a culture of caring about a place

Can a small group of people have an effect on a place?

A neighbour and I found ourselves asking this question about our neighbourhood today. Although she and I live only a few blocks apart, it was quite a chance meeting. A colleague of mine had found a great deal via an online classified ads site ('le bon coin') for some special sort of cooking dish. As it turns out, the woman selling the dish lives a few minutes away from me. To save my colleague the journey, I offered to pick it up for her (but really it was also just a good excuse to get to know one of my neighbours).

And it was a really nice exchange (in both senses of the word). We mused over how nice it was to be able to trade locally, to take the time to chat and get to know one another as we exchanged goods - quite a contrast to the impersonal sales transactions we have all become accustomed to. She explained to me that she really likes the human side that comes along with this kind of exchange, that our society has kind of lost over the years. And that she also likes giving back locally where possible, particularly in these times of economic crisis. 

Naturally, we also talked about our neighbourhood. I got the sense that she had an initial moment of hesitation about which line to take about this place. The one we're supposed to take, since we live in the banlieue and all - complain about the riffraff, that it's not the real Paris, that it's so grey and the apartment towers are so tall ... or the one that most of us who live here truly feel. That the diversity of this place makes us feel like we have the chance of getting to know humanity in all its splendour, all in one place. That there is a sense of solidarity we tend to lose the more we venture into bigger and brighter places (e.g. she and her neighbours share power tools - why does everyone need to go out and buy things we use so infrequently?) If it's not already obvious, she took the latter approach. 

We both appreciate that some people really want to invest in this neighbourhood. I told her about the youth group that I facilitate, and how many of these youth really desire to contribute to the improvement of their neighbourhood - though admitted that we are only a few, and that our actions are small. 

And she replied - but you know, a lot of small actions can make a difference. 

Then she went on to explain to me how, dissatisfied with the wastage that was being created by the constant use of disposable cups at her workplace, she started to bring in a glass cup (which she much preferred anyway). Little by little, all her colleagues started to bring in their own glasses too. 

Its a nice, simple example of how small positive actions can influence an entire culture, a way of doing things. And I feel like it's a really nice analogy for the kinds of changes we can hope to see in a place. 

Her hopeful outlook brought to mind a conversation we were having the other night with a group of teenagers, a couple of whom take time out of their weekly schedules to teach moral and spiritual education classes for children of their neighbourhood. A fifteen year old boy explained how he had become more conscious of the influence he had on the children. He explained how he was beginning to appreciate that it was the little things - like asking them to serve food and drinks to one another, and to help one another - that added up over time, so that these little gestures became ingrained habits. 

Another youth, aged 19, explained during that same conversation how some of the parents in the neighbourhood were so touched to see a young person dedicate time to look after children that they too felt like they should be doing something more, and have started to host the class in their homes occasionally. Nobody ever asked them to. But this noble action, of this one girl, who teaches this class purely out of love for these children and their families, motivated them to do so.  

A changing conception of youth, as people with capacity and noble aspirations, is beginning to take shape.

A few weeks ago, some of the youth who come to our place for the youth group on the weekends decided they wanted to visit the neighbours of  our building, after a few of them had complained when the youth had made a bit of noise giggling and chatting in the stairwell as they left the group. The youth, aged 11-14, seemed determined to show these adults that they weren't there just to muck about and disrupt them. They seemed to want these neighbours to know that they were there for a purpose, to advance together, and to bring something to their neighbourhood. And so they baked some cakes and went to visit them all one by one. They offered them the cakes as a gesture to apologise for the noise and then invited them to our place the following week to explain why they came here each week (making all that noise). Six neighbours turned up, and each was as touched as the next to witness the youth stand up and explain, one at a time, their desire to develop their own qualities and capacities so that they could contribute to improving their neighbourhood. 

This notion of service seems to be penetrating the neighbourhood in so many ways. About a month ago, the local council got a bunch of local associations together to clean up the banks of the Seine river, which borders our suburb. Around 300 children and youth showed up and spent their entire Saturday performing this service. The year before, there had been 200. It seems this action is catching on. 

So perhaps one could dare to suggest that a culture of service is slowly being developed. Maybe it was always there. What encourages people to invest in their neighbourhood? I suppose seeing others invest in it is one of the greatest sources of encouragement. It makes us realise, maybe it's worth caring about. It forces us to search for its qualities, to look for the potential of this place and those living in it, for our vision to extend beyond the misguided noise and stigma describing it from the outside, that often dominates the discourse of a place. And in doing so it makes us all feel like we really can contribute to building a better world, right here on our doorsteps, with the people who share this place with us.

I think my neighbour was right. A culture of caring is contagious. A small group of people can make a difference. Not only to those with whom they come into contact, but to a place. 

New Urban Spring

One of the characteristics of 'places of meeting' that has been explored in this blog is the participative nature of the process through which such places ought to be designed. 

This theme threads through a series of articles I came across from BBC reporter Jane Wakefield. The articles also illustrate the inherently social nature of designing cities, and in particular the way social movements are impacting trends in urban design. 

Wakefield describes herself as a 'technology writer', so naturally her articles try to examine ways that new technologies can be harnessed to design smarter, more people-friendly cities. What I appreciate in her writing is that she doesn't come at these questions from a purely technological standpoint. Her articles capture trends not just about what planners are planning, but how they are going about the planning process. 

In her article 'Building cities of the future now', Wakefield describes what she terms 'some of the most talked about projects' among efforts to build 'smarter' cities'. One of these projects is that of Rio de Janeiro. Though much of the city's redevelopment efforts are corporate led, gearing it up for its role as host for the World Cup and Olympic Games, it's interesting to note how ideology of the recent '99 per cent' movement has found its way into complementary 'citizen projects'. For example, the article describes how design group 00:/ is working with residents of Rio's slums to participate in the design of their own houses via an online site. Designs and assembly instructions for the "wiki-houses" are posted online and residents can upload their own ideas. Project designer Alistair Parvin is quoted on the inspiration behind this project:

For too long cities have been made by the 1% and consumed by the 99%. We wanted to see what it would take to create something that would allow the 99% to make cities for the 99%. 

Parvin's vision illustrates how the idea of universal participation - i.e. participation of the masses of society that make up the 99% - has penetrated social consciousness. Though the movement began as a statement about unequal participation in the economy, it makes sense to include the voices and ideas of the users of goods and services whether we're talking about the media, budgetary decisions, or the design of the places in which we live.

Another project outlined in the same article describes designers who are trying to listen to what residents want in the wake of the 2011 London riots. Engineering consultant Arup is leading a community-based project to regenerate Tottenham, the place where the rioting originated. The concept for the project is being designed in consultation with local residents, including individuals who participated in the unrest. As a result of these consultations, plans now include a community hub, which will feature a library, childcare and adult learning facilities. Explaining the rationale behind the approach, Arup's head of urban design, Malcolm Smith, said:

We started to understand the frustrations and listened to the way people see Tottenham and their personal observations about a city.

In another article, 'What if you could design a city?', Carlo Ratti, head of MIT's Technology Senseable Cities Lab, references the Arab Spring when explaining why he would not design a city from scratch. Ratti says that historically, cities were always designed through a collaborative, bottom-up process.  

The idea that an architect could design a city from scratch, in a top-down way, is relatively new. It embodies the 19th century dream of the artist with unbound freedom and imagination and the egotistic vision of the 20th century architect.

The approach that Ratti rejects is one that sees architecture as a purely technical and aesthetic endeavour, neglecting the social concerns that lie at its heart. His ultimate verdict is that design processes need to be bottom-up, reflecting the movements and interactions happening there by the people that use them:

A good city cannot be designed in a top-down fashion. Spaces and fluxes overlap and intertwine in our interaction with the city, which can only be shaped through a distributed, bottom-up process. A chaotic self-organising movement, which resembles what we have seen during the Arab Spring and its fostering of new forms of participation, is rising in unexpected ways and with unknown consequence. Can these very forms, supported by social media and new technologies, now extend to urban design and planning? Could this be the beginning of a new urban spring?

Bottom-up process might seem more chaotic, but it seems to me that the participative nature of the planning process is only one characteristic of places of meeting. Other overarching principles, such as reinforcing community life and ensuring sustainability, could go a long way in bringing some order to the chaos without compromising participation. 

Finally, in her article, How will our future cities look?, Wakefield touches on why such processes need to be participatory in order to be relevant, quoting technology analyst Joe Dignan:

Companies produce videos of glass houses of lovely people doing Minority Report-style stuff, but show me how this will help people sitting in their council flat 20 storeys in the sky?

For places to matter to those who are intended to use them, people's voices need to matter in their design. While the ideas driving some of the planners and designers Wakefield quote seem to be pushing a new wave of participative urbanism - an urban spring if you like - champions of such approaches have been around for a while. At the end of the article, Wakefield references one of the pioneers of this people-oriented way of thinking about urban design, American author and urbanist Jane Jacobs:

Jane Jacobs...warned several decades ago: "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." Those building the cities of the future may do well to heed that advice.