The purpose of most industry tradeshows and events we attend is to facilitate new business by showcasing the latest advancements and opportunities. However, the aspect Purgula appreciates most is being exposed to perceptions of the future—where all of this developing innovation may be headed.

At the latest show we attended, FutureScape USA 2026, we were pleasantly surprised by “The Earth Is the Floorplan: How Landscape Design Can Restore Health, Belonging, and Connection,” a particularly prescient session presented by landscape designer Michael Bernier of Michael Bernier Design.

Our positive reaction was largely due to how closely Bernier’s perspectives meshed with many of the emerging topics we have been covering and learning about in recent months—especially those pertaining to community.

According to Bernier, landscape design has for decades been treated as the last thing that happens to a developed piece of land—decoration applied after the “real” decisions have already been made.

He proceeded to make the strong case that this sequencing is actually backwards. In other words, getting it right isn’t simply a stylistic preference. The timing and quality of landscape planning can influence whether a subdivision feels isolated and transactional, or whether it gives residents practical reasons to get outside, linger, participate, and interact with one another.

Having already explored the built environment’s relationship to loneliness, most directly in our feature on The Granary in Milton, Delaware, we were eager to hear Bernier’s take on how landscape can influence community. His talk didn’t just add another data point to that conversation. It offered a framework—an explicit contrast—that sharpened our own thinking about what separates a community that genuinely works from others that merely give the appearance of being well-designed from stylish renderings.

Here’s what we learned from Bernier’s session—and how it changed our perspective on what thoughtful landscapes can do for a community.

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From Decoration to Infrastructure

Michael Bernier presenting

Michael Bernier presenting his “The Earth is the Floorplan” talk at FutureScape USA 2026 at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, California

Bernier opened with a blunt observation:

We have more private space today than at any point in recent history, and fewer places to actually belong.

His diagnosis of how we got here reads like a checklist of familiar complaints about suburbia:

  • Homes designed as isolated products
  • Streets built primarily for cars
  • Open space treated as whatever’s left over once the lots are drawn
  • Amenities substituted for genuine community
  • Nature reduced to ornamentation

The framework he calls Living Human™ treats that checklist as symptoms of a single root cause: development hierarchy. In his telling, the conventional sequence runs as:

Yield → Roads → Lots → Buildings → Landscape.

Land gets evaluated for how many units it can support, infrastructure gets laid out to serve vehicles, and landscape shows up last, once every other decision has already constrained what it can do.

He proposes flipping the order entirely, to:

Land → Ecology → Human Experience → Community → Homes.

Landscape isn’t the caboose anymore—it’s the engine.

“Infrastructure does more than move water, power, and vehicles. It can move people toward one another.”
—Michael Bernier, Landscape Designer

That’s the sentence the whole talk was really built around. Pathways can create more opportunities for encounters. Gardens can create reasons for participation. Shared outdoor rooms can make gathering easier—provided they are accessible, comfortable, and supported over time. None of that is new to landscape design—what’s new is Bernier’s insistence that these aren’t amenities layered onto a development, they’re the actual infrastructure a community runs on, no less foundational than the water and power lines underneath it.

 

Oak Passage: A Real-World Test

Frameworks are easy to nod along with in a conference setting; what makes Bernier’s argument worth taking seriously is that he says it is already being applied. Oak Passage, a proposed development in the Paso Robles area, is the working example. Bernier mentioned Ari Gati, founder and CEO of Homeplex, as his collaborator on the project; Gati also attended the session.

Oak Passage should still be treated as an emerging case study rather than a fully documented one. As of the initial publication date of this article, we have not independently verified the project’s exact site, entitlement status, unit count, final plans, or the complete scope of Bernier’s and Homeplex’s respective roles. The features discussed below should therefore be understood as design intentions described by Bernier at FutureScape 2026, pending supporting plans, records, or further confirmation from the project team.

Even in outline form, the design choices are telling. Bernier described the community as centrally focused and working within county-approved plans rather than around them—a reminder that this framework has to survive real permitting, not just a slide deck. Catch basins, which Bernier flatly called “ugly,” are intended to be reworked as permeable surfaces and biologically active soils rather than treated solely as hidden infrastructure. An edible garden, including fruit trees, is intended to function as shared common space across three lots. Native, low-water species are intended to anchor the plantings.

Digital rendering conveying the concepts of

A digital rendering conveying landscaping features that can enhance a community by Homeplex and Michael Bernier
Image courtesy of Homeplex and Michael Bernier Design

Bernier also described a greenbelt threading through the site and a clubhouse designed less like a traditional amenity center and more like a WeWork space: a place people might have an actual reason to visit on a Tuesday afternoon, not simply a venue for scheduled events. Fallen tree trunks on the property are intended for creative reuse rather than removal, and a weekly farmers market is described as part of the plan rather than an add-on.

Photo of Michael Bernier's

Photo of Michael Bernier’s “Landscape as Social Infrastructure” slide shared at FutureScape USA 2026

None of these elements is dramatic on its own. Taken together, however, they suggest a working example of “landscape as infrastructure” connected to what Bernier described as permit-ready design—which is exactly the gap between vision and execution that a framework like this has to close to achieve anything of lasting value.

The eventual test will be practical:

How much water the landscape requires, how much stormwater it manages, how easily residents can access and use its shared spaces, and whether those spaces invite participation without turning community into an obligation.

 

Measuring Landscape as Infrastructure

Landscape becomes infrastructure only when it performs measurable functions. A landscape should not merely encourage people to go outside under ideal conditions; it should also make outdoor movement and gathering feasible under less comfortable conditions.

For Oak Passage, that could mean monitoring and documenting at least five outcomes:

  • Water: Annual landscape water demand, the share supplied by potable water, and the reduction compared with a conventional landscape baseline.
  • Stormwater: The amount of runoff retained, infiltrated, or treated onsite through permeable surfaces, planted drainage areas, and amended soils.
  • Access: The percentage of homes within a short, comfortable walk of the greenbelt, garden, clubhouse, or other shared destinations.
  • Climate Comfort and Resilience: The amount of shade, tree canopy, and shelter along primary pedestrian routes and in gathering spaces, as well as the site’s ability to remain usable during periods of extreme heat, intense sun, heavy rain, and strong winds.
  • Usage: How often residents use the garden, paths, clubhouse, and other shared spaces after occupancy—and whether participation feels voluntary rather than socially required.

These measures will not capture everything that makes a place feel like a community. They would, however, help distinguish a landscape that merely looks communal from one that actually changes how people move, interact, and consume resources:

Using water more efficiently, creating opportunities for informal social contact, and encouraging regular use of shared spaces.

 

Invitation, Not Obligation: The Granary Comparison

This is where Bernier’s talk connects directly to reporting we’ve already done—and where it sharpens rather than just echoes it.

One of his slides cut to the chase:

“Design the Invitation, Not the Obligation.”

An outdoor yoga class being held at dusk

An outdoor yoga class being held at dusk

Belonging, he argued, can’t be forced—but connection can be invited, through visible activity, intersecting daily routines, comfortable places to stop and linger, shared reasons to participate, and privacy available wherever and whenever residents actually want it.

That is nearly word-for-word the tension we identified when we covered The Granary in Milton, Delaware earlier this year. The Granary is a genuinely ambitious 451-acre community built explicitly around Colby Cox’s conviction that human connection is the most important ingredient in a good life—and we found real things to admire in it.

But we also flagged a structural risk:

When a community’s stated mission is togetherness, residents who simply prefer a quieter life can start to feel like they’re failing the neighborhood by staying home.

Forced, manufactured community isn’t community. We point to Amblebrook at Gettysburg’s approach—an abundance of varied programming that makes participation feel irresistible rather than expected—as the model that gets this balance right. We recommended that The Granary build in that same abundance-and-opt-in ethos rather than let community read as an obligation.

Bernier’s session was, in effect, an entire design philosophy built around the same instinct as Amblebrook’s—just applied one layer earlier, to the landscape itself rather than to programming. Where our Granary recommendation was about how a community should run its calendar, Bernier’s argument is about how the physical layout should invite behavior in the first place, so that connection can happen without anyone having to organize it.

Neighbor's working on their community garden

Neighbor’s working on their community garden

A pathway that happens to pass a front porch creates an encounter nobody had to schedule. A garden with visible activity gives residents a reason to be outside at the same time as their neighbors, without a sign-up sheet. It’s belonging engineered largely through geometry rather than solely through programming—and arguably a more durable version of the same goal, since it doesn’t depend on a developer’s events calendar staying imaginative for fifteen years or more.

We’d put it this way:

The Granary is trying to solve belonging through culture and calendar. Oak Passage, as Bernier describes it, is trying to solve it through the ground itself.

Both are legitimate approaches to the same underlying problem, and the strongest version of either community probably needs some of both.

 

Healthspan: Wellness Without an Appointment

Bernier’s second major thread was Healthspan—his term for how healthy a person remains through the end of their life, as distinct from lifespan alone. His framing was simple and, again, quietly pointed:

“Wellness should not require an appointment.”
—Michael Bernier, Landscape Designer

The mechanisms he described are deliberately mundane:

  • Walking naturally through daily routines
  • Spending time outdoors
  • Encountering sunlight and soil and trees without seeking them out
  • Growing and sharing food
  • Moving through incidental recreation rather than scheduled exercise
  • Maintaining relationships that don’t require calendar invites to sustain

None of this is exotic wellness technology—it’s the built environment quietly doing the work that a gym membership or a wellness app otherwise has to do on purpose.

Aerial view of a modern community center with biophilic features and wandering pathways

Aerial view of a community center with modern amenities: biophilic features; pickleball court; water-efficient plants; shade areas; and wandering pathways.

This lines up with a pattern we’ve been tracking across very different corners of home wellness coverage—including our own look at how personal, physiological regulation tools work at the scale of an individual body. Bernier’s argument is the community-scale version of the same idea. Instead of asking residents to manage every aspect of their health through devices, appointments, or scheduled routines, design an environment that makes some healthy behaviors easier: walking to ordinary destinations; spending time outdoors; encountering sunlight, shade and vegetation; growing food; and maintaining low-stress social contact. While the environment cannot guarantee those outcomes, it can reduce the friction involved in pursuing them.

 

Homes That Adapt, Land That Endures

The same principle applies to the homes themselves. If the landscape framework is meant to endure, the buildings should be evaluated not only by their initial appearance or efficiency, but by how well they can accommodate changing household needs. That means asking whether a home can support an office, caregiver, guest, rental, or multigenerational arrangement without requiring residents to leave the community or undertake a major renovation.

For Oak Passage, that could eventually be evaluated through the range of home sizes, the number of units designed to accommodate an ADU or flexible secondary space, accessibility features, and the proportion of homes that can change use over time. Adaptability should be treated as a performance characteristic, not simply as a design aspiration.

The talk’s final structural idea reframes what actually needs to be permanent in a development. Bernier’s position:

Homes should be allowed to change; the community framework underneath them should be what endures.

In practice, that means adaptable, modular homes; deliberate support for multigenerational living; homes and ADUs arranged along connected greenbelts rather than isolated lots; a range of home sizes built to match different life stages rather than a single template; and lower-impact construction throughout.

This tracks closely with something we’ve argued before, most directly in The Forever Home Myth: the idea that a home earns its longevity through architectural flexibility, not sentiment or overly rigid resilience. Bernier’s contribution is extending that same logic from the individual house to the community it sits within—a neighborhood built to absorb residents’ changing needs over decades, rather than fixed products that residents eventually outgrow and leave.

 

What We Think Matters Most

The line that stuck with us most wasn’t the healthspan framing or even the invitation-versus-obligation slide—it was Bernier’s closing reframe of the profession itself:

Landscape architects, he argued, should stop designing what’s left over once everything else is decided, and start designing what holds everything together.

That’s a bigger claim than it sounds at first. It says the landscape isn’t a feature of a development—it’s the connective tissue that determines whether a collection of houses ever actually becomes a thriving neighborhood. Oak Passage is an early, real-world test of whether that claim survives contact with county permitting, construction budgets, and actual residents. The Granary is a test of the same underlying question from a different angle—whether a stated philosophy of connection can be built into governance and programming without curdling into obligation.

The eventual evidence will not be found in renderings alone. It will be found in the approved plans, water and drainage calculations, construction details, maintenance budget, and the experience of residents after move-in. If Oak Passage can demonstrate that its landscape reduces resource demand, improves everyday access, supports changing households, and invites connection without requiring participation, it will offer a stronger model than a development that merely borrows and promotes the language of community.

Young family walking together on a central walkway through their neighborhood

A young family walking together on a centrally-designed walkway through their neighborhood

We don’t think these are competing answers. We think they address the same question, asked at two different scales. The neighborhood models willing to take both seriously—the physical layout and the social programming—are the ones most likely to deliver what both Bernier and Cox are actually promising:

Not just a home, but a place to belong.

 

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