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.

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?