Shared Visions

This past Saturday I volunteered to be the scribe for another creative session around diversity in community. What was interesting were the commonalities that emerged from one session to the next. When we design art, we think of an object, plan its construction and present it to the world. The same holds true of many traditional forms of design, including architecture and city planning. Yet the world is changing, becoming smaller as our stranglehold on the planet is revealing its limitations.

As we begin to realize that everything is connected, the need for systems thinking becomes more apparent. The concept of cause and effect is archaic. Everything is part of an evolving system, including neighborhoods. So community design must be acknowledged as an organic process, not something that a government or a developer can reduce to a formula.



I love how this wake up call takes the form of an entertaining video. Clearly, we can't just keep doing things the way we did before. In my humble opinion, we can design all the technology in the world, but if we can't figure out how to work together, live together and grow together we are doomed.

A community is like a farm. Its resilience comes from diversity, while a monoculture is susceptable to all sorts of predators. They key lies in shared values, a diverse asset base, a system for sharing those assets and a commitment to working through the inherent challenges that arise, because that is a given. We're all human and prone to weakness, so we have to work to make it work.