To the ancient Greeks, the whole world was composed of four elements: • Earth: the substance of which our world is built.
• Water: fundamental to all life, the fluid transporter and exchanger of all substance. • Air: the bearer of sound and smell, of communication and emotion.
• Fire/warmth: the energizer of all movement.
The principles behind the process 45
Our planet: we live on the edge of matter in the zone where all elements interpenetrate each other. Outside this zone, there is no life.
Fire Cosmic radiation Air Water Liquid Vapour Solid matter
Viewing these elements as principles, not chemical ingredients, these potent archetypes are as relevant as ever. In my experience, every problem, personal, social or ecological, has four levels to it:
• a material level • a continuity level • an emotional level
• an underlying root; its essence, spirit.
Nothing is ever properly resolved without addressing underlying root causes. Nor can we achieve anything without material action. Continuity is essential to the social and ecological ‘fit’ of any solution and to harmonious evolution, while the emotion- al aspect is essential to acceptance.
Is our world just matter – a lifeless lump of substance? For those who believe it’s more than that – from Gaia to deity, from multi-realmed nature to pantheistic spirits – parallels with the layers of human being are inescapable:
• we have physical bodies
• we are alive: have been shaped by our biographies, reveal our nature by our move- ments
• we live in an atmosphere of feelings and moods
• at the heart of each of us lies a unique, individual, human spirit.11
To meet someone, we absorb a first impression, then gradually get to know them more deeply than by mere appearances. The world is not only what we see. Sight can even obscure its real being. When you look closely at somebody’s face, it’s hard to concentrate on what they’re saying. When you listen to the sound of their words, how they pronounce them, it’s hard to also listen to what they mean. Yet when, on the phone, we hear words without seeing a face, and even more when we read print- ed words without hearing tone of voice, many layers of meaning are lost.
We tend to put our energies so much into what we do, and take places so much for granted, that we rarely really consciously know them. Before working with them, therefore, we need to get to know them. Places have the same levels of being as people: • First, the material, physical and sense-accessible, facts – unclouded by value
judgement or speculative theory. This is the ‘earth’ of a place.
• Then the process by which it has become: the flowing history of the place, its ‘water’ quality.
• Then how it reveals its essential being through its different moods, to which our emotions respond: its ‘air’ quality.
• And finally the essence – the individual identity of the place. Its genus loci or spir- it-of-place: the ‘fire’ at its heart.
Everything we see and touch in our surroundings is material. Everything that touches us is spiritual. Spirit-of-place, though tangible, has no material substance – although we experience it via the material to which it is bound. To know a place objectively, we can only start with things beyond dispute: physical facts, then progress up the ladder of apparent intangibility – from matter to spirit. To study a place, building, situation – or anything else – we therefore progress carefully from the
material to the life and time related, then to the realm of induced feelings and final- ly to the spirit at its heart.
Walls and roof, ground and trees. Such bits and pieces make up the tangible aspects of places. That isn’t all that places are, but it is all that, initially, we can eas- ily agree on. Only the material facts are ‘solid’. Although in Eastern terms, these are ‘Maya’, illusion, it is only through meeting these fully that we can come to know what stands behind them.
Material substance isn’t fixed. What lasts unchangingly forever? Even the longest- lived plastics discolour, scar and break. Not only in sub-atomic physics is our world one of constant change. We don’t really know places if we don’t know them in rela- tionship to time – our time, as we journey through them – and their time, as they form, age, mature, metamorphose and fade. Single snap-shots never tell a whole story.
Nor do we know places unless we engage with them. Statistics only tell dry sto- ries. Being there, we can breathe their ambience. We can feel them. Feel their moods and how they affect us. That’s why novelists have to visit their settings, also why so many people travel for pleasure. But these are still only outer moods. Until we use, do things, in places and they become a barely conscious background, we haven’t real- ly engaged. You can’t do this in a one-day visit, but you can listen acutely to how you feel in places. This gives a finer, deeper, sense than does the novelist’s accumulation of sensory experiences.
The principles behind the process 47
We don’t really know a place unless we know it through all its layers.
Snapshot view
Places change over time
They mean something when we engage with them
They speak to us
We aren’t wholly there in a place unless we’re open to its spirit. But this spirit, though easy to intuit, is elusive to anchor. Different people will describe it different- ly. Spirit is central to what places are about, to why they are, to how they affect us and to how we can complement or compromise them. For the spirit (of a place, thing or situation) influences our moods and feelings. These are never fixed, but develop and change over time. Time also works on matter – even the apparently immobile and permanent. This is the magic of process: creative process, consensus design process, or any other process.
Notes
48 Consensus Design: How?
The world we experience is solid and limited to the present moment. To understand it, we make memory associations, so link it with time-flow. Things gain meaning from how they affect us and how this makes us feel. There is something about people, places and situations that is individual, their unique essence.
Essence Feeling response Time (flow) related Solid matter
1 While technology used to be
considered merely applied science, we now regard them as distinctly different but interdependent, often overlapping (See Encyclopedia Encarta, World English Edition (2001), developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing plc.)
2 For summaries of a range of techniques see: Wates N. (2000). The Community
Planning Handbook. Earthscan
Publications; New Economics Foundation and UK Community Participation Network (1998).
Participation Works!: 21 Techniques of
Community Participation for the 21st Century.
3 See, for instance: Bachelard G. (1964).
The Poetics of Space. Onion Press; and
Cooper-Marcus C. (1995). The House
as Mirror of the Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. Conari
Press.
4 The idea of the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) refers only to certain of the body’s sensory receptors that respond to stimuli from
outside the body. In fact we have many
other senses that inform us of our internal and external environment.
The principles behind the process 49
Such subtle senses, like those of life, warmth, movement and individuality, can tell us more about the ‘essence’ of things than sight – which is about appearance from a single viewpoint. Sight is exceedingly important, but, on its own, only skin deep (see for instance: Aeppli W. (1993). The Care
and Development of the Human Senses. Steiner School Fellowship
Publications; and Steiner R. (1975).
The twelve senses and the seven life- processes, in The Golden Blade. Rudolf
Steiner Press).
5 The root of the word ‘science’ is the Latin verb, scire, ‘to know’. 6 An insight I owe to Dr Margaret
Colquhoun. 7 After Dr Colquhoun
8 Hence the importance, early in creation myths, given to naming things. 9 Things we see without understanding
can alarm or give pleasure but they have no conscious precision. 10 Goethean science, named after its
founder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749–1832), is an approach to knowing the underlying ‘essence’ of things through their material manifestations. H.B. Nisbet (1972) describes this as an intuitive or ‘right brain’ complement to the traditional rationalistic ‘left brain’ science (Goethe
and the Scientific Tradition. Institute of
Germanic Studies). This, however, is no simple intuition, but that won by rigorous, detached, broad-band observation. A good example of Goethean science in practice is Bockemühl J. (1992). Awakening to
Landscape, Allgemeine
Anthroposophische Gesellschaft. 11 I owe my first contact with this insight
to lectures on Steiner’s way of looking at the world by Francis Edmunds in Emerson College, Sussex. These layers of our being have great significance on how places affect us. In Spirit & Place (2002, Architectural Press), I describe in detail how places designed with these insights can work on us beneficially and even therapeutically.