a place called earth

So, another round of climate change negotiations have come and gone. Once again, the fractures dividing the different corners of our world were the starting point for negotiations - fractures defined by geography, history and the sizes of countries' respective economies. And, once again, these divisions have effectively paralysed our global community's best efforts to find a solution to climate change.

This little video (though over-simplifying the problem), provides a brief summary of the history of these negotiations.

As the video points out, a tendency to put what is 'best' for our respective nations before what is 'best' for all causes us to turn against one another, to pit our own successes against others' failures, to spend more time and energy finger pointing, and naming and shaming, than trying to find honest, workable solutions. And so, in the wake of another round of negotiations, we find ourselves exactly where we started: unable to find a common basis for sharing responsibility for our future and for working together to improve it - while in the meantime the condition of our planet continues to deteriorate.

This time around, victory did come for some in the form of an ambiguous reference to compensation for those who are most affected by, and contributed least to, the effects of climate change. But I can't help but feel such an 'outcome' just detracts attention from the underlying problem: nobody is willing to significantly cut the actual emissions they are producing. Attempts to buy one's way to maintain current levels of consumption, to find more 'efficient' ways to use the same volumes of energy, to argue that history completely exempts one from the need to act responsibly represents at best piecemeal attempts, and at worst lame excuses, to avoid taking the action necessary to address the challenges before us.

The video briefly touches on a history plagued with inequality and injustice, leading to the sharp divisions we see around us. So accustomed have we become to them that they now define reality, and prevent us from consciously accepting that climate change is a global problem. But our shared history, however unjust, need not determine our shared future. Granted, we built this world on an uneven playing field of exploitation and carelessness. But we can ask ourselves how we want to go about rebuilding it - lest history repeat itself.

I find it ironic that the very root of the problem - that actions on one side of the world can affect those on the other side - is also the very proof that we're living in one world, with one ecosystem, and that we are its collective beneficiaries. All this seems to suggest that it's not really the climate that's broken - it's us.

This takes me to another interesting short film I watched recently, which describes the 'overview effect.' The term describes the sensation that some astronauts have experienced when seeing the world from afar in space. Thrust out of the make-believe borders that have come to define reality here on earth, they are able to witness the oneness of our planet from a whole new perspective. In the film, some of these astronauts describe how this experience helped them to truly appreciate that borders are manmade, that divisions are fictitious. Hearing them describe this, we feel their attraction to the beauty of a united earth. These ideas bring to mind a writing from the Baha'i Faith that reminds us of the earth's oneness.

...The surface of the earth is one native land. Every one can live in any spot on the terrestrial globe. Therefore all the world is man's birthplace. These boundaries and outlets have been devised by man. In the creation, such boundaries and outlets were not assigned.

It is worth noting that some of the assumptions the video, below, makes about changing behaviour - and ultimately the world - are overly simplistic, attributing a little too much catalytic power to the 'overview effect' without really addressing what motivates change in individual hearts, nor what role the structures of our societies must play to contribute to such change. Nevertheless, the vision of oneness it articulates is both profound and beautiful.

Changing behaviour certainly is a key factor in tackling climate change at both the individual and national level. What would it take for each one of us to accept that the world is one, and to act accordingly?

We also need to ask deeper questions about what motivates humanity, and particularly leaders, to act in the ways portrayed in the first video on climate change negotiations. Every country rightly wants to prosper, yet under the current model of development guiding humanity, less emissions means less production, means less development - and therein lies problem.

The fundamental question we should be asking then is what is the nature of true development. From a policy perspective, this implies going beyond providing incentives for individuals to use solar panels or to ride their bicycles to work. We need to ask what the deterioration of our environment implies about the nature of our economies and growth models, which depend on endless consumption, fuelled by endless production from our factories. In this model, decreasing production spells crisis: less jobs, less revenue - for both individuals and the nation. But when the economic model is destroying the earth, is that not a good time to question it?

There is no doubt that every country has the right to prosper, and that the world would be a better place if these levels of prosperity were more equal. Those that were exploited in the past need to be provided the space to work for their own prosperity. But humanity's past mistakes, no matter where they took place, and who benefited from them, should guide us to a more sustainable development path, for all.

For ultimately, this earth is our home. The place of places of meeting. If we want to salvage what's left of it, to build upon these ruins a new, sustainable pattern of life, sooner or later we won't have a choice but to acknowledge our oneness and to think and act as one. This desire to build the world anew, together, can only stem from a genuine realisation of our oneness - not just as one planet, but as one humanity, whose destinies are bound up together.

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.

- Baha'i writings

something there is that doesn't love a fence

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun,

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 

* * *

I was reminded of this all too pertinent poem by Robert Frost, first published in 1914, on two occasions recently.

The first time, a couple of months ago, was when I came across a newspaper headline that borrowed from the first line of Frost's poem. While plummeting me back to my high school English class, the article spoke about borders and fences as "the most visible remnants of the war on terror." Though such walls are actually pretty useless when it comes to preventing people from crossing borders (the article cites the idiom show me a 50 foot wall and I'll show you a 51 foot ladder), the power of such walls stems largely from their role as symbols of exclusionary policies.

With this article fresh in my mind, I was reminded of the poem a second time, though this time much closer to home - after the construction of a fence around a couple of the high rise apartment buildings that form part of the big social housing estate just next to our new home - les grandes ensembles (literally, 'big together').

For both residents and passers-by, there has never been any real distinction between these two buildings and the thirty or so other ones, spanning across a terrain measuring a kilometre or two - three stops exactly on the local bus route. The buildings have always been connected by interior paths for pedestrians and for over forty years, they were all part of les grandes ensembles. As the name emphasises, they were all together.

The fact that these two buildings happened to be owned by a different social housing company never really meant anything to anyone. Children and families visit their friends in those buildings just as they would any other.

So when the fence went up, no one really understood why. Was there a territorial war going on between the two companies? Did the company actually think that residents needed to be walled off for security reasons?

Most residents I spoke to were just kind of irritated. They weren't consulted in the construction of the fence and certainly didn't feel like it was protecting them from anything. It was just getting in the way. Kids would have to walk all the way around it to get from one place to another. Journeys to the train station each morning were extended. And when we were visiting neighbours in one of those buildings we found ourselves walking in circles just trying to find our way out afterwards.

Granted these few extra minutes may not seem such a burden in themselves. But as the article quoted at the beginning of this post notes, it's not just about practical inconvenience, but moreso about what this fence symbolises. A neighbourhood divided in two. A common space separated. The boundaries of neighbourhood and community defined by a corporation that doesn't have a sense of the lived reality of the place of those who actually use it. A decision about how to conceive of that place that completely neglects peoples' own visions of their neighbourhood.

Last week I learned that the practical inconvenience of fences matter too. As though orchestrated to illustrate the absurdity of this urban planning, as I was walking home from visiting a neighbour, I witnessed from a distance four ambulance officers, with their equipment, struggling to push open a part of the fence (which was kind of a makeshift gate wedged into the ground, without hinges - not really designed to be opened). A resident was trying to help pull it open from the other side. After a minute or so of effort they finally propped the thing open and ran up speedily into a building on the other side of that fence. The car park closest, where the ambulance was parked, potentially waiting to rush somebody to hospital, is in effect fenced off from the places where people live.

As the ambulance officers rushed past, an angry resident shouted that they should file a complaint against the company for putting up the fence in the first place, further illustrating the sense of imposition that has come along with the building of the fence.

So what was this company trying to wall in, or wall out?

Sadly it is not the only one of its kind. Fencing, walling and gating off these estates is happening all over our neighbourhood and throughout the region. Another social housing estate, which we would always cross through as a short cut to get to a neighbouring suburb, has also now been closed off. As well as putting up barriers between different members of the community, these fences are encroaching on what was once seen as public space. Common areas, frequented by local children and youth, much crossed by residents on their way to and from work, have now been fenced off. Outside of special zones, like public parks, all that is left are the footpaths.

Another family we know complained that the new fences put up outside the entrance to their home makes them feel like they're living in a prison.

Again, I couldn't help but wander: are they trying to wall people in or out? Like the article above so poignantly notes, such fences seem to reflect exclusionary policies more than they actually protect anybody.

I wrote recently that France seems to do a good job when it comes to designing public spaces. While this is true, I am coming to realise that such spaces are accepted if they can be confined and controlled. Parks can be monitored by officials and closed at night time (which they are). But places of residence are more difficult to control. The desire to put up fences signifies a desire to try and stop people from coming together, based on a fear of what such a meeting might produce. The assumptions lurking beneath this conception of city planning is that places of meeting shouldn't exist in public spaces because wherever anyone meets out in the open, dangerous things can happen. Instead, everyone should keep to their homes, the private realm. People from different buildings shouldn't cross paths. If their paths are parallel, then there should be a fence between them. And granted, sometimes there can be a basis for fear - sometimes in the dark hours of the night, there can be unwanted things taking place a little too close to home.

But are fences the solution? Those who want to will always find a 51 foot ladder and these planning decisions need to consider what such fences are really excluding, and whether it is wise to give that up. Things like chance meetings between neighbours that might have happened naturally on one's way home from work. Like seeds of friendship sown between children who see their neighbourhood as one large playground. Like a sense of community, both within and outside the home.

It's a sad, lonely world we are building then, all in the name of safety from some elusive threat. For all this planning reflects a reality that doesn't exist. 'Community' is invisible to this planning, which just sees buildings and routes. I don't think fences can actually stop community life, but they certainly don't promote it. And who knows whether with time these fences come to represent more than inconveniences but actually separate spaces, separate neighbourhoods, separate neighbours. Places where people no longer meet.

There needs to be a long and hard reflection then about the value of community life and meeting places in urban design. We need to ask ourselves what we are so afraid of, and to deal with it, instead of trying to cage off perceived problems. For we'll probably find that most of these very problems stem from the conceptions of community engrained within our policies, and not from communities themselves.

* * *

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.

blessed is the spot

As I write this post, I'm sitting on a pillow on the ground. My laptop is perched on one of the many boxes filling our soon to be ex-aparment. Most of our furniture has been dismantled. 

It's a funny thing, to move. At least, that part when all the furniture comes down. Suddenly that space that you knew so intimately, filled with those things that had become background noise in the rooms that had become your own, metamorphoses into another place - one that you barely recognise, even though the floor and walls are still made of the same materials, and the number of square metres hasn't budged. But it suddenly becomes foreign -  it becomes someone else's.  

The big move is tomorrow. We're not going very far - about 200 metres to be exact. To a place big enough to fit all our stuff, and closer to the families whose children will participate in the class and youth group that will take place in the new living room.

After four years of living in this home, in this neighbourhood, what touched me most about us moving on from this place is how it affected some of the youth of this neighbourhood - those that had spent countless hours here. I guess I had begun to take for granted the way the space both reflected and shaped the community that it often housed - the many quotes and prayers decorating our walls, each one attached to a melody known by heart by all these youth, that we'd select from to sing together each time we gathered for a devotional meeting. The coloured papers upon which they were written had too become part of the scenery. As had the messily but adorably coloured in pictures that the children had made in their weekly classes over the years, each image representing a virtue they had learned about, like service or generosity or kindness. Just like the experiences of all these people, these things had simply become a part of this home.

 

A home that, to our great fortune, has come to represent more than just our space, the married couple. When we moved in, we had hoped that it could become a space for service. A space for learning. A space for worship. A space for reflecting and for developing qualities, together, with our community. 

So when some of these youth - who have passed a good part of these four years between these walls in pursuit of these same goals - expressed sadness at the fact that we were moving on from this space, it was heartening. One of them volunteered straight away to organise a final devotional meeting to part ways with the apartment. My husband recounted how another, upon hearing the news, also said she'd really miss the place. He reminded her that she and her family had also moved house recently, and that it wasn't really such a big deal after all. She replied, "It's not the same. We didn't experience the same things in our home that we did here. We didn't have the same memories as we do here."

When he told me this, I felt like these hopes had been realised. The time spent here during these crucial four years of adolescence was a critical part of their development as it was ours. And this space was as much theirs' as it was ours - a genuine place of meeting. Where a sense of place is more than attachment to a room, more than being able to feel your way habitually around the furniture in the dark. But rather a culmination of experiences, where the nature and quality of those experiences determines the strength of this sense of place. Coming to a weekly junior youth group session where you engage in meaningful discussions with friends, plan service projects together and pursue your individual and collective advancement (and also celebrate birthdays, sing together, dance, laugh...) is a very particular experience.

So perhaps then these are some characteristics of these places of meeting? Places where everyone can come together, feel at home, develop together, acquire memories? The four walls bore witness to countless meetings, classes, discussions, prayers and acts of service (sometimes simultaneously). Often people would come over just to do their homework, to talk, to say hello. It wasn't so unusual to hear an unexpected knock at the door - or when the door downstairs was locked (as it often was), to hear a young, shrill voice shouting up from the footpath below, calling us to open up.

As one of the junior youth commented, this apartment is so blessed.

The four walls might look different now as the furniture lies sprawled in pieces all over the floor. But whatever lived between these four walls lives on inside of us - just like we live in places they also live in us. As the keys to physical locations pass from hand to hand, the moments spent within them endure. The bonds that were formed and deepened in this place will carry over into the next one. 

And so we will move tomorrow knowing that we're not going very far, nor really leaving anything behind. Rather we are continuing, as we go on to the next place of meeting. 

One of the youth has already told us that he wants to organise the first devotional meeting in the new apartment. He said he already knew what the first text would be. It starts, "Blessed is the spot..."

"Blessed is the spot,

and the house,

and the place...

...where mention of God hath been made

and His praise glorified."

if life chances weren't dictated by the accident of birth

I loved this little video outlining the vision of economist Jayati Ghosh. As part of a series called 'After Capitlism' in The Guardian video section, the film is titled 'It is irrational to be obsessed with GDP,' but really goes much beyond that. Ghosh's ideal society is one where one's "life chances are not dictated by the accident of birth".

When I started this blog, one of the things on my mind was how mindsets and social strata divide society conceptually and in terms of the opportunities available to us, acting as a barrier to the realisation of genuine places of meeting in society, where people of diverse backgrounds could meet: physically, socially, conceptually.

Ghosh's seven 'dreams' for realising the ideal society outline governance arrangements for how we might organise our economies and societies, and according to what principles. 

But I'll stop there. Do watch the video. It's short and sweet. And offers some great ideas for what a more balanced economy organised around the goals of society might look like, and how government and the participation of the masses might fit into it all. 

What I really loved is the simplicity with which all these things are described. Ghosh makes it all sound so scarily simple. Scary because perhaps the key thing missing from the creation of a society without divisions, from a common meeting space for all of humanity, from equal opportunity, is the willpower to make it happen, and united actions to achieve it. 

we make homes, homes make us

After coming across an extract from the book 'Why We Build' by architecture critic Rowan Moore, published in The Guardian, I started to think a little differently about the notion of 'home' as the place where the family unit, and the individuals within it, are nurtured.

The concept of 'home' is all pervasive. It's that place we all wake up to, and close our eyes to at night. It is the preoccupation of many artists, and as such the subject of countless songs, poems and novels. It is, simply, that place we know most intimately. And yet it is a concept that is also becoming more and more detached: as a glossy image strewn across the inside of IKEA catalogues; as the subject of DIY television shows, causing in turn home renovations to become a disproportionate focus of human activity;  as the collateral that defines the commercial relationship between a bank and its client. From this perspective, we could say that the concept of the home is even in crisis, particularly as it becomes synonymous with the idea of 'home ownership,' an increasingly out of reach dream for more and more people. Perhaps we need to re-contextualise the home as that space that members of a family inhabit, to prepare for the larger realms of community and society. In the extract, Moore speaks explicitly of the connection between home and family, discussing different examples and modes of dwelling. In doing so, he considers how our homes shape our lives, and how we in turn shape our homes.

At the heart of this enduring syndrome is the double meaning of the word 'home'. It means physical residence, but also the family that inhabits it. It means building, people and relationship. 

Building, people and relationship, all tied up into one word: 'home.'

Indeed, at the heart of Moore's vision is a connection between the physical space that a family inhabits and the relationship between that family's members. He asks, does a home make a family, or does a family make a home?

I guess this question begs further questions. Like, why do we put so much effort into embellishing our physical surroundings, into designing spaces that reflect the domestic life that we aspire towards? How do these physical environments affect the relationships taking place within them? Can we make a home anywhere, provided the love between members of a family is based on the right foundations?

Moore addresses all these questions, albeit from a number of angles. On the one hand, he examines what happens when we place too much confidence in the influence of our built environment, whereby housing projects become ends in themselves and misguided attempts to fix what, in many cases, has sadly become the broken project of the family.

It is easy to imagine that, by fixing bricks and mortar, one is also fixing the flesh and blood, the more so as buildings seem easier to sort out than people. The results are more tangible, measurable, demonstrable. Because they are expensive and effortful, construction projects offer the appearance of serious attempts to fix something, even if they are irrelevant to the matter in hand.

In this respect, the home as a physical building can be the most ironic of metaphors. Sturdy buildings provide a strong and solid structure, protecting its residents from wind, hail, and storm. And we are getting better and better at constructing buildings monstrous in scope, inconceivable to past eras: sky-scrapers towering stories and stories higher above the earth, cutting edge architectural feats that will last generations. The irony comes in once we consider what is being lost alongside this growing architectural capacity. Somehow, strangely, as we get better at constructing buildings, at renovating and redecorating our homes, we are becoming less and less capable of laying the solid foundations that hold families together. Of maintaining marriages that last just one lifetime. The abandoned homes in the wake of the financial crisis stand as stark emblems for the social fabric that is being torn apart at its seams as the institution of the family comes crumbling down.

Moore goes on to examine another approach to home-making that I found rather interesting, and which he portrays as a sort of 'nomadic' lifestyle. Describing those who lead such lifestyles, he writes:

All show an ability to construct space out of the tracks they follow and the landmarks, whether a shop window or a sand dune, that they see. They do not need a house to make a home.

This approach challenges traditional notions of 'home', and assumes that we can make a home wherever we go. I suppose if the foundations of a family are strong, then this is especially true. Moore illustrates this idea through the story of the Bijlmer housing development in Amsterdam, which went dramatically off-course from the vision originally conceived by planners, in the process giving birth to its own type of dwelling, its own type of community, who used the space in its own way.

The point of the Biljmer story is partly how an obsessively planned development could be thrown off course by the unexpected...The population of the Bijlmer had to discover, in a few decades, how to inhabit a place through adaptations, actions, successes and mistakes...the residents of the Bijlmer make their universes around and in spite of the fabric. 

After reading this, I couldn't help but feel that it's rather the same with life in general. No matter how good we might be at planning, no matter how much time and consultation we might devote to meticulously designing each step of our lives, if such plans are not flexible, if they cannot be adapted, then they'll never work. The unexpected arrives at any moment, and in this flux usually throws our so-called plans completely off course. From experience, its the ability to recognise these 'accidents' as opportunities, rather than as obstacles, that helps plans to metamorphose into something much better than that which we could have ever dreamt up. Indeed, for the most part, life choices are reactions to a series of unexpected detours, that somehow get you closer to where you wanted to be than if you had tried to map the journey out yourself - on the condition that you have a clear sense of purpose. So, perhaps being a 'nomad' can also mean, quite simply, being open to living your life according to how you feel you can best serve humanity, at that moment, and following and settling wherever the divine winds take you to do so. That may not necessarily mean traversing the Earth; sometimes the unexpected plan is to stay right where you are. In that sense, its being nomadic in spirit rather than in movement.

This also changes the conception of the home as static, as something we build around us, to home as something that comes from within us - an outward expression of the relationships in our lives.

In this same vein, human geographer Fi-Yu Tuan sees a direct link between the notion of home or dwelling and our relationships with other people. In his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Tuan describes how the value of home as a place stems directly from the intimacy experienced there, as a result of human bonds, and how the concept of home can simply mean being with our loved ones. From a similar perspective, 'home' may not only be a union with other people, but to many, signifies the notion of closeness to God, as an expression of the longing of the soul to know its Creator. A writing from the Baha'i Faith describes this notion of home in the following way:

O Son of Being! Thy Paradise is My love; thy heavenly home, reunion with Me. Enter therein and tarry not. This is that which hath been destined for thee in Our kingdom above and Our exalted dominion.

Home in this context goes well beyond a physical space; it is more of a state, and a spiritual state at that, which then becomes manifested in our physical state and expressed in the environment around us. Building on this notion of home as a manifestation of those things held within and between us, it is interesting to consider Moore's view:

We want buildings to embellish, beautify, dignify, distract or divert. We want them to propose and to enable: to suggest what could be, to make things possible, to give freedoms. The idea of home, whether expressed as a stable cosmos or as nomadic wandering, shows a basic truth, which is that the space we occupy is not neutral to us. We cannot look at it with detachment. We are in it, we make it and it makes us.

In this passage, Moore also describes the mutuality of the interaction between space and us: it is not, as originally premised, a binary question of whether homes makes us or whether we make home. It is rather one fluid movement whereby we are shaped by the environments that we in turn shape. This concept is explored in more depth in the following passage from the writings of the Baha'i Faith:

We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions. 

That our built environment influences us is hardly a new concept. But how does this premise operate in the context of the physical space of our homes? Perhaps one way is that our conception of home and what we see ourselves as doing there influences how we arrange it, which in turn influences the habits formed around a family's interactions and exchanges. We could ask whether the setting we create within our home is a space to welcome our neighbours and communities, or whether these spaces promote learning and discussion. Such reflection might also include questions like where the television is situated in the 'family' room, and what assumptions this promotes about the nature and quality of the relationships between a family's members. All these things would influence the progress of the family, as a unit, and that of the individuals within it. As Moore notes:

If it is a mistake to think that a house can mend a family, the opposite is also false. That is, the built background to our lives is not irrelevant, either. To put the case negatively, the wrong kinds of buildings can inflict misery and frustration. 

Perhaps we also need to reflect on the extent to which such choices are always conscious ones, or how much they reflect, for example, the values sprawled between the pages of those furniture catalogues. In a world full of conflicting views, of fading ideals, from where do we draw our examples of home and family life?

edible landscapes

Most attempts to contemplate the form that local development projects might take on in a modern urban context prove challenging. In Europe, for example, the City already delivers most basic services, creating the impression that as its residents, our material needs are already being met. This tends to leave little room, or inspiration, for community led initiatives.

That's why I really liked Pam Warhurst's talk on 'edible landscapes' in the above video. It shows that there is indeed ample room for community led 'development,' if we can learn to think creatively together about how to do things differently, in ways that bring our neighbourhoods, towns and cities more in line with principles that encourage community building, sharing between neighbours and the local generation and application of knowledge.

Warhurst describes a local food movement that took place in her small town of Todmorden, England. The idea Warhurst describes is rather simple at its core: transforming unused, or undercapitalised, public spaces into community maintained garden strips, made up of fruit trees and vegetable plots, and free to the community. The project is described as combining three 'plates' - the community; learning; and local business, and set out to answer the following question:

Can we find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture that will help people themselves find a new way of living, see spaces around them differently, think about the resources they use differently, and interact differently?

Community

We could perhaps see the 'community' aspect as being at the heart of the movement. Warhurst describes this as "the way we live our everyday lives." The project is certainly being pitched as participative, and seeks to encourage a change in community behaviour through the development of core common values, such as sharing, caring for the environment, building capacity, developing a local network of growers and buyers and increasing the community's ownership of its own development.

Learning

The learning aspect threads through the project at many levels. At the most basic level, the entire initiative is conceived of as an 'experiment' - as a way to reintegrate agriculture into the heart of urban life, in the hope of inspiring local planners to "put the food sites at the heart of the town and city plan, not relegate them to the edges of the settlement that nobody can see." In this way, the dichotomy between places of residence and places of food production that has come to characterise modern landscapes is brought into question, ushering us towards a new age of urban living where this aspect of life - currently hidden away in the rural outskirts - becomes organically reintegrated into our lived environment. Food growing, then, becomes a part of life, a real thing that solidifies our link with nature, instead of a detached product that we buy at the supermarket.

At a more complex level, learning becomes integrated as knowledge generated through the local high-school system, which has put agriculture back on the curriculum, linked to a local market garden training centre. The fact that the education system has adapted to the local context is a great example of learning becoming more relevant, so that knowledge generated and applied actually responds to and helps advance community life, in this case serving to "inspire the farmers of tomorrow." Schools thus can play a key role in helping to "create  a sense of purpose around the importance of the environment, local food, and soils" in order to "create a different generation" of more aware, more driven and more purposeful youth. The next stage is a local horticultural course being designed by the university.

Local business

The business aspect tries to generate a local economy movement and to increase residents' consciousness of the businesses they choose to support. These efforts started at a simple level with one local product - eggs - but gradually increased in degrees of complexity as community confidence in local produce rose in tandem with an increase in learning and in the number of actors involved. This not only means that individuals' talents and capacities are being developed and enhanced through meaningful work but also shows how communities themselves can find creative, resilient ways to respond to global problems, such as those concerning the environment.

Another characteristic of the movement worth mentioning is its increasingly participatory nature. As Warhurst notes, "this is a movement for everyone." The grassroots nature of the project has also helped to reshape the role that local institutions - such as the local government - is playing in supporting community life. Rather than simply providing services, the local government is now serving to support this community led initiative, such as by creating a register of unused land that can be used for community food growing.

Though this model is now being replicated and adapted in many other towns and cities, it would nevertheless be farfetched to describe it as blueprint for modern urban community development. Rather, it serves as a promise that such initiatives are not only possible but indispensable to usher communities to the next stage of sustainable urban development.

When I think about my own neighbourhood, I couldn't say what a community led initiative would look like quite yet. But I do think that here, as anywhere, as the community becomes more conscious, as our capacity develops, as we become more motivated and more united, we can except that such initiatives will organically appear and flourish right on our doorsteps, as the material manifestation of shared values like unity, justice, love, equality and generosity, towards the goal of a shared prosperity.

What I especially liked is Warhust's emphasis that these actions need not be grandiose, at least not initially. She is instead a strong advocate of the power of small actions:

We are starting to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity, each and every one of us, to build a different and a kinder future.

If anything, her example shows us that the future is ripe with possibilities. As communities become more empowered to take charge of their own development, we can only begin to imagine the fruits that these endeavours will produce - both literally, and metaphorically.

the neighbourhood gift economy

In a recent video posted on the Guardian's website, self-titled 'de-growth theorist' Charles Eisenstein provides an overview of his vision of the 'gift economy' - a model for an economy that could function within a locally-embedded community, which encourages neighbours to share common resources and to perform services for one another. Click here to watch the video, which is just a few minutes long.

What I like about Eisenstein's notion of the gift economy is that it is based on some different assumptions about what drives us as human beings. Far from the 'self-interested' rational economic man that underpins mainstream economic theory, Eisenstein paints a human nature characterised by service and altruism. This gives rise to a conception of the neighbourhood as a community of people who naturally care about one another, who want to help each other out, and who can rely on that support from others. 

Building an economy on these assumptions can include exchange models that don't depend exclusively on money - he gives examples of local trading schemes and 'time banking.' It can also imply pooling some resources instead of each individual family needing to own them, such as public cars or shared power tools. Not only do such schemes reinforce the value of community, but as Eisenstein points out, they compel us to rethink the current economic model, whose dependence on unbridled consumption is clearly at odds with these more sustainable, more affordable, more gratifying, and more natural notions of sharing. 

This also got me thinking how in order for endless consumption to work, it needs us to think a certain way about who we are, what motivates us, and how we relate to our neighbours. Eisenstein's view is at odds with the well-known idiom "keeping up with the Joneses", which assumes that our neighbours actually form the benchmarks against which we measure our own social status. The theory goes that our notions of 'rich' and 'poor' are relative, depending on the status of our neighbours, marked of course by their material possessions (and most often the car they drive, as the ultimate status symbol). According to the theory then, one's own non-stop acquisition of goods is a race to outdo the neighbours. 

Thankfully, the notion of sharing expensive goods like cars does away with society's obsession with possessing luxury goods, thereby restoring the car to its rightful function - to get us from A to B, while ensuring that our neighbours are no longer perceived as competitors, but as friends and co-workers.

We could say that the current economy functions by thriving off our lower nature - that part of us driven by our ego, which can be easily lured into the trap of competition. Eisenstein's gift economy, on the other hand, is built on - and in turn helps develop - our higher nature, that nobility within us that seeks expression through acts of kindness, love and generosity. 

Eisenstein's vision of work is also based on the assumption of these qualities in man. Freed from the demands of the consumer economy, work can take on its true meaning - as Eisenstein notes, "an expression of our gifts," producing goods and services "called forth by needs." He also criticises the perversion of a system that can reward acts of injustice while often leaving humanity's most noble acts uncompensated. Money, which has become an end in itself, does not repay someone according to the value of their work. This also implies that our notions of wealth accumulation need to change, from a strictly material conception to one that incorporates spiritual dimensions too. As Eisenstein notes:

In the gift culture, the more you give, the richer you are. Which is kind of opposite to the money culture. 

A geographic community - a neighbourhood - is the perfect setting for such an economy. Not only because of convenience (sharing a car or power tools would only make sense if these things were easily accessible), but because the notion of looking out for one another as the basis of an economy implies a network of relationships. It implies interaction, and it implies vicinity. 

This vision of the neighbourhood has implications for planning, too. Eisenstein feels that humanity's best planning and logic and technological solutions have led us to the disaster we're in. His musings on the shortcomings of humanity's best planning efforts brought to mind another thinker on the relationships between members within a locality: French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose text The Right to the City (Le Droit à la Ville) provides insight into how different approaches to planning affect the way cities are conceived and created - and ultimately the way we relate to one another within them. 

According to Lefebvre, one approach to planning is that of 'developers' - those who plan cities with the market and profit generation in mind (and hence extend the consumer model described above). In Lefebvre's view, such planners cater their designs towards a consumer society:

They will build not only commercial centres, but also centres of privileged consumption: the renewed city. They will be making 'legible' an ideology of happiness through consumption, joy by planning adapted to its new mission. This planning programmes a daily life generating satisfactions...A programmed and computerised consumption will become the role and the norm for the whole society.

This 'planned' and systematised consumption gets to the core of the 'norms' that Eisenstein seeks to overcome, particularly in the milieu of the community, including the superficial notion of 'happiness' that Lefebvre describes ironically. This would be replaced with the more powerful, genuine sentiment of gratitude, where members of a community experience true happiness through the gift of helping each other out, based on the principal of reciprocity.

Ultimately, the structures of our societies need to embody those higher aspects of human nature that we want to nurture and develop, the ones that reveal our innate nobility. In doing so, they won't only reflect these virtues but will become systems through which we can further develop them. We need more thinkers like Eisenstein who can find the simple logic in models that harness man's capacity for nobility.

meeting places as a basis for unity

At a recent gathering in our home, where people from various backgrounds, with diverse mother tongues, different coloured skin, various rituals for how they practice their faith, and different names to call their beliefs, came together to pray, to consult, and to celebrate the birthdays of various members of the local community, a question was posed:


"What is unity?"


After some reflection, one participant raised his hand and responded, "It's us. Here, in this room." 

His contribution was met with a moment of silent acknowledgement. It was a very eloquent and appropriate reflection. Given the wars fought, the animosity fostered, the divisions created and segregation entrenched in the name of 'religion,' between different groups in all parts of the world, it was hard to ignore that what we were experiencing in that room, each time that we came together for such a purpose, represented a massive leap forward in human relations. And moved us an inch closer to the unity of humanity - even though it was in itself merely a glimmer of what this unity might look like on a global scale. 

For some time, we - and other neighbours - have been holding such gatherings in the unassuming settings of our living rooms. This act of coming together seems to have helped us, as a community, to become more conscious of the common threads that tie all of humanity together. The force of unity, as a light that has the power to illuminate the whole world, is making itself manifest in the relationships that are solidifying between a growing number of friends and through the power of attraction that is drawing more and more of us together in an act of collective devotion, reflection and discussion. 

Our living rooms have essentially been transformed into places of meeting that welcome an increasingly diverse range of people. This act of collective devotion has helped to reinforce a sense of oneness and a sense of common purpose. I have seen how establishing this common base - the meeting point, this moment of acknowledgement that there is a single Creator binding us all together - affects the way we interact. The cause for the spiritual and material wellbeing of our neighbourhood is increasingly becoming a common one, whose advancement more and more members work towards as equal partners. Thanks to such meetings, the act of coming together to reflect and to plan concrete actions in our neighbourhood - which we ultimately implement and learn from together - has become a natural part of the pattern of community life. Coming together for the purpose of advancement, both individually and collectively. 

And, as noted, there is no doubt that these brief, shared moments together - the burgeoning light of unity - are but a mere glimpse of what this would look like at larger and larger scales. But irrespective of the scale, seeing it here, on the home front, one cannot help but feel a tremendous sense of hope, that unity in diversity is a real possibility, that these places of meeting are closer to us than we think. And that unity, as our friend proclaimed, starts here with us. 

divided spaces, parallel places

Backlash and panic over what have come to be perceived as pockets of exclusion created by the erection of isolated, high rise social housing estates has sparked a new wave of urban design policy in France. In an attempt to create a more balanced society, "la mixité" is an approach that seeks to bring together a diverse range of housing types into one space - from private, to public, and everything in between.

It's a great shift in thinking about how to design spaces that seek to unite, rather than divide, an increasingly diverse range of individuals - to create communities that reflect all walks of life. Yet I also feel that care must be taken to avoid simplistic solutions as a kind of silver bullet for the inequalities facing society today. Whilst critical, planning solutions alone are inadequate to seal the cracks that divide our societies. To some extent, spatial proximity can be entirely irrelevant when it comes to bringing people together; multiple worlds can co-exist right along side each other, even within a common space. An aeroplane might serve as a good analogy - passengers may share a pilot, an engine - in fact, an entire aircraft - yet there is a world of difference between the curtained-off journeys of first and economy class.

This notion of "parallel places" coexisting in close proximity is poignantly illustrated in yet another excerpt from the book, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan offers the example of different workers within an office building to elucidate this point:

People may work in the same building and yet experience different worlds because their unequal status propels them into different circulatory routes and work areas. Maintenance men and janitors enter through the service doors at the back and move along the 'guts' of the building, while executives and their secretaries enter by the front door and move through the spacious lobby and well-lit passageways to their brightly furnished offices.

With its multiple entrances and passageways, this one building in effect harbours multiple worlds, within which workers can go on co-existing without ever crossing paths. After reading Tuan's comments, I started to think about how these divided spaces and parallel places are everywhere - even right in our own neighbourhoods.

My husband and I live in an area comprising largely of privately-owned, semi-detached housing (where we rent), touched on all sides by various social housing estates, ranging in size from clusters of tall high rise buildings to smaller, more discrete blocks of apartments. Having arrived here a few years ago, we moved in, and to this day have considered all of these residences as part of our neighbourhood. We have had the fortune of making friends who come from all the various types of dwellings.

But discussions with different residents made me realise that they don't necessarily see each other that way - or see each other at all. One experience that really marked me was when we went to visit a house for sale a few blocks away. As a sales pitch, the owner went out of her way to assure us that she didn't even notice the high rise buildings that tower over the neighbourhood, and that the people there never bothered her. I suppose as prospective property owners, she assumed this would offer some reassurance to us.

At first I was kind of astounded at the sheer absurdity of the notion that these dominating, towering edifices could be rendered invisible to residents living a mere few blocks away.  But I guess this absurdity gets to the heart of the matter. Blocking them out requires some kind of dismissal of this place and the people living there.

It also made me more conscious of the different worlds within our neighbourhood, both of which - by some good fortune - we were simultaneously experiencing. In addition to their perceptions, peoples' experiences of these common places vary greatly - much like the first class/economy flight. Their taxes might finance a shared road, but while some of them will experience it as being too narrow from behind their steering wheels, others will experience it as that dangerously bumpy surface you try not to trip over while running to get your train in heels ... (at least, that's my experience...).

All of this seems to suggest that genuinely open places of meeting are about more than the physical sites, even though such sites are undoubtedly a good starting point. A meeting place is a mindset. Who we see as belonging where, and who we include as being part of our space, or who we exclude, whether consciously or subconsciously, reflects the way we relate to different members of our neighbourhoods.

Tuan rightly notes that neighbourhood as a concept is highly subjective. Who it includes depends largely on boundaries that we, as its residents, create:

The street where one lives is part of one's intimate experience. The larger unit, neighbourhood, is a concept. The sentiment one has for the local street corner does not automatically expand in the course of time to cover the entire neighbourhood. Concept depends on experience, but it is not an inevitable consequence of experience.

So the emergence of true places of meeting that welcome an increasingly diverse range of people depends more than anything on the will of those people. Governments can provide social centres and parks and strive for 'le mixité' - and governments should keep doing these things. But uniting people spatially is just the first step in overcoming the divisions within society. Truly uniting people depends most critically upon their ability to see each other as one human family, to see past man-made perceptions of our supposed places in the world. It depends upon the recognition of a fundamental truth: that humanity is one, as captured in the following Baha'i writing:

Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch. Deal ye one with another with the utmost love and harmony, with friendliness and fellowship...So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth. 

public space revival

In a recent post, I shared an article and a few thoughts on the decline of public spaces in the name of privatisation. Today I came across another article in Slate that highlighted instances of a reversal of this trend: private spaces being converted into public spaces.

The article describes how an abandoned former supermarket warehouse was purchased by the City and converted into a public library, with the intent of "establishing a community gathering place." Other such projects have converted abandoned supermarkets into schools, chapels and court houses. 

The buildings that the article describes have been abandoned by businesses in pursuit of bigger spaces. But I can't help but think how with the debris of the financial crisis taking the form of abandoned homes and empty warehouses, this approach holds much promise. 

The article also references this Wikireuse site, which documents community creativity and agency in converting abandoned "corporate real estate" into places for the community. Founder Julia Christensen explains the purpose of the project:

As superstores abandon buildings in order to move into bigger stores, what will become of the walls that they leave behind? It is within the answer to this question that we are seeing the resourcefulness and creativity of communities across the United States, as they struggle to deal with a challenge that is emerging all over the country: the empty big box store. 

Christensen is driven by a desire to change the course of urban development, from cities overrun with large, private corporations, to a future built environment designed with input from communities themselves: 

Big box buildings densely populate the landscape of the United States. Ultimately, we need to change the course of this development, before our land is completely overrun with this corporate, homogenous structure. The structures are environmentally hazardous, as they remove square miles of green space, replace it with impermeable surfaces, and harness the auto-centric culture of one-stop shopping. Unfortunately, we do not have a magic wand with which to wish away existing structures. In fact, they are not easily recyclable ... By looking at how communities are using these structures, and by exploring design issues from the ground up, we can begin to steer the future design of our built environment with informed awareness, as cities and towns learn to regain control over the design decisions that shape the future of their communities. 

Needless to say, I'm a bit of a fan of her project. Not so much because of the 'reclaiming' of public space per se, but because while it is an optimistic project, it's also a highly pragmatic one: starting with what we have, but developing innovative ways to transform this into something of value to the community.

In my first post, introducing this blog, I shared a view that we don't need to go out in search of places of meeting, that we can build them together, to make manifest the world that we wish for right here - in our living rooms, in our parks, in our local markets.

Perhaps Christensen's approach is building on a similar idea - encouraging communities to create places of meeting within the neighbourhoods they are in, using the resources they have - the empty lots and box like buildings. Transforming dull, inutile spaces, where form has been completely subsumed by function, into more vibrant places of meeting, where communities can gather to partake in activities that they have chosen for themselves.

Here are just a few examples from the site:

where paths clash

I was quite impressed by an Australian film I saw this evening, Mad Bastards (check out the trailer above). Set in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, the story and film were developed over several years with a local Aboriginal community, many of whom also make up the cast of the film. While addressing some of the harsh realities that the actor-characters have lived through, I found it nevertheless a story infused with hope, where its main protagonists and the community they belonged to were depicted with a strong sense of agency, and a pulsating determination to move their lives forward.

A line from the protagonist of the film, T.J., quite struck me. Gazing over the vast plains of the Kimberley, T.J. comments to his new friend (in the screen shot above), "you must have a lot of sacred places around here," to which his friend responds in the positive. He then goes on to describe his own home place, Perth, the capital city of W.A.

T.J. recounts how the sacred sites of this land are now covered up by a road and a bridge. A natural spring had a brewery built on it. He described the anger this stirred up in him as a child, throwing rocks at it at whatever chance he got (an image that is certainly intended to be symbolic in the film, since the alcohol such a brewery produces now serves as one of T.J.'s weaknesses. He is still fighting that brewery, one way or another).

I thought it was worth a few brief reflections on the vast ideological differences between the two visions of this land as evidenced by these comments.

For T.J., the land was inscribed with a sense of history, and with the stories of his origins. In his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes this "origin myth" as being linked to an individual's sense of identity.  Quoting T.G.R. Strehlow from the book Aranda Tradition, Tuan notes that "he finds recorded in his land the ancient story of the lives and deeds of the immortal beings from whom he himself is descended, and whom he reveres. The whole countryside is his family tree." Strehlow also comments how "to Australian natives, topographical features are a record of 'who were here, and did what'. They are also a record of 'who are here now'."

As a result, strong emotional ties are established with the land itself, ties that teach one to value it as a sacred space and that encourage contentment with one's own homeland. Tuan describes how a member of the Ilbalintja tribe explained to Anthropologist Strehlow, "Our fathers taught us to love our own country, and not to lust after the lands belonging to other men."

Clearly, this view of 'the land' is in stark contrast to that which these images of roads and bridges represent. This usage envisages space as a way to move people, and to move them quickly, encouraging transit rather than settlement and attachment. This is all done in the name of development, in an attempt to create a faster, more accessible, more open Perth.

My intention here is not to get into details about the pros and cons of each approach. What I am interested in highlighting is how a fundamental difference between aboriginal people and their then colonisers concerned how they saw the land and its purposes. The act of arriving and stamping the land with one's flagpole is ideologically very far removed from the credo above that discourages the 'lusting' after land belonging to others. Land as a commodity, as something to be claimed and possessed, represented the ideas of the West making their mark on this space. In tandem, the building of roads and breweries signified the spatial erasure of the stories that served as a testament to how these communities came to be, and to who they still saw themselves as.

The appeal here is not one to go back; for there is nowhere to go back to. In places like Perth, that time is lost. But it is worth being reminded of how dramatically our conceptions of space can differ, and how those with less power have their perceptions of space so easily cast aside. In these cases, places of meeting can become places of conflict; when peoples' paths cross, they clash rather than merge.

How can we collectively perceive our connection to a land then, in this 21st century melting pot that we now live in? How can we share a vision of the way to use space that benefits everyone, while remaining respectful of a diversity of views and beliefs? These questions go much beyond who owns what, which would be a very superficial reading of the dilemma at hand. The heart of the issue concerns how we relate to a place, and how its usage can reflect those values we have in common. Any suggestions?