start with ideas. In an ideas-led world, why doesn’t it? How does this non-ideas process work?
Virtually every project starts with ideas – usually lots of them, mostly sound and well thought-out. It’s natural, for many people have been worrying and thinking about issues for a long time. Everybody involved has at least one suggestion for improving the place. But ‘improving’ according to their own viewpoint, hence criteria. Naturally enough, these differ and compete. This doesn’t help agreement, doesn’t help the place, doesn’t help things to go forward. Moreover, there are often strong feelings and personal-worth issues bound to these ideas. Emotive val- ues are potentially explosive. It takes special skills to put lids back on when they blow off.
This is why I like to start at a pre-idea level: the only level at which agreement comes easily. This will get us where we want to go quicker, more equitably and with richer multi-dimensionality than any idea debating, synthesizing or bargaining.
We always therefore, start safely: communally looking at what is there, now: the physical description. It’s something which, even though we each see different things, we can all agree on.
But places aren’t fixed things. They’re slowly changing frameworks through which life flows. No still photograph or flying visit describes a place in any meaningful depth. We need to know it in a time context. Getting to know the biography of a place is always interesting, but this has more value than just raising interest. Places have more depth when we understand their history – much of which is also family history for the people who live there, hence emotionally laden. And, even more importantly, we begin to see the reasons they have taken the form and character they – and their people – have. Most important of all, we start to enter into the stream of time so that the future is no longer a list of options to choose among, but a current to harness.
When we consider the moods of a place, concealed values start to emerge. Many are built on memories, others on different perceptions. Children experience, value, and focus upon, places differently than adults. Adults all too often forget to look, and easily think too much to uninhibitedly feel. Sometimes also, childhood perceptions, treasures, horrors and fears can colour adult response.3What disciplinarian torments – or, for others, carefree happy memories – even just seeing a picture of an old school can bring up. As both outsider and adult, I can never imagine these feelings.
Though quite opposing facets may first come to mind, everyone knows the spirit of a community. Also the spirit of the place that is home to it. Some may focus on what is of value. Others on shortcomings. But – quaintness or impracticality, friend- liness or nosiness – we are all talking of one place, albeit with several sides, so it’s not impossible to find a single description – like humanly warm – even if qualified by conditions (like: sometimes claustrophobically so). Despite the polarities of players and community, of small-townist factions and clans, of the myriad of competing, often conflicting ideas, this much, so far, can be agreed on.
The problem now is to extend this consensus into a plan for the future. But before any plan, what should the place where the new will happen ‘say’, be about? It can, of course, say anything, but unless this is a development of what it now says – a metamorphosis, shaped by hope, of what already is – it won’t feel at home there. This
The principles behind the process 39
Places build meaning through their four layers: physical, temporal, mood and spirit.
Many views see many facets
Many facets make one (external) whole
Place Time: temporal experience ephemera
place biography
How something makes us feel matters more than what it looks like
is about relating the essence, the spirit, of a project to the essence of a place, its ‘spir- it-of-place’. This gives a frame for all future discussions, plans and actions. Anything outside this frame will undermine the spirit we’re working towards. Anything with- in it will support these.
We start the design-stage, therefore, with communally generating a phrase that encompasses the aspirations of all involved; a phrase to encapsulate the essence of what we hope to achieve, or ‘spirit-of-project’ (the spirit-of-future-place), nourishing for the whole community.
Usually, people whom circumstances have brought together can agree on some issues of principle. Republicans and Loyalists in Belfast don’t need to speak to each other to agree that peace is something they all hope for. About practical details, how- ever, they could hardly be further apart. Similarly, on a housing estate, some may want fun for children, others tranquillity for the elderly. As adventure playgrounds and tranquil gardens – namely, as physical manifestations – these may be dramati- cally opposed.
But as ‘spirit-of-place’ nourishing both young and old, for the whole community, they need not be. It’s not hard to find a phrase that encompasses both aspirations. After all, both parties want a socially sustainable – which means multi-generational – community. It is, however, hard to find physical forms that satisfy both – if we go straight to this stage. If instead, however, we hold back and let the spirit at the heart of things slowly condense into form, we can find the forms appropriate to all. It is this ‘spirit-of-place’ that lies at the heart of the consensus design process.