Community

by Peter Block

  Finally, the design process itself needs to be an example of the future we are intending to create. The material and built world is a reflection of the connectedness, openness, and curiosity of the group gathered to design the space. Authentic citizen engagement is as important as design expertise.

  • • •

  The discussion to this point has been about creating a new communal conversation by redesigning the social space within which we gather. There is one more aspect of conversation that is important to creating the experience of community and belonging: this is to be intentional about how we design and occupy physical space.

  The Physical Space

  The room has importance beyond its functionality. Every room we occupy serves as a metaphor for the larger community that we want to create. This is true socially and also physically. The room is the visible expression of today’s version of community or lack of it. The room we are in, and how we choose to occupy it, is what we have to work with in the present moment. If the future we desire does not exist in this room, today, then it will never occur tomorrow. This is what is meant by “Change the room, change the culture.”

  Meeting rooms are traditionally designed for efficiency, control, and business as we know it.

  Conference rooms have long rectangular tables basically designed for negotiation, one side facing the other. The effect is that you can only see those on “the other side.” You sit blind to those on your own side of the table. So here we are, gathering to build community, accountability, and relatedness, yet unable to make eye contact with half the people in the room.

  The ends of the table are VIP positions. We all know this and avoid these seats. They are most often occupied last. In a restaurant, the person at the end of the table usually ends up paying the bill, so who wants to sit there by choice? This is also the typical design for boardrooms, which are all about prestige, privilege, and control.

  Auditoriums are designed for citizens to passively receive what others have produced. They are great for presentation and performance, which leaves the audience with their backs turned to each other, all eyes facing front.

  Classrooms are mostly designed for instruction. The usual layout says there will be one expert who knows, ten to three hundred students who are there to absorb what the expert knows. Structured for teaching, not learning. This arrangement gives little recognition to the importance of peer-to-peer learning. Sometimes we see the hollow square or U-shaped arrangement of tables and chairs. Same problem: each person loses sight of one-third to one-quarter of the people in the room, and those we can see are on the other side of a moat of empty space.

  Reception areas are mostly designed for security. The message is that you have to demonstrate your right to enter this building. Hardly the welcome that encourages belonging. If you want to see a reception area designed for welcoming and hospitality, visit a nice hotel, a bar, or a good restaurant. The best business reception area I have seen is at LivePerson, a tech company for which I have great affection. You walk in the door and you are in a kitchen and eating area. The kitchen is the traditional center of warmth and relationship in any house or institution. Placing it right up front says, “Welcome, you belong here, have some fruit or snacks.” Brilliant.

  Hallways are designed for transportation. There are a growing number of community-conscious buildings that create hallways as city streets—places where casual contact is valued, the rooms you pass have internal windows like storefronts, and the hallway is wide enough for sitting areas. All created to bring life to our experience.

  Cafeterias are often designed as efficient refueling stations. The concern seems to be how many people we can feed and how quickly. Chairs, tables, walls, and food stations are set up for effi-ciency, easy maintenance, don’t linger, please get back to work. As if sitting and being with other employees is not work. There was a time when there were executive dining rooms and employee dining rooms. There may be reasons for the separation by rank and status, though none come to mind at the moment. Where these still exist, the resolution is to decorate the employee eating area as nicely as the space for executives.

  Bring the Room to Life and Life to the Room

  Although we may not have control over the form and shape of the room, we always have choices about how to occupy the room. The task is to rearrange the room to meet our intention to build relatedness, accountability, and commitment. This puts the convener in the role of interior designer. I spend my life being neurotically fussy about what room to meet in, and how to rearrange it once I get there. This is embarrassing and awkward, earns me weird looks, and receives irrational refusals, and sometimes I just get tired lugging chairs around the room. But this is work that has to be done in a world not designed for human interaction.

  The room needs to express the quality of aliveness and belonging that we wish for the community. Here is what this entails:

  Arrange the Room as the Shape of Things to Come

  The circle is the geometric symbol for community, and therefore for arranging the room. No tables if possible. If tables are a given, then choose round ones (the shape of communion), which are better than rectangles (the shape of negotiation), or classroom-style tables (the shape of instruction). If tables are a given, find the smallest ones you can.

  The ideal seating for a small group is a circle of chairs with no table. Put the chairs as close together as possible, which forces people to lean in to one another. People will complain that they have no place to put their laptop or water. They have laps and the floor. The circle with no table instantly and visually communicates to citizens or employees that dialogue and relationship with each other are as important as any content to be covered.

  Pick a Room with a View

  A room without windows blocks out the larger world that we are attempting to care for. A room with no windows carries the message that the larger world does not, for this moment, exist. It isolates us from that larger world and gives permission to be focused narrowly on the smaller world within the boundaries of our own interests. It makes the neighborhood, the city, and the globe invisible. It also keeps the energy produced by our gathering trapped in too small a space. There is no exchange of energy between our work and the world when we are trapped in a box.

  Welcome Nature into the Room

  Gather near a window, if there is one. Open the curtains; pull up the shades or blinds. If there is too much light to see the PowerPoint presentation, so be it. Perhaps there is a message in this.

  Bring in plants, even if they are artificial. As my friend Allan Cohen says, artificial plants are real: they are real plastic. The walls and furnishings of most of our meeting places are dead. The spaces are designed in the name of modernity, efficiency, and low maintenance. We do not have to passively acquiesce to this.

  Even one candle or one flower in the room changes everything. They completely understand this in India.

  Amplify the Whole Room

  All voices need to be heard equally, and we have the technology to amplify a whole room. Look at a concert hall if you doubt this. As mentioned earlier, never have one microphone on a stand that people must line up to use. This breeds citizen speeches, gives too much power to the extremes, and reinforces the power imbalance between leader/expert and follower. Having three handheld mics that can move around the room works much better.

  Example: Conservation Commissioner

  I met a conservation commissioner in Colorado who was constantly arbitrating disputes between ranchers, farmers, environmentalists, loggers, and all who care about our open spaces. He decided to buy a van and amplification equipment so that wherever in the state he went, he could mic the room. All could speak without walking up to a podium or lectern, and all could be heard equally. He said that as soon as he made this investment, the tone of the conversations shifted. The differences did not go away, but the contentiousness of the debate subsided, and civility and respect increased.

  Choose Chairs That Swivel and Have Wheels
and Low Backs

  A chair is not just for support; it is also a means of mobility and transportation. Most meeting-room chairs are designed for straight lines and stability. If you place them in circles and move too much, they get nervous and unhappy.

  If designed well, a chair can encourage movement from one small group to another. It can facilitate moving our attention back and forth from our small group to the larger forum. A movable chair is a metaphor for the ability to move back and forth from the concern for local tribal integrity and the needs of the whole.

  A swivel chair tells us that we must keep rotating to take in all that is around us so that what we create in our own unit or neighborhood occurs in the context of a larger world. Wheels allow us to move among small groups easily. If there are wheels on the chair, they ask to be used and serve to convince us that we are at every moment connected and willing to travel to all else that is happening in the room.

  Level the Playing Field

  Rooms in public buildings, presumably designed for civic dialogue, often have a stage or raised platform. A platform or stage creates a demand for performance and judgment; it looks like the throne of the monarch, the bench of the judge. This is not the arrangement for democracy or community. Granted, watching a stage together gives us a common experience, but it does not connect citizens to each other. When we watch the stage together, we have once again turned our backs on each other. This obliterates the circle, the traditional shape of community.

  The raised platform, besides underlining the superiority of a few raised higher than the heads of many others, distorts the need for dialogue by encouraging questions and answers. It’s as if citizens can show up only with questions, and the leaders will be the ones with the answers. Question-and-answer sessions are patriarchy’s answer to interaction.

  Most city councils operate from raised platforms that isolate elected officials from citizens. Those platforms are effective in establishing the authority of the leaders and good for creating order. They are weak in creating a structure in which the leaders themselves are physically set up to work well together. Plus the leader who would declare to citizens, “We want your input,” and do this while looking down on them—from behind a big table, sitting on a plush chair, speaking into his own microphone—makes the intention impossible to implement. In these situations, the leader is as imprisoned by the structure as the citizen.

  Even in the theater, which is traditionally all about performance, there are structures designed to reduce the social and emotional distance between actor and audience. Theaters in the round put the stage in the center of the space so that the audience becomes a participant in the drama.

  Bring in Art and the Aesthetic

  This is a larger conversation than can be dealt with here, but here is the gist of it: There can be no transformation without art. Art in the form of theater, poetry, music, dance, literature, painting, and sculpture. Communities by and large know this and invest heavily in the arts. Those who want to heal the wounds of a fragmented community initiate hundreds of art projects for those living on the margin. Art brings these voices into the mainstream. Most communities are proud of their arts tradition and rightly so.

  If this is true for our larger communities, then it must be present each time we gather.

  Why would we assemble without a moment of silence, a song, a recitation? We often have this consciousness in education, workshops, and conferences. This sensibility should not be sequestered into those special occasions but be a part of our daily life. If every gathering is an occasion for producing for ourselves a future we want to inhabit, then we need to design it for that intention, and we need art to accomplish this.

  If it is a large gathering, invite a local band or choir or dance troupe to welcome people into the session. Each time you break and reconvene, create some form of art or inspiration to mark the transition. Read a poem, or take a moment to create a poem, write in a journal, breathe together. This is all very doable with little cost or preparation.

  Every group of twenty people has someone who would be willing to sing a song, recite a poem, or tell a story. All we need to do is make the request at the beginning of the gathering, and as people come to trust each other, someone will offer their gift of song, poem, or story to the community. When this happens, the tone in the room shifts, and the place becomes a little more sacred.

  Put Life on the Wall

  There is nothing as lonely as an empty wall. Our halls and meeting spaces are filled with empty walls. Interestingly, this is not true of executive offices or spaces designed for sales presentations. Great attention is paid to making these places warm and welcoming. Art collections adorn the walls, seating is comfortable, and windows are softened with fabric. Granted, this decoration serves as a sign of privilege and importance, but it is a good thing. Why not extend this symbolism to those spaces where citizens and employees gather?

  “An empty wall is a testimony to the insignificance of the human spirit,” observed pioneering street life researcher William H. Whyte. Our job is to affirm the significance of the human spirit, and filling the walls with photos and with art by citizens, youth, and employees is very doable. The library or art galleries in the community would be willing to curate public space. They do it frequently for restaurants and shops. It is not a question of cost; it is a question of consciousness.

  At the end of the day, we have to ask, how can we create aliveness when the wall sits sadly empty?

  Design and Build Opportunities

  Every once in a while, there comes an opportunity to work with architects to design new spaces that support community. These are rare moments (unless you are an architect) when we can bring a communal consciousness to the construction of a new building or the rehabilitation of an old one.

  An elegant quote from Christopher Alexander in Book 1 of his Nature of Order series reminds us how rare and powerful these opportunities are to bring a new consciousness into the material world:

  Common sense tells us—or seems to tell us—that the physical environment affects our lives. It has often been said, certainly, that the shape of buildings affects our ability to live, our well-being, perhaps our behavior. Winston Churchill is believed to have said, “we shape our buildings; and they shape us.” But how do they affect us?

  I shall argue that the geometry of the physical world—its space— has the most profound impact possible on human beings: it has impact on the most important of all human qualities, our inner freedom, or the sense of life each person has. It touches on internal freedom, freedom of the spirit.

  I shall argue that the right kind of physical environment, when it has living structure, nourishes freedom of the spirit in human beings. In the wrong kind, lacking living structure, freedom of the spirit can be destroyed or weakened. If I am right, this will suggest that the character of the physical world has impact on possibly the most precious attribute of human existence. It is precisely life— the living structure of the environment—which has this effect.

  Later he summarizes by stating, “In an environment which has living structure, each of us tends, more easily, to become alive.”

  As mentioned earlier, the architecture of a building can support a community of belonging in the design of its walls, ceilings, hallways, reception areas, training and community rooms, eating spaces, meeting rooms, accommodations for food, breakout areas, and small gathering spaces. This does not even get into the design of work spaces, which I am not dealing with, as it is such well-covered territory.

  The distinction to be made here is between great design and modernist aesthetic design that is about modernity, newness, and placing an architectural and landscape footprint that produces a legacy, which is more about the architect than the neighborhood. These modernist places are usually indifferent or strictly utilitarian with respect to human habitation. Michael Freedman, an urban architect and planner, can show award-winning building designs that no one wants to inhabit and award-winning landscape desig
ns that keep people from congregating and have no relationship to their neighborhood. This is a stunning reality. How could we design buildings and communal spaces that are not friendly to their inhabitants? Not so stunning perhaps when you realize that we design institutions, social structures, and gatherings that have the same effect.

  Here is the bigger point. The buildings and material forms that we create are an outgrowth of our social fabric and capacity to be in community together. They have a powerful impact on our experience and relation to each other. Space matters.

  Alienated and retributive cultures will create alienated and unfriendly buildings and public spaces. Patriarchal institutions will create physical space that glorifies those who lead them and the designers they choose, and they will be indifferent, in the name of cost, to the space dedicated to workers and citizens. This means we must be thoughtful about the quality of relatedness that exists among those designing our spaces: the owner and the architect. If neither is intentional about space and the neighborhood or place where it is located, and if their first priority is preeminence and branding, then we will continue to have instrumental spaces. These are spaces where conflicts are unresolved, isolation is taken for granted, and style conquers substance. We do have evidence that there is a choice.

  Example: Citizen­Driven Design

  Here is an example of how the planning process can involve citizens and increase the chances that the built environment will be friendly to community and belonging. In the world of community planning and landscape design, Ken Cunningham and his partner, John Spencer, have created a design process very much in line with the thinking offered here. They know that the quality of a plan is not just in the rightness of its design. The quality and success of a plan also depend on there being an authentic expression of the voices of the citizens who will occupy that space. The essence of Ken and John’s process is to invite citizens to walk around, observe, and imagine what the space might become.