Mark Lakeman is the founder of City Repair, a social permaculture group in Portland Oregon active since the 90’s, and the architecture firm Communitecture, which does accompanying work in ecological design and place-based community infrastructure. Being the instigator of several legendary regulatory coups in our city, Lakeman was a clear first choice for our interview series, which concerns autonomous, protocol-based strategies for building community infrastructure beyond institutions.
While Lakeman agreed with many of our science fiction impulses about scaling the city’s underground capacities for self-organization and self-governance, his experience told him that these efforts need to be guided - by both meaningfully placed-based grounding and the location of a genetic memory for community that makes this project as much one of recovering the past as it is building the future.
Our hope in this interview and in the series at large is that our technologist friends can find strategic resonance between the self-organizing, stigmergic modes of the p2p web and the struggles for decentralization and distributed power that have been taking place in urban centers for decades. Lakeman himself is a technologist and a maker; far from trafficking in ideology or politics, his method is to simply inject novelty into ossified systems and let the energies rediscover and redistribute themselves. In that respect, he is a model for us.
Exeunt: It maybe makes sense to say a word about our research projects, which we could go on about but I think the simple thing is that we're interested in the concept of - to what extent can informal protocols replace formal institutions. And to what extent is the city sort of - it seems to us that cities naturally do a lot of that work.. Cities tend to be chaotic. They tend to be, from a regulatory or enforcement perspective, tend to be a lot looser than especially suburbs, for example. And it seems like in that chaos - it turns into this weird, creative factory where sort of ad hoc, practical solutions in the form of informally circulated knowledge sets do a lot of work. Yeah, the phrase we're using is formalized without standardized. How do you scale those knowledge sets up in a way that could make them more sustainable or more powerful without sort of institutionalizing them or standardizing them in a way that has all the problems of bureaucracy and captured capital interests and stuff like that?
Mark Lakeman: So you're posing a question, okay, so we're getting right into it, okay, yeah. Well, I think the secret of the success, some of the secrets of our success in affecting some systemic change, have to do with recognizing that There's kind of like these different realities that coexist. There's systems and structures, and they're kind of all over the place. You know, they're multi layered. Like, for instance, there's a building code and a planning code that we interact with here at the office all the time. And then there's also this kind of larger religious code. And I'm serious, like, there are literally books that spell out the code. And to a certain extent, you can say the building codes are like commandments or something, you know, and it comes with living in an empire, which starts to explain these concurrent realities. So, you know, I think it's core to progressive faith. And people would put it differently, that we all kind of have this sort of Neolithic villager self where, you know, we have these kind of self regulating behaviors, especially when we're placed based, we start to interact with each other in ways that, you know, after people are interacting for a while you can call this social capital. This is relational capital. This is natural capital. And all that's flowing based on affinity and experience and affection and not even requiring money yet, because people are doing stuff because it matters, because they care, because they're proximate. So we're able to act in that self regulating set of behaviors from a deeper basis, from before Empire and its impersonal systems that are centralized, power centralized, decision making centralized. So it's fantastic, it's amazing. It's horrific. Like, you know, you feel alienated, and at the same time, there are moments when you recognize each other's cry, you know, like humanity in a crisis, we open a door for an old lady, like someone calls to you in the moment where you like, you forget to be afraid, or you forget to be alienated, and you like, you connect, and you do things you behave differently.
We start to interact with each other in ways that, you know, after people are interacting for a while you can call this social capital. This is relational capital. This is natural capital. And all that's flowing based on affinity and experience and affection and not even requiring money yet, because people are doing stuff because it matters, because they care, because they're proximate.
So basically, I think there's like this pre, pre-conquest reality or humanity that persists inside of you, because your hard wired to be that way. And this is one way I think of it that we work on all the time, the villages where people have lowest crime rates in the world, and highest public health indicators - lowest crime, sort of highest indicators of thriving are ones that are punctuated by gathering places and social architectures of participation and identity. We live in the United States, where everything's laid out as a development for profit. So the cultural infrastructure that people normally create for themselves over some span of time is gone. It's not there. It's never been created because we live in instant landscapes. So somebody else is creating your reality as you're paying for that reality within the zoning construct where you leave where you live, to go make the representation of currency to pay for the place where you barely get to be like: we're living in an artifice. We're living in a giant exploitative, investment-driven infrastructure that is missing all manner of things that would enable us to communicate. So in America, we walk around feeling afraid and isolated, so we feel alone because of that infrastructure that we know should be there. We feel separate. And then we live in this system where everybody talks about it needing to be better and it needing to change, really reward each other for standing up and doing something right that in another society would just be like, “Oh, that's not really heroic. That's what we do all the time.” So we live in this terrible dissonance between an imperfect but awesome village reality that is still kind of inside of us, like a story, and then this, this kind of centralized manifestation. It's Roman colonialism. You know, Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles are installed as administrative centers to oversee the extractive processes of what happens around and then we're all conscripted. We're told we're consumers, you know, whatever we are, we're residents, we're citizens within this system, and that also that we're powerless except to vote. We're in a democracy that pumps us up to think there's something good about it. So I'm just basically recognizing that there's these parallel realities that exist, and there's a dissonance in between that is, like, is terrible, like it's horrifying. And we feel it, but we can't understand it. So in that construct, I mean - getting back to the way you pose this - all the time, all across the city, people are doing things on an informal basis where they exercise their judgment, and when they sometimes come face to face, like in the form of an interaction with police or a code enforcement official, we feel this resentment. We feel - I don't even know anybody who doesn't go - “Oh, don't you know who I am?” You know, because we want to be recognized in your place, or like, “Oh, didn't you trust me? Why do I have to show you this card? And that proves who I am?” Like, we're always coming up against this stuff which kind of insults us and otherwise, when we're walking around in a place where we feel known, things are informal, and people do things out of their own volition, and that feels right and good, a hell of a lot more right than having perfunctory interactions, where we just kind of pay for things. So it's really interesting the place that I know of, in this city, where I live in my own neighborhood, where I've been doing work the longest, almost 30 years, we have literally been free of drama and conflict on a community scale for 28 years. In all the NGOs that I work in - even in this office, pretty rare in this office - but in the NGOs, constant strife, where people get together in horizontal cultures, where it's finally equitable, we're fair with each other - constant strife. And then within the bureaucracies and hierarchies - constant strife. But when people are place-based and able to interact with people that they have some proximity and affinity with - mutual identification, because they see each other all the time, maybe multi-dimensional, right? Over time, right? Multi generational, youth, and especially when you're interacting in the commons creatively, it creates this whole new basis for your interaction, which provides for the informality you're thinking about. So I don't know if that's a yes or no answer.
We live in the United States, where everything's laid out as a development for profit. So the cultural infrastructure that people normally create for themselves over some span of time is gone. It's not there. It's never been created because we live in instant landscapes. So somebody else is creating your reality as you're paying for that reality within the zoning construct where you leave where you live, to go make the representation of currency to pay for the place where you barely get to be. Like, we're living in an artifice.
E: Yeah, no. So I'm just gonna jump around here again. This is our sort of first interview. So, so the way that we're pushing through it is… I have some questions about multi capital… like these different forms of capital, and, you know, what would it mean to have an institution that is trying to commerce in multiple forms? But to, maybe hone in on a specific thing. Because the story that I like, I've heard the story told, and I think the first time we met, I was asking you about it, but can you tell us the story of “Share It Square” and the Intersection Repair ordinance, and potentially the story of a seven foot tall guy named Ed, you know, as it's relevant to these questions about informal community stuff rubbing shoulders with strict institutional boundaries.
ML: Yeah, I can definitely tell about that. I'll give you a little foreshadowing that the things that enabled this to happen were the power of stories and relationships that slice through how things are supposed to work. Like, I don't really know too much about Ed's background, but like, let's see. Okay, so it, for me, it begins by rejecting my corporate architecture and paying job because of a giant toxic waste cover up that happened under the Bank of America building at the West End of the Morrison bridge, right as it was being built. I was present in a meeting where government officials were talking about how we were going to have to basically, they were like this: the site is saturated down to China, and there's no way for us to get all of this toxicity out of the ground, so we're going to have to cap it in order to keep the emissions from going up into the building, because the concrete won't stop it. So we're gonna have to cap it with like, rubber membranes, and then vent it continuously into the atmosphere. And I'm like, wow, everyone's gonna be breathing it outside of the building? And after they left, there was actually a compromise in this situation in which they received some kind of compensation for their compliance, which was so disgusting to me. And after they walked out of the meeting, the Vice President of Hoffman, which is the biggest construction company in the state, he leans back in his chair. He's just laughing. And my boss, Alan Beard, he's like, so what's so funny? And he's like, “Oh man, you know, we just have to do this all the time. Got to keep the project moving, got to stay on budget, keep the timeline, otherwise it's going to cost.” So we do this all the time. This is what we always have to do, like negotiate some sort of compromise to the environment, to enter the community in order to meet your financial goals. I was so disgusted by what unfolded in front of me that I literally quit that day. But it took me about six hours after the meeting in the rest of the day to figure out what I was gonna do. So, I'm making this kind of long, but my departure story…
E: Well, I did have a quick question further up - maybe a quick aside, since it's exactly you're talking about - like, what do you consider your craft actually, how would you self describe, in terms of your craft and what maybe like that day, like, you know, the trajectory that you went on, I feel like you have a very distinct…
ML: Okay, I'll tell you the truth. So, like some, somebody would call me an architect, and somebody would say I was an activist or a politician or something, really, what I think of myself as, I'm some sort of - it's almost like Terminator, except I'm from the past, and I showed up here. I'm like, holy shit. You don't realize you've all been conquered. And that's partially because I, you know, I visited some, a lot of different villages, and in particular this Mayan village where they explained colonialism to me and how it works. And this guy's like, don't apologize to us for what you did, because what was done to you is so long ago in the past. You have no idea who you people are. You've been so traumatized. You did this to us because it was done to you. But at least we know who we are. We still know our story. So he was like, explaining placelessness and the centralization of power and the annihilation of the environment that's happened here all across the Western Hemisphere. And so I was just like, blown away. When I came back from that… So now I'll tell you, if I had to write down on a card like what my job is, I'm like this insurgent Neolithic villager who wears urban camouflage in order to trick people into waking up to their own voice and power. And I use these different mediums, like I used to be a sculptor and a painter before I finally settled into architecture, and I use architecture in order to engender collaborations and quite a bit of different alternative economic threads that happen in all of this. I'm constantly trying to arrive at rootedness and an entire alternative infrastructure where people are more connected, and then they're therefore more committed, and their environments become safer and more expressive, and all of those are like little nodes of healing that are supposed to (or hopefully) be inspiring all these other people that they're affecting through the internet, through visiting their places. So whether things like a co housing community in Portland or a straw bale structure somewhere, like every one of them is an opportunity. And fortunately, we're attracting clients all the time who come in for a more, you know, sort of right livelihood, appropriate technology, but a prototypical approach. Everybody that comes in here wants to have that. They want to inhabit it, and they want to create it as a legacy to affect other people. So I'm successfully tricking them. But this is what they said to me in the Mayan village, they were like, Okay, so you've been on this, metaphorically speaking, you got on this bus, and you thought you were an artist, and you rode that until you realized you're not really an artist. You like, got on this other thing called architect, and you rode that for a while. You got off that bus, and eventually you got here on some kind of bus, and now you're just going to be a person. You know, you're not going to be a description, you're not going to be an occupation. You're gonna be a person, and you're gonna walk like that from now on in your life.
Ven Gist: A villager..
ML: Yeah, you’re gonna be a villager, right? And the point is, of course, that you know, to help each other realize that we're all just villagers. And that is sublime.
VG: Yeah… Like, how you were saying that too.. These spaces can be like healing centers, in a way, in a larger network of urban spaces and spaces between those. And so, yeah, there's like a pole of globalism and localism, I guess, you know, doing hyper-local, proximate, using like that self regulation, all that stuff is very valuable and generative. And so how do you see that getting to a point of no return, to where the other, the old artifice, where the artifice is in its right place. Basically, I think, we need an artifice because we don't all live together. We do have to coordinate across great distances of both time and space, you know. So we do need artifices to do that. So,how do you think about the work of doing like strong, localist stuff, and focusing on, doing, hard, good, local work, and how that could propagate around in the global human environment.
And yet we all come from, in terms of the local model, we all come from these geomorphic, adaptive village structures with all these like social architectures around each of the nodes of gathering. This is an incredible thing. So strategy becomes - Okay, if the neighborhood is like this, and yet the fundamental pattern is that wherever people's pathways converge, they interact, then this is how we subvert the colonial grid. So this is Shared Square, and this is what was explained to me in the rainforest.
ML: Yeah, okay, I’ll draw you a diagram. First of all, unfortunately, there's so many people who don't understand that between the reality as it exists and the one that they can kind of describe or articulate theoretically, that you have to transition. You don't just leap from one state to the other, not as a group, not as a city, or as a culture. So you're constantly in, you can put yourself into a position to be engendering transitional models toward what you're talking about. The beautiful thing is, I know that sounds like, oh, that's turgid. That'll take so long. The thing is, the hardest thing are the initial models. Once you get those initial models going, then the replication that you inspire gets out of control, and you can't track it. So I'll show you a couple things. But first I want to say you know that, the subtitle of permaculture is planet repair. The thing is, permaculture is site-specific and hyperlocal, so the only way you affect planet repair is through local action. That's why we call what we do City Repair. Because, understanding colonialism, we understand, again, that cities are administrative centers for this larger totalitarian organism, and they are the scale at which you can intervene and the brilliant thing is that each city is part of a larger network, and if you intervene in even one, because the totalitarian network is based upon basically homogenation in order to control, if you intervene in even one, then all of them can begin to change.
VG: I mean, they do. It's only a matter to what degree. You know, that's how we think about it, too, yeah.
ML: As you know, as activists who don't have tanks and stuff, like, at the beginning of our project, we were like, “We don't need that. We've got food and music, you know, we've got all of the best shit anyway, no matter what.” So, you know, how do we use that in order to inspire change? So, fortunately, we're like… So here we are, you know. And this thing is, the National Land ordinance has literally done this over the whole thing - [Ven: 1785] - yes, exactly, no matter what's going on. Geographically, you know, it just does that. So we're like, Okay, so that's the system on top of us. And yet we all come from, in terms of the local model, we all come from these geomorphic, adaptive village structures with all these like social architectures around each of the nodes of gathering. This is an incredible thing. So strategy becomes - Okay, if the neighborhood is like this, and yet the fundamental pattern is that wherever people's pathways converge, they interact, then this is how we subvert the colonial grid. So this is Shared Square, and this is what was explained to me in the rainforest.
VG: Yeah, exactly. That makes sense.
ML: They were like, go to the closest one of these, near where you live, look in all directions and see that nobody's talking, and then walk a little ways away and see it's the same, and see it's the same, and then go to another town and see it's all the same. So you know, how do you create change around one of these nodes that is so beneficial that it starts to inspire everyone to say, hey, wait a second. What about that spot? So the ultimate urban design principle is that where our pathways converge, our lives come together. So you can actually say that to people, and it makes sense. So what we try to do is elicit this [convergence] from within this [intersections, nodes of gathering], and not just once, but try to get it to replicate within blocks and out in the streets, to decompartmentalize the whole thing. .. It's all designed to become something where you have rights of way through the system, in order for it to be a community and all of this can be vacated, street vacations, in order to reprivatize and consolidate the whole thing. So the system is designed to change and be modified, mostly by people who control land power, but we can do the same thing once we understand these tools and begin to transform these spaces.
So the ordinances that we've established in Portland that let people do stuff in their neighborhoods right where they live, are utilizing and expanding on that set of tools. But instead of these tools just being in the hands of developers and politicians and bankers, we're using them on the community level to create a transitional model. It'll never be like it was with our ancestors, it'll be something like we've never seen before, like the stuff we're doing in the streets with these paintings, like the values that they integrate and express as metaphors have never been seen before in this world, an integration of like feminist principles, an embrace of ecology. It's never been as rich as what we're seeing now. I completely agree with your
VG: I completely agree with your hypothesis. That's perfect. Where did that sense of intuitive knowing of the convergence… Well, I mean, now you're a space maker, and you were doing architecture, which is always like spaces that people inhabit, so maybe it's always been there, but yeah, when did that become such an intuitive knowledge for you that you need to have a space where people can convene in ways that are natural to them?
ML: Yeah? Well, let's see. For me personally, my influences have included, you know, growing up in Portland, where at some point in the 60s and 70s, there was this notion that this is our town. It became pervasive. And it's, it's literally wired into the Portland plan, that we have participation in all things uniquely compared to other American cities. So I got to grow up in that kind of attitude that, you know, this is our place, very place based attitude of ownership and identification with the city. So that's cool. But then my father and my mom were two radicals in design, in the design culture. My dad founded our urban design division of the Bureau of Planning, believe it or not. So he was just this punk ass farmer from southern Ohio who was just really rash, and they put him in charge, and he's like, led the charge to create waterfront park and Pioneer Square and a bunch of other spaces. And they're like, you know, show us a vision, and we can fire you, and we'll pay you very little. And he was incredibly brash and unstoppable. So I got to be - his bedtime stories, the struggle to create Pioneer Square, were informative for me. He would say things like, you know, I want to design this. I can't control what it will become, but I can facilitate it into happening. So I learned through him that there's a kind of an alchemy and a role that people can play in order to move everyone along toward a choice. And I learned from him also about the absence of Commons. He's like, we've been here for 150 years. The city's been here all this time. We don't have one place for community, so at last, we're gonna have one. And then he'd be like, Well, I'm gonna be fired. We're gonna lose our job, we're gonna live in a tent again. (I’m like, yay, camping!).
So he was like that. But then more to the answer to your question, my mom is literally like this Indiana Jones kind of architectural theorist, and she goes out and visits ancient villages. And when I was a kid, she would take me and show me, like these early urban forms. One time, she was taking me through a series of villages on Sardinia, and she's like, this village people were all very small, and at a certain point they realized they couldn't carry their loads through the streets. So we go to this next village a few miles away, and she's like, this was the next village they built. And you can see how the streets are wider, and then the edges of the private buildings have these openings that speak to the street. So they were actually creating urban edges. And then here this house is the first courtyard ever created where this family realized they wanted a big open space to the sky. So, like, I started to realize, like, learn from here about people could be intentional about their design in a way that impacted their social life, so stuff like that.
E: Seems like when thinking about, again for us this formalization and standardization question, it's like, the thing that's striking, that's maybe a little bit surprising or that wouldn't have come to mind for me is how much you're thinking about lineage. It's like: this isn't ahistorical. Well, it's like these institutions with their standards are more ahistorical and that, the informal rhythms, you know, are things that it's almost like a matter of genetic memory. It's a matter of instinct, almost like just kind of making observations now- it's almost like it's a design element for you is that you can exploit the fact that all you need to do is bring people together and you don't need to be prescriptive. And these things will naturally, will naturally sort of, sort of arise.
ML: Yeah, that we have a proclivity, if we have a chance, if we have enough help, and we feel safe enough with each other, that we will start to act from almost like an instinctive place.
VG: We'll start to give in the space. Yeah.
E: So if our model or our sort of lense is, taking informal behaviors and formalize them without standardizing them, it seems like you're thinking about it differently… I'm just thinking about these intersections, and I'm not quite sure how to say it.. I guess it's a matter of discussion of what interventions are needed. You know, do we need to build formal models for scaling up this behavior in a way that's, you know, rigorously open ended, right? I think that's the key, that these captive institutions tend to put up Overton Windows of acceptable behavior and close them off and manage them, whereas you can imagine building sort of replacement institutions that are geared towards a real culture of openness and experimentation.
VG: Facilitation and not control…
E: Maybe the best way to phrase it is, we're thinking about the need for these different types of institutions - call them extitutions - whereas for you, it's more like, village patterns that go back centuries already carry these institutions of open, creative engagement and improvisation. It's really subtle, the distinction I'm trying to make…
VG: Old protocols, but with new synthesis coming out, it sounds like, which is because it's a new set of people using that protocol.
ML: Yeah. One thought, like six or seven, but one is that we're not going to be able to wait till we figure it out, like people need to be getting inspired and then going into the realms where they have some creative access and engaging wherever they can. I mean, that's what I see is happening. People get inspired and they think that they can transpose this model that they've seen, into another circumstance. So like with the beginning of City Repair, you know, we have this Tea Horse. They're going around the city, this Commons. And this guy, Michael Hebb, is like the son of this famous developer in Oregon. This kid came to our gig with the Tea Horse and started to help. I met him dancing on a garbage can at Downtown Portland. I had no idea who this kid was, but eventually he's like, God, I can just, I can take this model of people sitting down together around a common table. He invented Clark Lewis and the Gotham Tavern and the family supper. It became this kind of foodie Empire. There’s a whole reason why it crashed that was separate. But like all of this, like Free Geek came out of the Tea Horse, they were like, we could build community by recycling technology. We could create common spaces, you know, have potlucks and stuff, but like, use technology as a means to build friendship networks.
So, especially in the beginning, there was all these spectacular things that came out of it, where people were just riffing off the idea of common space again. So I think whatever we figure out as an answer, you know, could be the ultimate model. But in the meantime, we just got to unleash the creativity of people to go and reinvent the institutions around them that they can, I think.
But let's see. So [drawing on whiteboard again] here's one thing I think that's happening that's essential. I basically think of our society as something like the Tree of Life metaphor goes deep into the ground, comes up into the sky, and it's collecting all of this oxygen or other carbon and light going this way, and nutrients and moisture going this way. But what seems to be wrong in our society that's making the whole tree sick is that we've snipped off the roots, you know, disempowered people locally. So then this becomes like a vase with some flowers in it that look pretty for a while, but they die because they're not rooted anymore. So the idea of Shared Square is literally a systemic counter. It acts to try to reanimate the roots and begin to heal the whole tree by making all of these institutions that the tree consists of be based upon what's happening at the root level. Okay, but I don't think that's going to succeed. I mean, that's a great concept, but what we see happening, even with only one of these, which was Shared Square, we started to see things happening up here [marks top of tree]. So we began to motivate other action with a healing impulse within the whole system, like commercial models, like the Rebuilding Center, houses people organized in like Dignity Village, all that stuff started to become possible. And then what's really cool, cooler maybe is that because we're messing in the right of way and transforming the streets into people spaces… Like at the time, we had Vera Katz, who was the mayor, and then here we were at the grassroots level, and she's got all this bureaucracy going on in between us. But because we were messing in the right of way, we engaged the institution at every single level. And because it was food and beauty and community, and she became like, you know, acquainted with people on a first name basis. And then with dignity village happening, and suddenly the mayor is like interacting with the street leadership culture. We started to see a horizontal effect within each of the vertical layers. So we started to integrate vertically and horizontally, because we were messing strategically in the right of way.
E: What do you mean the horizontal effect that?
ML: Yeah, thanks for asking. It's because at every point that got integrated between the mayor and the community level, the people along the way became more relationship connected, which meant that their values and their humanity started to move this way as well. So I think there's been a lot of progress. I think a lot of it's rolled back. You know, every time risk managers speak, you know, bureaucracies double down, you see that horizontal effect and the vertical effect constricting a bit. But we learned a lot about how to make that happen through them, through what we've done so far.
E: I had a question, sort of operationally, about City Repair and Communitecture. So one's a nonprofit, right? And one is a firm, yeah? Like a friend of ours has has a firm called Blockscience and and was talking about like, Okay, well, this is a firm, but we also have relationship to DAOs, which are more in sort of informal, maybe almost like radical politics land and, you know, one big thing we've been thinking about is efforts that are ultimately informal, putting on these institutional masks. You know, like the anarchist bookstore in San Francisco, they were like, they didn't pay taxes for 27 years, when we talked to this guy, and then he's like: and then we were going to be a nonprofit, but then we decided to be an LLC, but we're actually volunteer run. We're not really worker cooperative, but we do do consensus-based activities. I guess we're interested in the idea of strategically cobbled together things that have these substituted these formalized, legible presentations. So anyways, I just wonder, has having these two different strategic outposts. Has that been a matter of like, has that facilitated a lot, or has there been limits or struggles that are involved with keeping that legibility up, or yeah just anything about the difference between those two modes and the legibility of them and how that relates to the broader project?
ML: Well, it's been really great to be working in different structures to see how they work better and… worser. Like the nonprofit City Repair has all kinds of totally typical issues, and the fact that, like…Communitecture, in my mind, works really, really well, like the fact that basically, I am basically a facilitative benefacting, you know, underlying, bottomlining entity that just shares power all the time. It's a clearer diagram. There's no fighting over power here. Everybody's just powerful and, well, they all have plenty to do. I mean, this is actually an anti-architecture office, I should say that, like, from my early career, it's not that place. It's not a few people taking credit for and having all the fun, taking all the money. It's not like that.
VG: An inversion, an inversion to architecture in a way…
ML: Yeah, it's kind of an, it's like anarchitecture in a way. As much as possible, but it also has continuity and stability. Because, like, I'm this continuity that keeps it going, even as people kind of come in and out. But you know, one of the things that makes us fundamentally different from other firms is that we will not just take any job. We always are standing for what we're here for. You know, I think if we were to actually get really like, faced with scarcity, we might have to make difficult choices, but we're just so successfully attracting people who are intentional and want to create alternative models that we don't have to face those kinds of contradictions and compromises. So we've really put it out there from the very beginning, and that immediately began to attract people who are looking for someone with our skill set to begin to support ideas. Because we're not the only ones with visions. You know, it's always people having visions, but they don't know how to draw or they don't have technical skills. So they needed somebody to match them and meet them and help them move their ideas forward. So we immediately, as soon as we got, like, out there in the media, people wanted to come to us.
So I'm kind of going on about this a little bit because it is part of this project to affect the rest of the profession as much as we can. Yeah, and part of that is, you know, I became really conscious of the culture of design when I was a little kid, listening to my dad and the way he would talk about people in the bureaucracy, the compromise to their humanity, the repetition, the boredom, the fact that they couldn't use their discretion. They could, but they were afraid to. And then, when I was traveling with my dad and mom through the city, like the whole city became a library of stories, where they would tell me, what firm was working on stuff, and what their goals and objectives were, because my dad was involved in these things at a design review level for the city. So he could explain things and put it in light of like city goals and regional goals. So I was learning those things as I was listening to them. So for me, this project of trying to create a better model is not to reject the other firms. It's to, it's kind of like I'm, I'm in love with them, still, like I care about them. They're the brotherhood and sisterhood that I ache to have in my life, you know. And by the way, in that one Mayan village I referred to a few times, I saw the government as it's supposed to exist. Like neighborhoods where people don't talk. You know, we have a neighborhood association. It's got certain specific roles. It reviews land use applications. That's like… A real village has a council of grandmothers. It has the most badass association of fathers, and no shit goes down like this is what I learned in that village. In this reality where we are, we literally outsource all of our roles to these official structures while we go off to make money to pay for them, replacing us. Like the Council of fathers is supposed to be the police force, they don't just deal with shit that's wrong. They take care of, they mentor their kids. All that's missing because we got conquered. So they're again, about the alternative structures. There's this, there's the structure that's just below our consciousness that we're supposed to be living in, of inherent social architecture, where we are the government, we are the police, we are the bank, you know, we hold everything in common, and when we live like that, we thrive and there is no crime, you know, and we have maximum identity and deepest possible relationships. You know, most amazing creative expression. Like in our reality, you know, creative expression is where artists make art and we consume it or, you know, shit like that, anyway. So the dissonance between is what I'm talking about. Yeah. I don't know. I’ve kind of gone of…
Like the Council of fathers is supposed to be the police force, they don't just deal with shit that's wrong. They take care of, they mentor their kids. All that's missing because we got conquered. So they're again, about the alternative structures. There's this, there's the structure that's just below our consciousness that we're supposed to be living in, of inherent social architecture, where we are the government, we are the police, we are the bank, you know, we hold everything in common.
E: So, you did mention that overall, it does seem like City Repair has been successful to the extent that it's maintained, but overall… You know, we’ve been playing with this idea of Commons Enterprise. It feels like that may be a description of Communitecture. And the sense that is coming from a lot of circles, that there's something very wrong with the nonprofit model.. I guess, what are the problems? Or, like, what are the things that have made Communitecture more successful then and if it's just simply, just realities of the nonprofit model that have made City Repair more challenging.
ML: So, yeah, the reality, realities of a nonprofit include that you tend to have a board. It all sounds great on paper, you tend to have a board that has liability for the actions of other people, staff and volunteers. So then, because of that difference, I mean, if they're not integral, then the remote and disconnected board can tend to freak out when the volunteers and staff are actually successful, I've seen it like in City Repair. We were like, I know, in VBC [Village Building Convergence], which is, of course, a project at City Repair, we were like, we have 45 projects this year, and the board was like - “45 projects!?” I mean, you joined the board in order to grow the project, but now you're freaking out and worried, like, “is our insurance adequate?” You know, “do we have board coverage in case anything goes wrong?” I was, like, “worried about things going wrong?” Like, it took us 28 years, but now the government of Portland is doing the work that we had to fight them for 20 or some amount of time to do. Now they're doing the biggest street installation in the history of Portland, and they wrote a grant for us to receive $25,000, okay? And now we're using our work in the streets to lower crime and violence and traffic speed through art in the streets. Which is what we said would happen in 1996 and they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, until 2024 when, now they're like, paying us to help them do it. So, okay, great. So yeah, it's cause for celebration**.** But one of the board members goes, “Oh, no, are we facing a bunch of liability? Are we laundering money like this?” We're paying out of that $25,000 we're paying youth, black youth, stipends and paying for their lunches. So like, it's amazing, the government is paying black children to alter the street and transform them in the commons. But one of the board members doesn't know how nonprofit works on our board and is freaking about with a fear based mindset. And I'm like, when you hold on, before we even go into this, this is really a moment for us to realize we've succeeded, and we are rocking and the government is working for us, okay? We’re winning, I mean, on that. And people were like, oh, okay, that sounds good, you know. But then when we work through it, we're like, oh, well, that board member should actually just leave, because she's just creating drama, and she just clearly doesn't know how to operate on a board. But you go through that stuff all the time, the distortion between you're actually successful, you're closer to world peace, but or you could get mired in dysfunction and fight and argue and destroy yourselves.
E: So, is the core reason, like, we live in a very litigious culture in the United States, it seems like you're identifying like one reason for this drama is just anxiety over, over this culture.
ML: Okay, well, just to say about that, the loss that the absence of perspective and proportionality of a shared vision… like the liability is that we're, you know, there's a great liability, which is why we formed the nonprofit. Exactly, oh, my god, we're all isolated and disempowered. Ah, the world's gonna end. So we create this, and now they're worried about some little, tiny liability in the larger liability of our potential failure. So the thing is …
E: That’s quite a visual, right there, that's that's really strong.
ML: Yeah. Well, I've realized, with all of the hills and valleys that we go through, that, you know, especially people who are passionate, and they feel strongly, and a lot of everybody's carrying trauma into a nonprofit. So the sheer surface area that you're in contact with of their creativity and their passion and their trauma will always, always lead to some amount of misunderstanding, and without the continuity that you need to have some equilibrium over time, you're going to get bogged down by that if people don't have strong enough tools, and if the structure is not clear enough. So with the attrition that happens in a volunteer based model, you're just constantly dealing with misunderstanding just because people don't talk to each other. So yeah, you got people being out of practice, in collaboration, out of identification with each other, even if they like share the same cause, they don't have trust. So what I've seen is that place based community over time, has far more stability than a group of people who are not place based, definitely would say that.
E: But also the firm… I'm suspicious that there's something about the “volunteer” nature of nonprofits, that there's, like, something not suitably multicapital.. One thing that I've sort of observed in nonprofit world is, like, bluntly, like people like: “I'm not getting paid for this, so I want credit.” Whereas you go to your job, you know, you go work at the grocery store, and you're like, we're all getting paid the same, like, taking credit for this micro action isn't like in my economic calculations. Whereas someone in nonprofit might be sort of trying to grab those up and compile that because it's just in their nature to want to be economic and accumulate something, and so they're going to replace one form of capital with the other. There's something like that. That's, it's a suspicion. It's almost like the firm may have more freedom for people to have a more integrated relationship to all the forms of capital that they're navigating, because there is more of a diversity of forms of capital. In other words, people are getting enriched by the work they're doing together, product based work, but also getting a paycheck, and also, like sustainability, like that, and…
ML: Yeah, it's sustaining some real like capitalistic needs, pressures, but also there's a creative reward. Like everybody gets to lead their own projects and have great kind of creative access to work through their design challenges, and work through their technical implementation. So there's a great range that, especially in a small firm, that people get to have, but a lot of that keys off of me too, because I want people to be able to have the projects and think of them as their own, but that I'm kind of like this. I mean, I'm essential in some ways, but I don't want to tell anyone how to do anything, So I'm there kind of like as a resource and there to support them. And because of the way that I interact with people, they tend to want me involved. So then we have a really enjoyable brotherhood. Right now, it's all men, but we have a brotherhood with each other, of collaboration. We really build each other up. So there's a lot of good, self esteem, personal benefits, autonomy, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I agree with you about nonprofits. I think people do, they need something. And actually, you know, we've talked about this before, and then it's a thing that gets forgotten. It's sort of like two steps forward and three steps back sometimes, like, you remember, oh yeah, we used to have that institutionalized. Let's do that. And then you forget this other thing, or somebody doesn't come back that used to play a role. So it is important, to, like, have a party at the end and then, have people stand up and be recognized and have the community really celebrate them. But that doesn't always happen, because everybody's exhausted. But like, people deserve awards. They deserve recognition. They need to be in the annual report. They need to be online, posted with their picture, accomplishing something like all that's important. Yeah, I do think it's even more important, like at the start of a cycle, for people to actually speak to each other and say, This is why I'm here, and this is what I'm looking to get back so everyone can hear each other. And then if we do a go around like that, then people can be like, All right, do we commit to help each other get there? And how are we going to do that together? People can say, We'll thank each other, recognize each other in these moments when we're together, we'll surprise each other. We'll show up at each other's houses, like in the middle of the night, have cupcakes. I don't know.
E: I mean, I hate to be so reductive, but I do think about, like, these multi capital relationships, and that, at least as designers, you could think about that as a good way to delimit it, right? Like you're talking about, there's experiential capital that people are really thrilled, you know, people participate in the VBC and then are really thrilled to have had that. There's social capital and the community building. I wonder about, it's like trying to eclipse this idea, the important work in our society, like community building that doesn't have an immediate profit. It's not legible to a system that's obsessed with one with only one form of capital. “Well, that stuff, it can just be volunteer based.” How do you start to eclipse that out and build serious commons, enterprises, that there's serious multi capital credit that's being afforded for people that are doing this serious work just like city repair is doing, and leave behind this nonprofit model that tries to say, “Oh, well, there's volunteers that will come in and take care of it” and have it be more of an enterprise model…
ML: I think that this actually starts to emerge organically, but maybe not as an organized institution that it should become more of, but like I see when people work, seen this for decades. People working in the city start to know the leadership in different parts of town and in different kind of quadrants, and they get these multidisciplinary collaborations going on that becomes this relationship web that stretches across the city, and that becomes a network where what you're talking about is actually manifest. It happens as a natural kind of like outcome
VG: From the convergence,
ML: Yeah, but I think in lots of different areas and dimensions of the city, outside of the VBC itself, but the VBC is an intentional way to try to seed that right? When we get leaders from different communities around the table, and we're doing a training on fundraising or design or permaculture or something, and then they're networking with each other by just talking, it's that that's gelling. You see it in the business world all the time. People help each other out. They're on multidisciplinary teams, and then they end up, that's the thing where the story slices through everything. If they enjoy their interaction and they develop a friendship, then they get preferential treatment within the system that's supposed to be more monetary there. That leads to things like, well, we got three bids, but we know who we're going with, you know, because we really enjoyed working with them, they're our friends. So I think it has a natural tendency to gel, even in situations like that.
E: Thanks, brings me to another question and let us know if you need to wrap up soon… But I wonder about like, do you see. I'll pose it this way. Do you see a city full of Commons Institutions, Commons Enterprises masquerading as legible institutions? In other words, they say they're a grocery store down there, but really what they're doing is something much more integrated and bigger and that. They say they're a book shop there, but really they, you know, they're much bigger about their community nights than they are about selling books, and that's just the way for them to be legible to the state, limit liability, you know. Does that feel like it's a real strategy or mode, or is there not enough of that?
ML: I saw, I saw a culture of intentionality to use these different identities and functions of the city as a medium for creative and invention and community building. I saw that rising in the 70s, and then really hit its peak. And it wasn't done, you know, when we started to hit the housing crisis, and then, you know, now that we're sort of coming out of Covid, I hope we're trying to figure out who we are. But before the housing crisis, we were going through the roof. People were just outwardly like, they were like, I don’t care how imperfect we are. I love this place. I love being here. And you heard people just really confessing that to each other, and all of the demonstrative like affinity people were showing for each other, whether it was lesbians hugging and kissing in the streets, or people talking to each other in the checkout line of a store, like it was everywhere. And now I feel like people are really hit over the head. I'm still trying to figure out who we are now. I know there are a lot of institutions, but many of them have closed, you know.
VG: One thing that I really noticed in Portland and covid from a like, a space designing perspective that was like, radically not good for the community was, a lot of bars had just big, big tables, right? But then when covid became a problem, they broke all those up into small, little two tops everywhere. And then after covid, a lot of places didn't go back to the old ways, kept the new tradition, right? Because we have tendencies. Everything that we do leads to a tendency, right? So a lot of places are still like that, and I just don't go there anymore. There's still a couple places that went back to the old road or whatever, but we don't always go back. We're now in the future, doing something new, and I agree,
ML: Yeah, there's been a lot of receiving at the same time, one of the things I really love seeing that the Department of Transportation has been doing is making streets available, like those little parklet things and extensions of restaurants and closing some streets, and now there's a plaza program to permanently close streets all over the city. I don't know how many.. I think a lot of communities, like in my own neighborhood in Sellwood we're talking about a permanent, major primary public square on 13th. So, yeah, you know, I suppose I'm a conspiracy theorist sometimes, you know, like one conspiracy I'd be, I could be convinced, like this guy closes our pandemic unit, you know, and this thing comes out of nowhere, and this fucker does everything he can to make it worse. And it has all of these impacts that cause isolation and disassociation. So
VG: Finding the intent in the system is hard in general, right? Like, because, like you said, regardless of any intent, the grid existing there is changing behavior on its own, just by existing and then, and then also, we have to worry about the human intent within that. Oh, now I can use this also to do that.
ML: That’s right. No matter where covid came from, you just look at the behavior of the people who used it as a means to divide the community,
VG: But the system might have, you know, these codes might have done that to us… are we, is that just our nature, or are there other modes? Yeah, but there's not much exploration outside of the main modes to the researchers. Oh, yeah. Speaking of.. modes and like… Yeah, I mean, you've done a bunch of awesome, incredibly awesome things, built communities that have done awesome things, different kinds of things. And then they've lived for a long time. Were there any other forms that you wanted to do or things that you wanted to do that simply weren't possible and that you had to make do with, basically, like compromises, trade offs that had to take place, or things that you'd like to see done that you think are just not possible right now because of the limitations, constraints.
ML: Great, big question. Well, first of all, I'd say that every single one of the models that I've worked on is a transitional model, and they all have compromises. Like in Cully neighborhood, there's quite a few kind of co- housing village models that we worked on, and they, you know, they have a price tag. So the price of admission is whether or not you can afford to be there. And so families who can afford to pay 30 years have jobs, can be there.. But I'm fine with that, because it's a model that stands to affect people, and the contradictions are part of what we want to have happen, so that people can be learning, they can talk about it, and they can figure out how to feel about that. And on the other hand, there's all these other things, you know, Dignity Village happened, Kenton Women's Village, Hazelnut Grove, lots of different models, and so, you know, and those were made out garbage. And you have people going like, that's not good - substandard housing. Fuck you, you know. Like, for a woman who just doesn't- she just wants to be able to close the door at night, and that's like 85% of what she cares about to be safe at night. Like, that got done. And even if she's just zipping a tent closed, as long as she's with people that are her peers, and they have a pact to take care of each other - that's 65% of what she cared about. So, you know, those are imperfect too, but it's where people get organized. And actually, I'm absolutely happy about the homeless models, because they have proven, you know, like government funded, or rather, taxpayer funded government shelter costs like probably $120 a night per person. Dignity Village costs $4.25 for 24 hours. And Dignity Village is literally, measurably the safest place in the entire city, with murderers who live there, compared to a neighborhood that is, like, incalculably more expensive, and people are all like, afraid and unsafe. Dignity Village has the lowest carbon footprint of all and a full, complete community infrastructure. The neighborhoods are sitting there thinking … I mean, the contradictions are so rich. And, you know, Dignity Village - you can actually build a human habitat out of garbage, recycled bottles, you know, because the thing that really matters is the human agency and that everyone has access to that actually… and people who are willing to break the law to take care of each other, that's a powerful part of the story.
…and people who are willing to break the law to take care of each other, that's a powerful part of the story.
So they all have these contradictions, and they all have lessons involved, and every one of them represents shifts. So intersection, that's not, it's not where it's supposed to go. I mean, like it's supposed to become a full on, thriving what's called a “spot zone,” where the properties on the corners become hybrid commercial… Planning Bureau’s talking about all this recently, they were like, “hey, those painted intersections, maybe those could be where we do these spot zones,” where you engender localized economy, where you have not a 20 minute neighborhood, but a one minute neighborhood. Hey, maybe it's like, about 28 years late.. because that was the point the whole time, we're intervening and trying to create an integrative model. So, so that's an example of where you might say it's incomplete, like everyone's still in their boxes. They all go away from this zone to that zone, because they're in this capitalization. So it's not perfect, but it's actually transitioning. It's causing a transition. So as you talk about the model, it's not the same yesterday as it is today. It's heading toward the spot zone that enables, locally, like bike and pedestrian based commerce, that then will cause crime rates to completely vaporize, or maybe, and all of these new like entrepreneurial initiatives that you can't even foresee will start to happen..
VG: Which is it, right. We don't have to have the model. We just provide the transitional space for everyone to find the model together. Yeah, yeah.
ML: So I'd say every one of them is a different model. They're all trying to re-village.- They're all trying to take a thing that exists and help it transition into a new thing. And they all have contradictions. Surely.
So I think the main thing is engendering constructive change, engendering movement toward improved state. And having that objective in your mind, you're trying to move things toward the thing you want to see happen as a practical strategy. And all these people that are, you know, pissed off and impatient - I think I would share the same ideal perspective of like, what we would talk about, probably agree on where we want this to go, but then I want to get to work creating it. I don't think you create it by being angry at everybody about how things are, because nobody really understands how it is working anyway.
E: It sounds like - we talked in prepping for interviews in general, we were talking about not leading the witness. But I should bring up, like, just in the past week, what's come up a lot is the idea of empiricism versus idealism. And, you know, experimental and experiential work that has a tactile push back from the material reality at hand and negotiation and improvisation that way, rather than to say, you know, “here's an ideal, and if we don't get there, it's a tragedy.” There's just two completely different modes of going about it.
ML: Yeah..
E: What's standing up from the conversation though is that the model of protocols.. it maps on pretty well to this conversation you had about, Am I an architect? Am I an artist? It's like the protocols we're thinking about - reuse and repair culture, mutual aid, library protocols and that, like these all collapse into a more multi dimensional village identity in the stories that you're telling, I think.
VG:
Yeah, they're all like these institutions, or extitutions of the new village model, basically like they have these protocols that can they pop up and use whenever they need and put it way in the shed until they need it again. It's not this, like overarching system that's always there, just like, can pop it up when they need it, potentially,
ML: Yeah, well, I think like, speaking of ideals and stuff, I think you can reasonably conceptualize some kind of ultimate model, but you would not likely get everyone to agree to it, even if you could. How would you create the transition to it? And you would need to test it along the way toward it anyway. So I think the main thing is engendering constructive change, engendering movement toward improved state. And having that objective in your mind, you're trying to move things toward the thing you want to see happen as a practical strategy. And all these people that are, you know, pissed off and impatient - I share their view like I think I would share the same ideal perspective of like, what we would talk about, probably agree on where we want this to go, but then I want to get to work creating it. I don't think you create it by being angry at everybody about how things are, because nobody really understands how it is working anyway. So you can't really, I mean, I don't even think.. maybe the Carnegie family would understand how everything works together, and you'd be mad at them. It's just no point.
I think, yeah, our strategy has been trying to interact with the humans in the system … actually for me as a strategy, that's one of the things I remember from my dad talking about how, bored people were in their jobs, how it was just so dehumanizing. So in the Department of Transportation, when they were like, Why should we help you? I remember saying, because we know that you want to have more creative discretion in your work. You want to have a more fulfilling experience. And they were just, “you don't care.” What they didn't realize is they were up against the seven year old in my heart, I was like, “No, I do care.” I used to go into my dad's office and watch all these planners and listen to them talk during lunch, and they're all talking about these dreams of how to transform the city. And then I would sleep underneath the model of the city that they had built of the urban core. And it was just fascinating to me to see how they were trying to figure out how to make the human city more of a human scale. So I could see that people were really dreaming about it. Yeah, but it was the fact that there's human beings in the system that was ultimately the way forward for us like to bring our humanity to the table, even when they were mad at us, and they'd be like, you know, stop doing this. And it was absurd, because then they'd be leaving the neighborhood, they'd be like, don't do any more of this creative stuff. We're like, “see ya!” you know, and we would just keep doing it.
And they were so frustrated, like, “we keep trying to fight with them, and they won't fight. They just create.”
And they were so frustrated, like, “we keep trying to fight with them, and they won't fight. They just create.” You know, there's some, on this thing called taking space, making place. On YouTube, there's a quote from, well Eric Stan, who was in charge of housing back then. He was like, “it’s so weird. We try to fight, and they wouldn't fight. They would just create, and they wouldn't stop.” And that was just so attractive to them. And when the Transportation Bureau, when we finally cracked them open, because we just wouldn't stop being kind, they were like, we're gonna be punitive at you, and we're gonna threaten you. And we're like, Well, how are you doing? You know, how's your day? They’re like “Oh, don't give us this check in shit!” you know? And they were like, not well. At one point this person, I think it was a woman. What was her name? A long Greek name, Papadopoulos. Elizabeth Papadopoulos. She was like, Okay, this is our favorite problem. We love what you've done. Like, this was this moment of disclosure. She's like, we love what you've done. We have an entire wall of photographs dedicated to this, but we don't know how to say yes. Like, we don't. We need somebody be able to tell us that we can do this. So fortunately, Charlie Hales at the time was a pretty dynamic Transportation Commissioner and he said, you can say yes, you know, and then we've got this new ordinance,
E: And it was a kind of weird, like interdepartmental amnesty that was, that was going on with that? Or is that…
And Ed, was like, okay, when you set up the meeting, give me a call and I will come to the meeting and we will face down transportation. So we broke the law and the police showed up to help. That's the miracle piece, but the reason that was possible was because we kept treating everybody like a human being.
ML: Well the miracle parts of the story were the interdepartmental dynamics. Like Ed, the giant policeman, like he would get called by disgruntled neighbors a few blocks away, and he would show up, and he literally said, you know what, I'm paid to stop stuff which is bad, but not stuff which is good. And like, this is good. You're all standing in the street, but nobody's like, committing any crimes. This is You're all being nice to each other. This is what we want. So when transportation was mad, and they're like, you know, we'll fine you all $1,000 you know, you can't have a little free library on your corner. You can't have a you know, the various features that we had at the time, I think it was $1,000 a month. You know, nobody could handle that. And Ed, was like, okay, when you set up the meeting, give me a call and I will come to the meeting and we will face down transportation. So like we broke the law and the police showed up to help. That's the miracle piece, but the piece, the reason that was possible was because we kept treating everybody like a human being.
E: This really fills in this model you're talking about, where the horizontal relationships start to just eclipse the vertical structures, or the vertical constraints.
ML: I think the horizontal vertical integration is possible when people are like feeling like they can be human beings with each other. Actually, I remember getting coaching. So how do you put this at the very beginning of City Repair, before the intersection, there was the Tea House? I don't know if I’ve ever shown you a picture of that, but it was the very first thing, and it was a fusion of Mayan rainforest meeting house and Oxford afternoon tea, like and the many other different sources, but it was built out of all reclaimed doors and windows around the perimeter that all opened, and it was wrapped around this big noble fur. And then there were pear trees and cherry trees coming up through the floor and stuff. So it was like a piece of architecture with living trees as well. It's really something.
E: Like a Richard Brautigan book.
ML: I'll show it to you sometime. So the night before it opened, this Cheyenne guy, Elk River was his name, and he would come through Portland every now and then. He basically, I'm really digressing to talk about this, but there's this whole thing going on with Native Americans. cultures where they have what are called Road Men that go around the continent traveling and doing like Native American ceremonies, and they're basically, he was a Shaman. And I had three or four different points of contact with him. But the night before the tea house opened, he came because he had an adoptive daughter who was a good friend of mine, an artist named Jean Meyer. So Jean Meyer brought Elk River, also known as Calvin Magpie, to the tea house, and it was all kind of dark, and I was getting things ready. I was arranging these pillows and stuff. And he sits down, and he's like - this is perfect for this conversation - he's like, “Okay, so you're getting really good at giving, but the trick to make everything, the wheel of the, the economy of the universe start to turn on your behalf, is that everyone has to start helping by giving too, like they need to see that you need to receive in order to keep giving. So you just can't keep like exhausting yourself by putting it out there. People have to start reciprocating. So, you know, and then you'll get into a groove with the universe - that was powerful. Get into a groove with the universe, with the economy of the universe, which is based on loving and caring and sharing. And he also said this, this comes back to the story about working with the bureaucracy he's like. So once you realize you're a villager, then you're going to realize everyone's a villager, and that you're all on the same side. So when you start to understand that you know, your words, your tone, your body language, will start to speak in a way which is not oppositional. It's kind of like that Obi Wan thing you know, like these are not the droids you're looking for or something, like you just you know - that's what happened with transportation. They were like, you don't care. But that was the beginning of humanizing the relationship and transforming the relationship through seeing that we're on the same side. So when they were like, You can't do that. That's public space. We were like, but this is true of your neighborhood too. Like, if we can do this, then you can do this too. And they're like, Well, that's true…
VG: Yeah, I think that's a spell for sure, throwing a better party, and then saying, Well, you can do that too, yeah,
ML: Yeah, everyone's in the party. He was, like, really honest about this. He's like, they don't do that. People keep drawing lines, like, between you, and what you got to do is step over onto their side and join them. You know, you got to give up a bit of your ego about winning and losing and just be like.. just jump over. I’ve got a bunch of memories of him, but those are the main ones.
Macks Wolfard: So I still had something actually, if you had another minute, but I kind of wanted to enhance on a little bit mentioned earlier on how horizontal organizations often predictably lead to constant strife, and yet, place based community organizing, which you describe as being very stable, right? Is place based community organizing inherently more hierarchical than something that's very horizontal, or is there something about the place based nature of it that allows it to be stable versus stable horizontal relationships or organizations that lead to lots of friction?
ML: I think that there's some various different pieces that you can definitely identify. One is that it's multi generational. And I think when you have, especially when you have children, but then also if you have elders involved, then people's behavior starts to self modulate. Like, for instance, get a bunch of men together, and we may well be defensive or aggressive and like, play things out, or conditioning. But then when you're actually, like, a bunch of dads in the room with their little kids, has a whole different dynamic. So the multi generational aspect is very important.
And then I think there's clarity in place based community, like where you all live, and kind of the realms that are proximate to each other. So I think that there's a sense that clicks in, that you're kind of in it with these people. You're in it together. And you know, you could hate each other, because a lot of people don't even know who's around them, and they're afraid, or they're like something happened one time to mow down their flowers or something, some dog poo on their lawn. This is mad. But when you're starting to focus on something larger in common, you know you're coming out of separation, and you're separate because you don't have anything in common. As soon as you have this unifying space, especially when you're - your pulse is creative, like synthesis, there's all this deferential behavior. Like, it's weird. Americans are like, I've seen this a zillion times now. People like sitting in the circle. They got the potluck food, and they're like, unable to talk. Half an hour later, body language is different. People start to laugh. They're learning about each other, and the more they're learning about each other, where their children go to school and stuff, the more that everything's softening and the spell starts to happen. So I think the fact that you start to be sharing, you start to find your voice, and you start to have this capacity for listening that maybe you don't have at work, you know. So there's a bunch of things that are actually really right, like that fall into place perfectly and beautifully in that circumstance. And of course, you got these hard lines in between you. Those help create clarity. They also are weird. But you know, you have interstitial spaces in between what is yours, what is someone else's… You have these third spaces, buffer zones, you know, that help with a lot of that. So I just think that like, as soon as you start to learn about each other and some stories starts to develop, that's really what's been missing the whole time.
MW: It's like what you mentioned earlier, when you start a project, you'll get everyone in the room and ask people to explicitly say what they want out of something, and then say, can we come together and work collectively towards everyone's goals here and make those possible? Is that, that's like, what's just happening organically in place, based organization?
ML: Yeah, especially if you get to identify the goals from the beginning, like, what do we want to accomplish here? And everyone gets a chance to add to it. It's amazing - this is the one of the coolest things I've seen. You know, unless you do this, you know, in the USA, you can just sit there thinking, Well, I'm a conservative and I'm a liberal, and these are our differences. But on the neighborhood level, I can't even remember in 28 years people actually talking about those polarizing issues. Because once you're bringing food to the table again, it's beautiful. It's not out of a mix. It's not a box, like people are doing really beautiful things for their community. So you seeing all this love manifest in nurturing food. So it creates a receptivity and then an interest in a broader range of subjects that are unifying. And at that level, you have way more in common and lot less to fight about. It's much more about constructive, forward things that everybody can relate to.
Now, that's not to say there aren't sociopathic people. There are definitely people that are like, I know what you're all doing. I've seen that. Or like, you're gonna create a bench? This is literally a quote, you fools, someone will sit there! You know, literally. And these like, you know, go back to your houses and go inside, you know. So this person is, you know, you can't let that person establish the numerator for the neighborhood. You know, they aren't paying attention at all, so you just kind of have them over there, yeah. So a lot of pieces that fall into place, leadership, I mean, you automatically start seeing mentorship and stewardship, and then that leads to all these other things you didn't even realize needed to happen.
VG: And new, knowledgeable people interpreting the world differently.
ML: Yeah, learning together and separately.