Saturday Plenary: Love, Home, Village, Earth

featuring Mark Lakeman

Saturday 8:30 - 10:00 am

A highly visual journey of momentum and transformation that describes essential strategies and initiatives for localized action that is designed to transform the social networks of cities. This also will be a story of communities rising, to ultimately become The City Repair Project, emerging from within the creative culture of Portland, Oregon. Much of the work described has also been in collaboration with City Repair's sister architecture and planning affiliate, Communitecture. While City Repair inspires and guides the retroactive transformation of the grid infrastructure of the typical American city into a vital social commons, Communitecture often provides a supportive community-process design role. The approach has been broadly successul, engendering movement across the social and ecological spectrum of civic life.

Click above to see Mark Lakeman as he repairs his city, one intersection at a time.

This presentation compares the historic settlement patterns of village societies with the dominant forces of Western colonization as a context for describing City Repair's work. As a multidisciplinary culture, City Repair combines architecture, urban planning, anthropology, community development, public art, permaculture and ecological design in projects that transform space and transfer power at local levels. While both City Repair and Communitecture support the same approaches to community self-development, the latter's work results in larger, built proptotypes that include village designs and cohousing.

Through a restorative process in which citizens re-imagine and literally re-build their own habitat and commons, we are engendering relationships that revitalize the fabric of our local community within the existing context of social isolation. By re-asserting localized village patterns in the city grid, City Repair establishes both the physical and social foundation for sustainable culture.

The presentation is chronological, proceeding from the most elementary and accessible scale to enormous visionary collaborations involving thousands of people. As an overall movement, each project repeats the essential principles of localization, community participation and placemaking, while building upon each success to manifest larger and larger impacts.

Presenter

Mark is the co-founder of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon. City Repair is a multi-disciplinary, non-profit organization which works with place-based communities to creatively transform the infrastructure of the public commons where people live. Whether converting street intersections into public squares, or organizing other forms of permanent or ephemeral place interventions, City Repair is effectively engaging citizens in the reinvention of the public landscape. All of these projects are ecological in emphasis, using natural building and permaculture techniques. City Repair projects are underway in more than a dozen cities in the USA and Canada, including citizen-driven designs for the Winter Olympics of 2010.

After working for several years in the 1980's as a lead designer of large scale corporate projects, in the 1990's Mark embarked on a series of cultural immersion projects with indigenous societies in order to derive placemaking patterns which could be applied to urban settings in the United States. These patterns include broad participation, local ownership, transference of authority to local populations, creative expression in planned and unplanned processes, and social capital as both the primary constant for stability and the economic engine of change.

Mark is also the principal of Communitecture, a creative and aggressive archiecture and planning firm with award winning ecological building and planning projects at many scales, including Portland, Oregon's ReBuilding Center, and numerous cohousing and ecovillage projects.

City Repair Project

The multidisciplinary nature of the City Repair Project defies categorization. It is a model for social and ecological restoration operating in a landscape characterized by isolation and compartmentalization. The project takes Fritjof Capra's 'Tipping Point' as a model for paradigm change by intentionally focusing upon intersections in space and time. We are directly reclaiming those intersection points and opening the field for what automatically happens when people reunite with their Place: everything. The projects restate the same themes over and over, but the forms change and grow. Each project questions convention, and reinvents it as we restate the principles of creative community involvement and ownership, working to rejoin people to time and space as a place for sustainable, creative, localized culture.
The City Repair Project is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. For more information, visit their website at www.cityrepair.org.

On Saturday, June 27, 2009, Mark Lakeman will give the National Cohousing Conference's Plenary. He is one of three Featured Speakers presenting at this annual National Conference.