"City Repair"
by Josephine Laing
A few months ago, I went to one of the most inspirational talks I've ever attended. The subject was City Repair, something I've found myself spontaneously creating in my own neighborhood. I've often thought how great it would be to tear up the street, put a shared garage with a couple of shared cars and a whole lot of bikes at one end and create a community fountain forming a plaza and planting community gardens in that formerly trafficked shared space.
But Mark Lakeman up in Portland, Oregon had a simpler and more effective transitioning idea. He calls it City Repair. It started when he and his neighbors claimed the intersection space at the end of their block with paint. They created a giant mandala and all participated in painting the street in the middle of the intersection reaching a short way down the roads in each of the four directions.
Then, using found and recycled materials, they all built a solar powered tea kiosk on one corner with hot water, cups and teas on a circular table. Another corner, at the same intersection, again claiming the shared sidewalk space, sports a free lending library for neighbors to bring or take a book. The third corner's sidewalk has a beautiful free-form cob-construction bench in the shape of a reclining dragon to rest on and enjoy conversation with a neighbor or simply enjoy a new book and a steaming hot cup of tea.
The final corner has a multiple living-roof covered series of spaces for kids to play in. It is kept well stocked with toys by the neighborhood parents and has interesting structures to climb on and enclosed places to explore.
The cars of course slow down upon encountering the mandala. Most of the drivers live there or right near by anyway and come for tea. The kids are always there having a blast and the beautiful big colors in the street remind the drivers of that.
Then the community decided that there were all together too many war machines in the world and they decided to create a peace machine. So, for eighty-five dollars, they fixed an old broken down truck and made it into a mobile desert and tea kitchen. It's covered with collapsible, folding gossamer butterfly wings constructed out of bamboo poles and plastic film that expand to create a canopy, like a giant umbrella. It drizzles a lot in Portland after-all. They make their peace machine available for neighborhood parties throughout the Portland area serving home made deserts and tea. Isn't that wonderful?
Miraculously, the Portland authorities decided to forgo all building codes for the community projects and thus the trend has spread like wildfire. There are now sixty-four street intersection mandalas. That's a huge amount of reclaimed shared space. Each one has neighbor constructed people friendly, community encouraging accouterments like bike sharing barns and surplus garden produce stands. Some groups of houses have even removed their backyard fences and have put in park paths and free-form community meeting halls and three tiered covered cat palaces with fish aquariums and garlic patches. And the mandalas are all so strikingly beautiful, all unique and neighbor created. I so wish that I could do that on my own city block.
Our typical western style neighborhoods are laid out in the ancient Roman grid style of city planning. With every home side by side, they are not as conducive to social interaction. Whereas, the age old lay out of the village is a circle where the doors to all of the houses face each other. This way people can greet each other in the morning or call out in the night if there is need. Folks who live with their neighbors in community groups always fare better in disaster scenarios then those who lead isolated lives.
In Portland, a group of homeless women living in tents arranged themselves in a circle on a city lawn space. Mark spoke with one of them who said, "You have no idea how frightening it is to be a homeless woman in the city." He and some of his friends decided to help these women in ways similar to the ones that the neighborhood projects utilized. With a standing exemption from the city permit requirements, they built them homes out of found and recycled materials. The city granted them an unused city yard and these beautiful buildings went up, small neat little homes nestled around a plaza with a fountain and a community meeting space. Raised beds for vegetable gardens went in. The women painted their homes with colorful murals of their favorite animals and plants. Crime dropped in the area by eighty-five percent within one year. And the women in this shelter, which was built for a mere fraction of the coast of a regular city shelter, tended to transition more easily out of the homeless shelter life and back into regular society within three to five months instead of staying in the system for years as is typical in other city shelters.
My how things can change when we let ourselves be who we really are. From this bright star, in the city of Portland, the light of community is spreading. Now other cities around our great nation are becoming illuminated with these and similar new ideas. It's like we're starting to wake up from a long sleep and Wow! what a glorious day it is.
© 2011 Josephine Laing
A few months ago, I went to one of the most inspirational talks I've ever attended. The subject was City Repair, something I've found myself spontaneously creating in my own neighborhood. I've often thought how great it would be to tear up the street, put a shared garage with a couple of shared cars and a whole lot of bikes at one end and create a community fountain forming a plaza and planting community gardens in that formerly trafficked shared space.
But Mark Lakeman up in Portland, Oregon had a simpler and more effective transitioning idea. He calls it City Repair. It started when he and his neighbors claimed the intersection space at the end of their block with paint. They created a giant mandala and all participated in painting the street in the middle of the intersection reaching a short way down the roads in each of the four directions.
Then, using found and recycled materials, they all built a solar powered tea kiosk on one corner with hot water, cups and teas on a circular table. Another corner, at the same intersection, again claiming the shared sidewalk space, sports a free lending library for neighbors to bring or take a book. The third corner's sidewalk has a beautiful free-form cob-construction bench in the shape of a reclining dragon to rest on and enjoy conversation with a neighbor or simply enjoy a new book and a steaming hot cup of tea.
The final corner has a multiple living-roof covered series of spaces for kids to play in. It is kept well stocked with toys by the neighborhood parents and has interesting structures to climb on and enclosed places to explore.
The cars of course slow down upon encountering the mandala. Most of the drivers live there or right near by anyway and come for tea. The kids are always there having a blast and the beautiful big colors in the street remind the drivers of that.
Then the community decided that there were all together too many war machines in the world and they decided to create a peace machine. So, for eighty-five dollars, they fixed an old broken down truck and made it into a mobile desert and tea kitchen. It's covered with collapsible, folding gossamer butterfly wings constructed out of bamboo poles and plastic film that expand to create a canopy, like a giant umbrella. It drizzles a lot in Portland after-all. They make their peace machine available for neighborhood parties throughout the Portland area serving home made deserts and tea. Isn't that wonderful?
Miraculously, the Portland authorities decided to forgo all building codes for the community projects and thus the trend has spread like wildfire. There are now sixty-four street intersection mandalas. That's a huge amount of reclaimed shared space. Each one has neighbor constructed people friendly, community encouraging accouterments like bike sharing barns and surplus garden produce stands. Some groups of houses have even removed their backyard fences and have put in park paths and free-form community meeting halls and three tiered covered cat palaces with fish aquariums and garlic patches. And the mandalas are all so strikingly beautiful, all unique and neighbor created. I so wish that I could do that on my own city block.
Our typical western style neighborhoods are laid out in the ancient Roman grid style of city planning. With every home side by side, they are not as conducive to social interaction. Whereas, the age old lay out of the village is a circle where the doors to all of the houses face each other. This way people can greet each other in the morning or call out in the night if there is need. Folks who live with their neighbors in community groups always fare better in disaster scenarios then those who lead isolated lives.
In Portland, a group of homeless women living in tents arranged themselves in a circle on a city lawn space. Mark spoke with one of them who said, "You have no idea how frightening it is to be a homeless woman in the city." He and some of his friends decided to help these women in ways similar to the ones that the neighborhood projects utilized. With a standing exemption from the city permit requirements, they built them homes out of found and recycled materials. The city granted them an unused city yard and these beautiful buildings went up, small neat little homes nestled around a plaza with a fountain and a community meeting space. Raised beds for vegetable gardens went in. The women painted their homes with colorful murals of their favorite animals and plants. Crime dropped in the area by eighty-five percent within one year. And the women in this shelter, which was built for a mere fraction of the coast of a regular city shelter, tended to transition more easily out of the homeless shelter life and back into regular society within three to five months instead of staying in the system for years as is typical in other city shelters.
My how things can change when we let ourselves be who we really are. From this bright star, in the city of Portland, the light of community is spreading. Now other cities around our great nation are becoming illuminated with these and similar new ideas. It's like we're starting to wake up from a long sleep and Wow! what a glorious day it is.
© 2011 Josephine Laing