information about what is famous, what people enjoyed, what they ate and where they went. From all of this, we can learn quite a lot about a particular place.
But knowing what people have said about a place is not quite the same as understanding, in a consistent way, what kind of place it actually is.
To exaggerate slightly, it is a little like asking AI to recommend a film after it has read thousands of reviews and pieces of criticism, but nothing else. It could probably still make a pretty good recommendation. But films have something beyond reviews: metadata that helps describe the DNA of the content itself.
Even the old video store organized films into drama, comedy, action and horror. Today’s streaming services work with far more detailed information. Genre is only the beginning. Mood, subject matter, period, characters, narrative structure and many other attributes can help describe a title.
As that metadata becomes richer, the resolution of classification changes too. We can move beyond a broad category such as “a heartfelt drama” and describe a work through much more specific qualities: amateur sleuths solving mysteries, a mystery unfolding in a small town, or a story about different generations working together to solve a problem.
Instead of simply saying, “You like mysteries, so you may like this,” we can begin to understand someone more specifically: “You tend to respond more to ordinary people solving mysteries than professional investigators, to changing relationships within small communities, and to suspense softened by humor.”
The more deeply we understand a work, the more precisely we can connect it to a viewer’s taste.
So what about places?
We have enormous amounts of information about them, but the shared language we use to describe the places themselves remains relatively crude. We often call somewhere “a charming old quarter,” “a trendy creative district,” “a café-lined area,” “a place that still feels genuinely local,” or “one of the city’s emerging hotspots.” All of these descriptions are useful, but their resolution is low.
Imagine two old neighborhoods. In one, old buildings and ways of life continue naturally into the present. In the other, traces of old industry collide with new cultural activity, creating an entirely different kind of tension. Both can be called “old neighborhoods,” yet the reasons we are drawn to them may be completely different.
If the language we use to describe places is not fine-grained enough, those differences become difficult to distinguish.
People who are good at planning trips have, in a sense, been filling this gap for themselves for a long time. They do not simply search for “things to do.” They look at the geography and climate, the history and culture, and the ways people actually live there, trying to understand why the place looks and feels the way it does today. Then they try to judge which parts of that character might appeal to them.
“The distinct character of this place reveals itself in everyday life.”
“I like the atmosphere created by old industry mixing with new culture.”
“The terrain makes it inconvenient to walk, but it also creates a landscape I find compelling.”
These judgments are a different kind of information from ratings or popularity rankings. Good travelers build their own place metadata, and the richer its resolution becomes, the more distinctive and memorable their journeys can be.
But this is not only a traveler’s problem.
Across the country, regions continually create tourism content and campaigns in an effort to attract visitors. The more remote the area, the more urgent the task of explaining why people should make the journey there.
So every local specialty gets its own festival. Skywalks and photo spots emblazoned with oversized place names appear across the country. Fried chicken bites somehow become a fixture of almost every traditional market. Rather than discovering what is already distinctive about a place, we often spend more energy manufacturing reasons for tourists to show up.
But perhaps before trying to make a place better known, we should ask a more basic question: What is it about this place that draws people in? And compared with other places, what exactly is different about it?
We know what exists in a place and how many people visit. Data on spending, movement, search behavior and social response is becoming increasingly sophisticated. All of this is, of course, valuable for understanding cities and tourism. But it still does not fully explain why someone wants to linger on one particular street, why one area stays unusually vivid in the memory of a certain person, or why two seemingly similar places can have completely different kinds of appeal.
Perhaps we need a different kind of information: information that describes the character of a place as individuals actually experience it.
How visible are the traces of time?
How strong is its sense of uniqueness?
How much of everyday life can you actually see?
What if we could ask the same questions of very different places?
Perhaps before finding more effective ways to promote a place, what we first need is a sufficiently rich language for understanding it.
With such a language, the way we discover places could change too. Instead of “You like old neighborhoods, so go here,” we could begin to understand what it is about old places that someone actually responds to, and then discover that same kind of appeal somewhere unexpected.
Returning to the question at the beginning, understanding why one place feels uniquely right for us requires more than understanding ourselves. We also need to be able to read the place on the other side at a much higher resolution.
The ‘language’ of places.
A shared vocabulary for reading the distinct character of places at a higher resolution and connecting their appeal with individual taste.
So what, then, is the appeal of a place actually made of? In the next essay, I will introduce the first framework we have been developing to give this language shape.
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