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?