A group called City Repair, which began in Portland, Oregon, claims that "localization" is the key to and necessary foundation for sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, City Repair says that we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities, and nurture our local culture. Using my Two Worlds model, "localization" is how we discover that we do, indeed, create the human world in which we most immediately reside, and it is how we discover new ways to create that world anew.
Pictured above is a City Repair project in Portland. As it turns out, the founder of City Repair, Mark Lakeman, will be in my hometown of Santa Cruz, California tomorrow, speaking at the Kresge Town Hall at UCSC on “Reclaiming the Commons: Uniting for Our Shared Future.”
I think that City Repair is on to something!
http://robturk.blogspot.com/2012/05/portland-episode-1.html
City Repair is definitely on to something!
ReplyDeleteThose of us in the Reinhabitation movement (since the early 70s for me) will always cherish the message of how to "live in place" gleaned from Ray Dasmann and Peter Berg (both now gone, alas). Peter and Judy lived in San Francisco and knew how to make that place liveable for human and non-human critters, rather than join the back-to-the-land movement, which inadvertently developed more of the Natural World.
Here in Santa Cruz, we can also learn about our various County watersheds, to understand the ecology of this bioregion and, to adapt our human occupation of it, becoming more in tune with its rhythms (the bio-geophysical world). Michael and I do this well at our home and, to some extent, in our neighborhood and the greater community. We are sort of a working duo "small group" of which Margaret Mead eloquently spoke.