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| <back | home City Repair: An Intersection of Paradigm Change by Mark Lakeman As you may already realize, the revolution is not being televised. For instance, have you heard that eight years ago, a group of neighbors in Portland, Oregon, walked into a street intersection and transformed it into a community gathering place? They were armed with paintbrushes and the radical awareness that something important was missing at a very crucial location — right outside their doors. Their action slowed traffic, made the streets safer, and brought isolated people together to make new friends. Soon, after initial opposition by the Department of Transportation, the Portland City Council legalized the project for all ninety-six city neighborhoods so that an unlimited number of street intersections could be ‘reclaimed’ for the purpose of community self-development. Today, we can see how this one little neighborhood helped other communities across the city to reclaim their intersections until other cities heard what was going on and the whole thing became a national movement called ‘The City Repair Project’. Well, now you know — and there’s more. It’s about humanity and how we can live in possession of our own destiny. It’s about villages, grids, and the intersections where our lives can converge. A Little Empire Story of Divide and Conquer Invasive cultures are always built upon the ruins of villages. Where before villagers gathered at the central intersection of the village, the conquered villagers are made to live in grids where intersections become merely conduits of movement. Since this story is common to everyone’s family history, no matter your ancestry, have you ever asked yourself, ‘Whatever happened to my village?’? Why do we live in placeless and alienating grid cities? Many Americans have been looking back in time in order to understand how it is that all the work of our ancestors has not already led to ‘sustainability’. Part of the answer is that our people have been working for someone else’s dream for a long time. Communities seldom have a voice. Whose idea was it to give up the village square, the cultural nexus? Did anyone ever call a vote to eliminate the Village Heart? Why, then, do Americans inhabit innumerable neighborhoods without even one single neighborhood public gathering place? You might say that in the grid, we don’t intersectwith other ‘villagers’ because our intersections were designed, by people we never met, to accommodate a narrow set of uses. Indeed, the disruption of culture thatrelegates whole peoples to a life of struggle, and thegridded infrastructure of their isolation, is the old story of divide and conquer, the very story of unsustainable culture. Reclaiming Intersections, Transforming the Grid The vision of City Repair is that democracy is the very foundation of sustainability and that the village heart is the beginning of a sustainable human habitat where we build upon social equity, political accessibility, and ecological balance. City Repair asks people to consider how our ability to participate relates to the health of our democracy. In connection with such questions, we should also ask, ‘What good is freedom of assembly without a place to assemble?’ If we look around and see that we have no such places, especially in the hearts of our neighborhoods, then City Repair says we should go into action with our community and build it. Before taking to the streets, the core group of neighbors had learned that village streets used to be an interwoven fabric of paths which led to places where people’s lives came together. When the neighbors saw that the grid which divided their neighborhood had long ago been designed to divide and regiment their own ancestors, then they took to their streets with a new vision. They knew, as with so many communities, people were not talking with their neighbors. They knew that there were no places for neighbors’ lives to intersect. Once they saw that the street intersection could become that public meeting place, they simply took it back. That first ‘intersection repair’ led to an exponential expansion of activity which has brought together diverse communities, political leadership and government bureaus to create new forms and scales of involvement. These include a fabulous series of organizations and locally-envisioned and -constructed ecological buildings for community gathering; ephemeral tea houses made by and for neighborhood residents and homeless kids; the nation’s first socially and ecologically sustainable self-help homeless village; many new kinds of creative public squares; and dozens of unusual new forms for community development. As speakers from the City Repair Project travel throughout the United States, many communities are realizing that the idea of building community starts with a sense of place that must be created by people for themselves. City Repair is a successful model because people across the country realize that they can create a place for themselves that is founded upon access and justice. They see that we can all have a habitat where everyone is included, and its heart will be located where the paths of our lives converge.When we have a place to gather, we create a place to share. The revolution will not be televised; it is being shared by people at the intersections of their lives. Mark Lakeman, architect and visionary, is a founder of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon. Mark will be touring Southern California with his slide show “City Repair, Street Corner Revolution,” from Arcata to San Diego, November 26 to December 12. Tentative dates in Oakland, SLO; Santa Barbara, Thursday, December 2, Faulkner Gallery, 7:00 pm; Los Angeles, December 3-5, LA Eco-Village; San Diego and Ojai. Contact SB Permaculture Network, sbpcnet@silcom.com, 805-962-2571 for Tour Info and dates. Sponsors: Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, HopeDance Media, Community Environmental Council, and The Sustainability Project. <back | top^ |