Upstream - Grassroots Urban Placemaking with Mark Lakeman

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

What if you got your neighbors together and occupied the public spaces on your book, transforming them into whatever you would all want it to be? What would you include? ...A solar-paneled tea station? A little free library? A mural? This is the type of urban placemaking that the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon inspires and facilitates. In this Upstream Conversation, we spoke with Mark Lakeman an urban place-maker, permaculture designer, and community facilitator who co-founder of The City Repair Project. In the last decade, he has directed, facilitated, or inspired designs for more than three hundred new community-generated public places in Portland, Oregon alone. We spoke with him while he was visiting Santa Cruz about the capitalist history of the Urban Grid and how to reclaim our streets, revive community, and belong once more to place. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Upstream is a labor of love. If you like what you hear and want us to be able to produce more content, please consider donating at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. It's really interesting that the most walkable, talkable landscapes in the world are also the ones where people have the highest rates of public health and the lowest rates of crime. And then the urban structures of patriarchy are the ones where people live in the most desperation with the highest crime rates and the most abysmal public health indicators of all. So basically, as we do in this country, we tend to live in landscapes and systems that are not designed by us. And so they are not made to be responsive and they can't adjust according to our knowledge and our lessons

and are coming together to make decisions. In fact, even the ability to come together and make decisions is frustrated and then relegated to just voting. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. And that was Mark Lakeman, the guest for this Upstream Conversation. Mark Lakeman is an urban placemaker, permaculture designer, and community facilitator. He is the co-founder of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, and the principal of the community architecture and planning firm Communitecture. We spoke with him while he was visiting Santa Cruz, California. Welcome, Mark, to Upstream. Thank you for this.

Thanks, Stella. It's a pleasure. I'm wondering if we can start with an introduction. Would you mind introducing yourself for our listeners and telling us how you came to do the work that you do? Well, I'm Mark Lakeman, and I'm the founder of the City Repair Project, which began originally in Portland, Oregon. I'm also the founder and design director at Communitexture, which is an architecture and planning firm that has more of an urban permaculture foundation and emphasis. It has more of an urban permaculture foundation and emphasis. And I'm also co-founder of the Planet Repair Institute, which has been an urban permaculture school for the last nine years in Portland and several other projects that are all associated with those.

And I would just say they are all means. They're all different organizational structures. They're all different ways to engage the systems of the kind of Western hemispheric paradigm, you might say, to engage those systems and then help affect transformation, beneficial transformation, through participatory design, ecological design strategies, but overall basically subverting the colonial grid through placemaking. And how did you come to do this work? Was there a key person who inspired you? Was there a project? Was there a moment? Or was it a gradual process of your studies and

activism? Yeah, I'd say it was a gradual process in a way, but I definitely got help along the way. And I feel pretty humble about it. I feel really lucky. As I reflect on my privilege, I feel very lucky. At the same time, yeah, I came from basically a farm family. And now I'm kind of a bit of a public intellectual, maybe, but really more of an activist. But coming from kind of humble Southern Ohio roots, I would say. But right at the right time, my parents were just determined to somehow extract themselves from that extremely confusing and constraining context, especially my mom, to get out of there and to come to the West Coast to as open-minded a culture as they could find for raising their kids. coast to as open-minded a culture as they could find for raising their kids. And I'm a product of that search, also of the messages and the messaging of the 60s, the activism of the 60s, all these

different causes kind of conjoining with each other and becoming a common urge to reinvent our society, our political culture, our social context, and have a more ecological and just basis. So yeah, I'm a product of that. And I stand on the shoulders of all of these people that have shared that urge. But in my case, I'm really lucky to be the child of two architect parents, sort of radical architect parents. My mom just like wanting to go absolutely to the heart of the matter, like who were we before we were all conquered and made to speak languages that weren't our own tongue and forced to embrace philosophies or religious constructs that were not grounded in our own being, in our own trajectory, in our own history. And so I get towed around the

world by my mom to visit ancient places so that I can see how people used to relate before they were basically conscripted forcibly into structures and systems that are not responsive and not expressive of our will and our participation. So I'm really lucky to have a mother like that and a father who was a really brash activist back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, who

was just determined that by God, Portland, Oregon would last have a public square after 150 years. And fortunately, for some crazy reason, he was the founder of our urban design division in the city's Bureau of Planning. And they were like, we can fire him if we need to, but we need a vision. we can fire him if we need to, but we need a vision. And this guy seems to be the one who's the man of the moment. So yeah, suddenly our city started to have a brain. It started to have like a focus, more of an intentional aspect. And so I kind of come out of all of that. And that's just a little bit of the story, of course, like everyone else. I can really relate to that idea of being able to travel or see alternatives. That inspired me to do the alternative economic work that I do, being able to live in Cuba and in Sweden and to visit Bhutan, Mondragon, and just sensing that

alternative ways of organizing our economies are possible. So it sounds like for you and your mom, taking you to places that was related. Yeah, traveling, like you just described, gives you kind of like an ultra stereoscopic vision, like to realize that alternative realities are possible, and not just theoretically possible, but to see the eyes of people who are living with vastly different conditions, like all of the places that you just mentioned would have different rates of, you know, public health distress than we do. All of them would have more gathering places, community gathering places. And I think almost none of the ones you just mentioned began as a giant real

estate investment scam. We can say a lot more about that. And all of them would have a stronger cultural basis. So you could go there and feel what people are like, who aren't so fundamentally afraid of each other. So yeah, it's wonderful. And for Americans to get out and be around people who actually know how to speak and listen to each other and don't always worry about the price of things, just they fundamentally identify with their own species. That's a big deal. So let's talk about City Repair Project. What's the story of it? How did it come about?

And how does it relate to Portland? Let's see. I need to be able to give a really concise description of what it is. So for you guys who have been really kind of paying attention a lot to the history of Westwood expansion, or those who have just been paying attention to history in general, the history of westward expansion, or those who have just been paying attention to history in general, I can say city repair focuses on the fact that in the western hemisphere, cities are conceived of as administrative centers for basically regulating the ongoing extractive

processes of the entire surrounding landscape and all the life force there. That is basically one of the main definitions of the city within a kind of a civilizing or expansionist construct like we're in. And I want to be sure, like for people that might be into new urbanism, for instance, like as a development model, or who are really just sure that the city is our greatest best hope in terms of reducing carbon emissions. I want to clarify that when we're talking about urbanity, which is where we live in close proximity and density, and there's all this cultural fusion that happens because we're in close proximity and we're living and working with kind of the

same groups of people every day. Like, that's awesome. And that does give us great hope. In fact, the fact that we even speak and listen is an expression of the virtues of urbanity. Like, coming together around the campfire, we share stories. That campfire is always going to be near water because we've always got to have water, you know, for almost everything we do.

We're made of water. We've got to drink water. Like, urbanity starts that way. The village comes from that dynamic of coming together in place and time in a conducive space. But that is not the USA. You know, some of you might have already read, you know, many different critical analyses of Noam Chomsky where he's like, look people, the US is just weird. This is what he means. It's weird to have everything laid out on paper first so that people don't get to go out into the world searching for their kind of metaphorical promised land and enact settlement patterns that are adaptive to the landscape

and then have their way of relating to the ecology be actually interwoven and expressive of their kind of mythological conception. It's weird not to have that. It's weird to have your economic structure not be an expression of your settlement patterns and how you're like working within your bioregion to meet your needs, to find your food, to grow your food, to build your structures, and then have your social culture interact in that way, and then create an economic basis, a trade network with other communities around you. It's weird that we never got to do that. We never got to do that. In this country, going back really to the beginning, we began as somebody's real estate investment, whether it was

corporations in Holland, you know, or later from England, people were sending others over here as conscripted, basically servants, to found the colonies that were not just a way of getting away from oppressive medieval contexts, but, you know, fundamentally as a way for corporations to be able to obtain more land and extract more resources and bring the proceeds back to them. What Chomsky points out is that the U.S. is the first time in the history of the world where a colony broke away from its kind of parent country or countries in order to itself become an empire.

That's just weird. So what that means is we were basically laid out according to goals and objectives that were not human with urban structures and economic constructs that were exploitive. And then once we broke away because we just, we had to be more human, or at least that was the idea that like, you know, we're going to throw off these oppressive extractive structures and be self-determining. That's good, I guess. But it turns out that our so-called founders wanted themselves to go forth to extract and exploit and plunder and take.

Which brings us to the National Land Ordinance of 1785. Most Americans have never heard of this. There are four great documents in the founding of the country, but we've only heard of the three. Why have we never heard of the first one, the biggest one, and the most foundational one that literally has designed the lines that underlie our feet everywhere across the country? So we've heard of the Declaration, of course, and the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, but the National Land Ordinance was enacted before those three, and it was the framework for westward expansion, and it mandated a political, economic, and even a geographic structure for how we would expand going westward. And really, the other documents are

added onto it, but it proscribes how time, space, and life would become a set of interchangeable commodities. And instead of us enacting settlement patterns, it was all basically designed as a way to ensure that no matter what everyone did going west, that the proceeds would come back to the east and feed the ruling class back there. And everyone can look this up if you want very, very quickly on the internet. You can find the National Land Ordinance either by that name or as the Northwest Land Ordinance, which was reauthorized over and over until it was known as the National Land Ordinance. So here we have Roman colonialism literally blueprinted as the framework for how America would go westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean,

planning the entire time to take the land from whatever cultures pre-existed. So I'm going on and on about that because when city repair is operating, we begin by understanding that we're not within human settlement patterns and yet we are human. And this is the key. The thing that we do over and over again is we find ourselves within infrastructures without gathering places, like entire neighborhoods all across the country where people are told they have no power and you have to go downtown

and maybe advocate at a city council meeting for a small change, a modest thing, right where you live. You're asking people who don't live where you live to let you do things where you live. That is insane. And that is normal for our country. Like insane is normal here. Disassociative, isolationist is normal in our country. So we look at a spectrum of things in city repair, like, okay, so we don't have gathering places, and therefore we don't have stewardship cultures that would otherwise cause cultural fusion, interactive coherence, ways of people being able to speak and listen, but also forums for interaction.

We don't have those things. It's not just the village square that's missing. To treat every neighborhood as basically a commodity where you only have houses, and you don't have commons for creative participation and expression and sacredness and food production and everything else any mother ever would say we needed we don't have so we don't have that we don't have the social cultures that would serve it and sustain it and then we don't have the cultural rituals that would bring us together and fill our hearts so in city repair we know that and we also know okay at the same time everyone is in some sense still a villager. They have

these instincts to support and to care and to have empathy and that comes up against the grid all the time and in fact it's the only thing that makes the grid work is the fact that we actually are awesome, overwhelmingly awesome. Like we won't run each other down in the streets, not because of a stop sign, but because we identify with each other. So City Repair is a search for the liberation of that character. And it first began by, you know, seizing a street intersection and turning it into a public square, goddammit.

We were just like, you know, arrest us now, we will stand together, all these grandmothers and little kids. Take us to jail, if you will. And the police are like, actually, this is the coolest thing we've ever seen. And we're not going to arrest you. And we're not going to even report you. There's not even going to be an incident here. Transportation's going to have to get mad. And when they do, call the police. Because the police were like, you know, they're sitting here looking at this spectacular expression where a street intersection has been turned into the village commons that it used to be for millennia. Before cars existed, before the grid existed, the crossroads was always the place that brought our lives together. Wherever our pathways converge,

the village is supposed to emerge kind of thing. That's like urban design 101. So city repair strategies to say let's elicit the village from within the grid and then see what it does. Like how it inspires people and then how it replicates like crazy once people see alternative examples. So I've given you a really long answer. It's beautiful. A few reflections. One on the point of the grid kind of being transposed or put upon communities. I remember being in my backyard in San Francisco when the concrete fell in and we realized there was a river that flowed behind our house through all of the backyards. And I was not aware of it. And I grew up in that house and I don't think any of my

neighbors were either and then imagining where that river which flowed from the top of the hill down and then probably joined a huge river that is now Ocean Avenue probably leading to the ocean so that gave me a real difference in a sense of what the actual bioregion or ecological systems were and are still there, but potentially beneath our grids. And then the other reflection around an essay written by, I believe, Wendell Berry around the construction of places in suburbs or shopping malls, that kind of thing, and how they're built. Like if you imagine a McDonald's building or a Borders or a Starbucks, the architecture being so prepackaged and usually very inexpensive materials and so same no matter where it is. And Wendell Berry said it's because those folks who come and build those projects don't live in those communities.

So it relates to what you said about the Western expansion being a way of getting money for them to be sent back to those on the East for that money. Because when those projects are built, the folks who build them don't necessarily care about that place. Yeah. Being remote and disinterested is definitely a key way of understanding how people could create landscapes that they themselves would never inhabit. Yeah, for sure. And I think Wendell Berry is absolutely right about that. That opens a can of worms to bring that up because, you know, in the diagnosis of what the fuck is wrong with the wealthy oligarch class in this country,

you know, a permaculture analysis is basically that they have cut themselves off from feedback. They're too far away from the impact of their choices. And it's dehumanizing them. I have to stop myself from going on and on about this. But basically, wealth is enabling people to be isolated from the impact of their choices, not just in terms of real estate development, but to vast ecologies. I mean, people are basically looking at spreadsheets and dreaming of yachts. They make a phone call, and it results in the destruction of vast housing tracts in various different cities where grandmothers on fixed incomes are suddenly thrown out into the streets

and suddenly becoming homeless when it was never their destiny to be that way, simply because people are so far removed that nothing becomes personal. And I think it's not delicious at all that there's this irony that the greatest impoverishment is actually for those people that are making those choices. That really, really, really, you're going to have this hugely disproportionate impact on your reality, and it's going to end up diminishing your own quality of life. Like you're going to be able to have that impact without even understanding that you're really having the impact, or maybe you'll feel a sense of power over doing that, but you never like feel whatever is poignant or emotional about what you're doing just in order to have yet more stuff i mean i what i've observed with all of the the wealthy people that i have i've interacted with

over time is that they just get smaller their receptors for experience become smaller and smaller and shriveled and then the more and more that they need and then the more and more that they have this is one of the things I learned in Oakland a few years ago in a workshop about sustainable economics the more that the wealthy have of our common wealth the more that our reality gets destroyed because they're always seeking to to bank their surplus in real estate. So the more they have, the more that they destroy of our reality, the more gentrification will happen and the more displacement or the more violence, really social violence will happen,

the more economic injustice will happen. The more they have, the worse everything gets, including for themselves. Yeah. Okay. Well, I kind of, the worse everything gets, including for themselves. Yeah. Okay. Well, I kind of, yet again, gone on another big tangent. Let's come back to what you're saying. The grid is fundamentally anti-ecological. When I was studying it in architecture school, before I was ever helped to see that colonialism had social and ecological consequences, it was just an urban form, but at least we were taught in architecture that there are these famous, absurd examples of the application of the grid. You know how the grid is like placed over San Francisco, and then you get these crazy steep roads because nobody's trying to get up the hill through switchbacks. I was just talking with this really influential

developer guy the other day, having this wonderful conversation where he's like, oh, my God, I thought the grid was just a geometry. It's synonymous with unsustainability. Like it it it's an expression of violence. Like I'm watching this guy who has a really big say on how people live in our region. I'm suddenly waking up to all this stuff. And yeah, we were talking about the colonial grid. And he's like, I was under the impression that it was so great because you can lay it out quickly. And I said, yeah, and the rest of the quote, that quote comes from Spiro Kostov, one of the primary architectural historians that students

have been made to study the last few decades. The rest of that quote is, yeah, it's really easy to lay out while you're fighting the people whose land you're taking. You can lay out the grid. You can have your surveyors at work to lay out basically your encampment. And then your encampment is placed over the ruins of the people you're attacking because they're located at a place that is propitious with water and exposure and resource all around and the right orientation toward the sun. So you wipe out their village, take their land, build your camp, and then build your urban structure on top of that. That right there is Roman colonialism.

People should know about this stuff. Yeah, the grid is anti-ecological. It ignores the fact that water is flowing under us and it tries to turn streams into culverts, for sure. But just as imperial religion intends to erase alternative understandings, with great hostility and fascism, the grid is designed to not just be an infrastructure that creates repetitious kind of sameness and enables homogenization. It's designed to erase alternative settlement patterns. Like how many Americans walking around in this Roman grid of

ours here even remember that they had ancestors with alternative cultures, their own languages, beliefs, and urban forms, and all these different things that had meaning, they don't even think of them anymore. And the grid is designed to do that. The grid isn't just a geometry, it's a mentality. It is the great architecture of patriarchy, of supremacy for sure. We are all in a supremacist structure, which is misogynistic absolutely in its design. Here's how. Basically, feminist space is generative. It brings people together in an interactive location, and a piazza, a public square, is feminist space. The space of patriarchy, there really isn't space. It reduces the public commons to a repetitious series of linear corridors, and then it creates objects. I mean, laughingly,

And then it creates objects. I mean, laughingly, understandably, patriarchy is consumed with objects, especially tall ones, statements of ego. But let's face it, frankly, statements of inadequacy. And so the American landscape, the American urban form is characterized by objects and not places. But the best places in the world that we save our money to fly across the oceans to go see where we feel human and we don't want to leave are places that are punctuated by gathering places and open spaces that basically open up constantly through the fabric of the urban reality where you are, that invite you to come outside and interact and walk around. And it's really interesting that the most walkable, talkable landscapes in the world are also the ones where people have the highest rates of

public health and the lowest rates of crime. And then the urban structures of patriarchy are the ones where people live in the most desperation with the highest crime rates and the most abysmal public health indicators of all. So basically, as we do in this country, we tend to live in landscapes and systems that are not designed by us. And so they are not made to be responsive and they can't adjust according to our knowledge and our lessons and our coming together to make decisions. In fact, even the ability to come together and make decisions is frustrated and then relegated to just voting. So let's take an example. Let's take a story of, for those of us who do live in a grid and we have an intersection,

for example, what might be the potential that we're not seeing or realizing? Maybe could you tell us a story of an intersection in Portland? Thanks for bringing it around to the positive, because I'm betting somebody might have been crying after that rant. Yeah, well, I don't really care to know any of this stuff if we're not going to do anything about it. Might as well just take the wrong pill and go back to sleep. Okay, let me tell you an inspiring story that leads to this great epiphany, this seizure of an intersection.

The intersection then becomes a legal way for everyone to transform public space, and then it travels to all these other cities. So very quickly, I was doing this corporate career in architecture and planning. And one day I went to work, I had no idea what was about to happen, but there was a huge toxic waste cover-up that happened. We were designing the Bank of America building in downtown Portland, and it turned out that the biggest contractor in the state of Oregon, Hoffman Construction, was routinely covering up toxic waste concentrations like this, except this time it was right on the edge of the Willamette River. So all of this toxicity would be leaching into the water table and therefore into the river and therefore into the fish that we ourselves were eating. And the way that this came up was just disgusting.

Everyone was laughing around the table when these government inspectors left the meeting. We were supposed to be digging this stuff out of the ground and encapsulating it and storing it forever in some remote site. Instead, we were just going to leave it in the ground and pretend it never happened. And I was so disgusted. I just went back to my desk.

I was so upset. And I ended up quitting. And I quit in such a good way. Basically, I went out the door assuring everyone that I believed that they still had, like, all their dreams somewhere intact inside of them. But I had to get the fuck out. And so I went traveling for, like, seven years. So I went traveling for like seven years, and I went around to different native cultures from Southern Pacific to Northern Africa, Eastern Western Europe, and especially Central

America, and just asking if people had any idea what the hell was wrong with our people and what was wrong with me. And it was a spectacular time. Even in the USA, when I was hitchhiking around, I was just trying to be out there floating in randomness, trying to meet people and have alternative experiences. And when I would ask people, if you had any idea what was wrong with me, they would just be like, okay, let's get some food. Let's get some drink. This is going to take a while. But the thing is, what everyone wanted to talk about, like nobody was like, you're a bastard and your people are fucked. None of that. Every single alternative culture I talked

with wanted to talk about sisterhood and brotherhood and commonality, common purpose, common culture. And they wanted to talk about colonialism and cultural disruption. And the best thing that ever happened was in a Mayan village in the mid-90s when somebody said to me that the only reason that my people had done what we had done to others was because these same patterns of disruption and destruction had been done to our own villages so long ago we didn't even know who we are. This person is like holding my face in his hands and I'm crying and I'm totally apologizing for Westward Expansion. Because I was like, I had this like desperate need to become accountable and to face it. And this person's holding my face in his hands and I'm totally crying. And he's like, no, no, you only did this because it was done to you so long ago.

You don't even know who you are. Meaning, you know, us. He's like, go home. Stand in the middle of a street. Look in all directions and see how the lines are long and flat and straight. And then walk a block and see that it's the same. And then go to another city or town and see that it's the same. And then realize you're in this giant imposed infrastructure

that the true people of this land died trying to defend their lives against. And then realize this was done to your own people. And this particular Mayan guy was saying, this may be the unifying cause that we all are searching for, that we all have been under attack, and we've all become crazy. The conversation went

on for a long time. And I'm sitting there going like, okay, so I don't get to just be the culture I identify with, a certain Seneca grandmother or Welsh people. I have to identify with the conqueror as well, because they're in me for sure. They're in me for sure. So I have to identify with the entire situation. So like reconciliation, ha, it's like everyone's redemption depends upon their ability to face their own family story and actually acknowledge who they are in that lineage. You won't find redemption without facing the truth of your own story. So yeah, this call comes back to an intersection. So I went home and I'm standing there in incredible culture shock.

I'm coming back from all these societies characterized by cultural expression and intergenerational community and talk about placemaking. They don't have to organize to create places. The best places I ever visited, there's no, no one needs to get a permit. You don't have to go away. You don't have to leave to create places. The best places I ever visited, there's no, no one needs to get a permit. You don't have to go away. You don't have to leave the home zone, go to the work zone to

make the money to pay for the home zone. You don't have to like have an idea and then make a bunch of money to get someone else to decide whether or not you have the power to create and then pay for a permit. Like the best Mayan village I was in, they were like, okay, we're going to build a latrine tomorrow morning for where you are staying. So, you know, you can have a place to go to the bathroom and we're going to build some benches and a place, a covered place for people to sit. And I was like, oh, okay, we're going to need to draw that. No, like you just start, you just create and you're almost done by noon. No, like you just start, you just create and you're almost done by noon. And it just brought me back to the spontaneity and the freedom of creating when I was a kid with my friends, putting a blanket over a table and putting pillows under it or and creating womb space

or creating like a, you know, a tree house or something like that. Except that this was an alternative cultural experience that they had all the time, that they could just take their children and mentor them immediately without ever having to leave their kids. They were always building their family, their familial cohesion and community. So I came back to where I had grown up as a kid, and I looked around my community. I'm like, oh my god, I can see the grid now. We all leave at the start of the day and we all have to go elsewhere. And none of us ever decided it would be that way.

And this is all across the country. We're all told to leave our village. We can't create livelihood. Of course, there's no public square. I'm looking around, I'm like, this is where I grew up and I never cared to even talk to people. I just played with other kids,

but the old ladies, I never wanted to ask whether they needed any help. So I could see the grid. And I walked right over to the southwest corner of this intersection and I knocked on this door to this old lady, Anne-Marie. And she's like, hello. You know, I've been gone for like seven years, but I had never said hello to her in my life.

I lived across the street all these years. And she's like, what? And I said, can I had never said hello to her in my life. I lived across the street all these years and she's like, what? And I said, can I help you? I don't even care what it is with anything. So I just did a few tasks for her. She didn't have any children. She had no money. Her house hadn't been painted since 1966. And I just sat there relentlessly organizing neighborhood support. I was out there working at night with ladders and spotlights. Look, for people who are talking about decolonize, this is what we're talking about. Like, I refuse to be selfish anymore.

I refuse to be self-obsessed. I refuse to dream only about myself. Like, how toxic that is. So at the end of that first day, we built a 24-hour tea station on her corner. And that was just like, you know, to hell with the idea that public space is not a place where people meet. The very next day after we had built that tea house, the first person to get a cup of tea there was a person, a young man who's about, well, he's early 30s. He was looking for his brother. Their parents had died when he

was seven and his brother was six and they were separated and sent to different families, but his brother never arrived. So he's back there like 30 years later, still looking for his brother, his little brother. And in the meantime, those of us in the neighborhood who never talked to each other, we all had seen this guy for years who lived down in the Blackberries. So right as they're at the tea station, this guy comes pushing a shopping cart up the street. And he makes himself a cup of tea and he hears this man talking about searching for his lost brother. And the two guys suddenly realize that they're each other's long lost brother.

Oh, still hard to talk about every time. Anyway, you know, like that's beautiful. But what it made me realize is that every fucking community across this country has stories that aren't getting to come into contact with each other, where people are not learning, they're not sharing, they're not finding each other. And then like, it just multiplies the possibility for tragedy and trauma and violence. So Emery told me that story at the end of the day when it had happened. And that was my entry point to engage in homelessness and build basically homeless villages with people. Because I suddenly realized, I mean, it was like a curtain had been drawn back.

I was like, I don't even see where I am. You know, I don't even know what's happening. I walk around with all these, like everybody else, projecting onto other people stuff I know nothing about. So anyway, the beginning of that public square was a fundamentally inspiring story like that of realization and connection. So then we built a little library on the other corner. And then we built a kid's playhouse and a self-service chalk dispenser and then a place for art and poetry on the other corner. And then we built a kid's playhouse and a self-service chalk dispenser and then a place for art and poetry on the other corner. And then on the other corner, a little marketplace and a place for information and a place for creative expression. And then we just kept building on each corner more and more stuff and planting all these edibles and flowers and fruit trees. And yeah, and then the condo owners several blocks

away got angry. But we were authorizing ourselves to have power in public space. And I knew that we didn't have it because I've been working in corporate architecture and I knew we didn't have power. But this is one of the things you'll find. It doesn't even occur to people that they don't have power because the patterns are so normative that no one's talking and no one's doing anything that it wouldn't occur to anyone to do anything more than maybe plant some blueberries or some flowers out there or maybe put in a bench. So we were fundamentally radicalizing our space and trying to kind of elicit a public square. And then at a certain point, we painted the entire surface of the square with these beautiful radial sort of circles of color from the center. And then these like Zia-like lines going down in all the directions.

And then somebody in the condominiums eight blocks away got upset and called the police. And then the police showed up and they said, this is the best thing we've ever seen. And then transportation got mad. And then we had a meeting with them. and then transportation got mad and then we had a meeting with them and then the police showed up at our meeting and told the transportation people that they needed to look at their own fucking website at the fact that they had said they want to engage youth they want to create gathering places they want to reduce crime they want to make streets safer they want to like build community pride and get people to pick up trash and they want to beautify. They want to support livability and sustainability. And the police were like, all this they have just done. Back the fuck off.

Then they didn't say fuck. They said something like frick, but they were upset. And frankly, you can't just wait for the police to feel that way. We were really proactive with this guy named Ed, this giant sort of mean looking policeman who was actually a big softie. And we found it out because we started to have these kind of tea parties on one of the corners where there was a bunch of open space. And every Monday night at seven, he knew the two super cute little girls would be waiting for him with chocolate cake and a hot drink. So Ed would always show up and then he would come and sit with us. And so we were proactive in that engagement. And as a sidebar, you know, I definitely criticize

the fact that everybody waits until points of conflict to have communication with the police. And I think it's been a very powerful strategy for us to say, you know, we are decolonizing, including how we see other humans. And probably our only hope is to offer them a chance to be human too, because we don't have tanks and we don't have like missiles, but we have our humanity and our creativity and our love. We have beauty. Like we have the most powerful things. If only we can reach each other's feelings. So that was our proactive strategy with Ed. And it worked. He became our advocate.

The intersection was legalized unanimously by the city council, and partially because of the police. But, I mean, the city council only needed to visit and hear a little bit of what we said, which was, United States of America, lowest number of gathering places of all first world nations in the communities where we live, the highest incidence of violence related to social isolation. How many universities are filled with studies and analyses of this phenomena that we are all experiencing? And they were like, oh my God, what all stands to change if we enable local communities to have power right where they live, to design, fund, program, inhabit, and then evolve these spaces.

So yeah, the day that we legalized that, it became a prototype. And then it began to replicate across the city. It's like 700 versions of this across Portland, Oregon. And the consequence of it, we don't claim don't claim, you know, we're not like the source of all the things that are happening in that city. But the fact that it has gone from a white supremacist homeland now to like the most dynamic urban culture in the whole of North America, it's like the best story is the reinvention from within the rot of the supremacist dream that young generations would rise up and reject that, that it's an increasingly participatory culture. So it's trying to learn all

the time and learn from its mistakes. There's all these expressions that prove that it's not just grassroots. I mean, we have the most green buildings of all cities by far. And that means that somehow we're affecting the development culture, but they're only becoming affected because everybody else is wanting a different reality. So the rate of participation is high in all things. The Portland Plan, which is our guide for like how the entire city and then the metro region will grow and change, is characterized by things like growth boundaries that protect farm and forest land, super logical strategies for concentrating transportation and density along transit routes.

So on a big infrastructure scale, it's super intelligent. And the rise of women leadership across the region. That's been going on for a long time. Conservatives cannot get elected. They don't even try anymore with their fascist backward mentality. They get no traction in the region. Well, at least especially in Portland, but Clackamas County is a little bit of an exception.

Yeah, and I don't mean to be sounding like vilifying anyone, but I do want to vilify Craven aspects of the culture. So that's one intersection, but then it's replicated in just a jillion different ways. And it's so rewarding to be an activist helping to propel it personally. And when you basically put it out there that you're going to support people in anything that they want to do to try to change the world, then you get to be part of this such a satisfying process of seeing stuff come forth that you never dreamt was possible in this world. So all these different forms that you get to see. So that's a good entry point to the topic of imagination. What's the role of imagination in the work that you do? Yeah, well, it kind of makes me sad to think of this because, you know, I mean, imagination,

it's this capacity that we have to express and to enjoy. We always associate it usually with like aesthetics, I suppose, like to be able to imagine and manifest something would be a satisfying experience. But I think in our context, we are having to retrofit something in a way where it's almost like catching up. Like we've built these vast urban structures, and now we're trying to retrofit them with the gathering places that actually, through the whole human story, people begin with the gathering places. And then the cultural fabric around the gathering places expresses what comes out of the interaction in those spaces. Really, the cart is in front of

the horse, has been in front of the horse in our context for so long. And now imagination comes as a release. It comes as a healing process. I have seen so many people get involved in what we're doing and find their voice. They find community. They find partnership. And this is all true for me. I mean, my wife and my child, we've come together and we've created our baby out of finding each other in these same processes and spaces. So it's certainly been that for me. But it's also, I mean, I watch people transform. I watch them cry. I remember a young

woman named Marilena going, just sobbing and speaking through her sobs like, this is the first time in my life where people have actually wanted me to give what is inside of me. You know, like instead of like working at 7-Eleven and then being fired for not serving enough big cult cups or whatever she's done in her life where people just want her to do this perfunctory task in city repair. From the beginning, we've known like we don't know what in the world we're doing. So we can't really make any mistakes.

And actually, we want to make mistakes if we can so we can learn because we don't know what in the world we're doing so we can't really make any mistakes and actually we want to make mistakes if we can so we can learn because we don't know but one thing we knew is that we need everybody to be bringing what they're bringing what they're feeling and what they're capable of into the mix the entire city is not going to be repaired until every different realm or subculture or infrastructural culture is engaged in the reinvention of everything that they're concerned with, or at least reconsideration. So we want to hear what people feel, and we want them to be able to feel like they can be more purposeful. to be able to feel like they can be more purposeful. It's a kind of activism where you're inviting people to bring what they have and either jump in and help with whatever they're attracted to or propose new things.

Because just in the same way that urbanity is a fusion of all these things coming together and then stuff comes out of that, the same way, pretty much the repair of the city will happen in that kind of same way, pretty much the repair of the city will happen in that kind of same way, except within patriarchy, it's designed to just be a system that it doesn't allow the fusion and just regulates and regiments people, stratifies, compartmentalizes, specializes people. That's actually a primary definition of the colonial city-state is everyone lives in specialization. Anyone listening to this

right now might go like, oh my god, I can remember how early people were asking me what I would do for a living or my career counselor trying to pigeonhole me into something specific. That is the definition of the city-state itself. You're no longer a generalist with specific talents. You're now a specialist that doesn't understand how the whole picture fits together that's the very definition of colonialism right there yeah it's interesting as you're speaking about the word repair city repair because it like to me it implies like it can be repaired to a former state in which it was once maybe good is not the right word but i have the same kind of questioning

around sustainability it's like what are we trying to sustain so i know for me i resonate more with the word enlivenment like how can we enliven ourselves in our purpose and our livelihoods but also enliven communities enliven spaces you brought up placemaking you know as a sense of to me enlivenment um so i just wanted to share that reflection on the word repair is interesting to me. Yeah, there's other terms. I like thrivability. I kind of feel like the state of our society needs these translation or interface program words. Like sustainability has played that function.

It's helped people go, oh, something that might be able to continue. You know, regeneratives, obviously more what we're talking about, but it's a little distant for the mainstream. So sustainability is a kind of a, to me, it's a strategic word, just like LEED as a design standard. The people who formulated LEED always knew that it was inadequate, but it was a way of trying to get development culture to be... What is LEED? I don't know. Oh, sorry. Leadership in Energy Efficient Design. It was a really pervasive design standard for architecture, you know, when you could get LEED gold or LEED silver or LEED platinum, depending on how efficient your building was. But the

proponents of that system knew that our buildings are so freaking energy intensive and the mortgages that we pay, like multiply the actual amount that we pay for something by like two or three times. So the energy intensity almost cannot be reconciled, but they were just trying to engender more consciousness around the impact that we're having. And then swiftly after LEED came things like the living building challenge or passive house design, which are definitely more wonderful in all imperfect systems. So yeah, to me, repair, I mean a lot of things by repair. It sounds gentle. It helps people sort of consider that something might be broken and it's constructive

it's just like well you know we can fix things so I think it has a certain kind of appeal but there's other levels of meaning for me I mean I resent the fact that my ancestral villages were overrun by crazy people then I resent that my ancestry is made up of crazy people now and villagers and then all these like people that were trying to resist and then that got swept up in it. And I resent it. I hate it.

And I want a revolution. And also, frankly, I would like to go back to the very intersection in space and time when my familial lineage had its choice removed. I want to go back to that intersection. had its choice removed. I want to go back to that intersection. So repair in way is also about pulling back and reconsidering and reclaiming. It has all these connotations. It also means to a great extent rejecting, in my view. It means a lot of things. Thank you. So just one more question. So this show is called Upstream, based off of a metaphor of bodies floating down a river and jumping in to save them and then realizing that some folks have to go upstream

to figure out why is everyone falling in in the first place. So we've talked about a lot of societal and economic issues, including inequality, colonization, alienation, isolation, and violence. And I'm wondering, when you go upstream from these societal issues that you obviously care so deeply about, what do you see as the root causes of those? And maybe in the paradigm or in our mindset or the root causes, and how does City Repair and the work that you do address that root cause level? Yay, what a great question. Yeah, I think that I've spent my whole life trying to go upstream.

I think for me, what ends up happening is I go upstream and I find out something. And then wherever I am in that stream, I immediately try to apply what I've learned within the context that I can design and that I can impact. So I'm doing action research. I got that term from Rian Eisler and her book, The Chalice and the Blade, which I'm going to go on about here because this is part of going upstream. But action research, yeah, it's not just to gather information and then create books that kind of, I don't know, people have all kinds of different motives for gathering information and compiling it.

I guess for people that do really meaningful work, they're kind of hoping to share the information that someone's going to do something. I really like it when people gather that information and they share it, and then they also set about doing something immediately themselves. So I think Rianne Eisler's work is like that.

She is powerful and passionate and brilliant and has not stopped since she wrote the book. So yeah, about going upstream, she has basically tried to shed daylight on the brilliant work of Margita Gambudas, who is an archaeologist working behind the Iron Curtain in the early part of the last century, up to the middle of the 20th century. And Gambudas did this amazing stuff. And it's amazing partially because the rest of us couldn't

get access to the sites that she was excavating. Basically, her work, her life's work was to establish the framework of the story of prehistory. What is the fundamental story that led to the history of what we know? Gimbutas' work was really purely archaeological, but at the same time, she was a woman, so she wasn't content with the conventional answers that men in the profession might have, or she didn't come at it with a bias toward interpreting the information. What she found was that there were a series of massive invasions that came down from a culture above the Baltic Sea. We refer to them as the Kurgans, and Kurgan is a term that refers to burials or burial mounds. I guess the Kurgan culture themselves were characterized by burial mounds,

the way that they would bury their chieftains and stuff, these big mounds filled with virgins and chariots and lots of axes and stuff. So that's who they were. They would come every 800 years and attack and kill and enslave as many people as they could. And what's really spectacular for us to understand is that at that time, before they began their massive invasions, for a spectrum of thousands of years, the cultures of Eastern and Western Europe were characterized by equilibrium.

It's almost like a cliche. People can barely even believe it. Like, wait, you're saying that in these strata that we can investigate through all the Neolithic, we find all of these goddess, basically fertility figurines. Yeah. Not only that, we don't find villages that feature fortifications. We don't find evidence of warfare. In fact, in the graves of our ancestors before the Kurgans and then even after the Kurgans in the cultures that managed to survive, we don't find evidence of human to human violence. You don't find hack marks on bones. You find people buried in these kind of wombs.

Their bodies are configured as if they're back in their mother and they're sprinkled with flowers and they're covered with spices and minerals and they're sprinkled with flowers, and they're covered with spices and minerals, and they're restored to the earth to regenerate. And then the Kurgans come along. The Kurgans, Rian Eisler makes the case that patriarchy and colonialism are from the Kurgans, and the craziness of westward expansion and colonialism in general is an impulse. It's a set of patterns and behaviors, and it's actually potentially even a living culture that persists throughout

as a continuity that is driving this whole thing. I know that sounds a bit conspiratorial, but it doesn't have to even be conscious. It can just be normative at this point. But the Kurgans came every 800 years, and they just burned the world of our people. They destroyed the villages. This is what Gimbutas also found, that it wasn't always the same. They didn't always win. There were people who managed to persist. There were clearly villages where all the men and boys were killed, and the women were basically taken and used as breeders. And yet we see the women that persisted having a cultural impact on the Kurgans themselves. So in the strata that she's excavating, she finds that the cultural emphasis and the interest in a broader spectrum of concerns expressed through art and ceramics and even building form,

and some aspect of temples expresses the persistence of the cultures that preexisted the Kurgans. So there was this resistance, persistence that would continue. Some people actually managed to survive outright, like up in distant valleys, where they managed to survive intact, but they became warlike in order to defend themselves. So Europe became pockmarked with all of these different people in transition. And then it would happen again 800 years later. And then it happened again. I think there's like three huge waves of these madmen. They were madmen because they were focused on war technology and killing, and their cosmology was even worshipful of destruction. and of the colonial grid and all its effects, comes from there.

And she's not trying to offload responsibility. She's not saying, oh, therefore, this isn't who we are. She's like, this is what was done to us, and this is who we are now. So that's a big part of how I'm perceiving what's upstream. For me, that connects with this idea that there's a Sol Nijetson quote, the line between good and evil goes down the heart of every person. There's a Sol Nijetson quote, the line between good and evil goes down the heart of every person. And so what that story reminds me of is that we all have the Kurgan, am I saying it right? The Kurgan mentality within us and that possibility for destruction, for darkness, for evil.

But we also all have the capacity for good and for regeneration and collaboration. And so it's which seeds do we want to water? And actually not seeing the Kurgan as an other group, but seeing our ability to also have that could actually be what then could help us unite over common issues or common ground. Yeah. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, that's a great way, I guess, to conclude because it's very much about reconciliation inside of one's own self.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark. Thank you. Thanks, Della. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Mark Lakeman, co-founder of the City Repair Project and principal of the community architecture firm Communitexture. Upstream is a labor of love. If you like what you hear and want us to be able to produce more content, please consider donating at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Upstream theme music was produced by Robert Raymond. Our other interviews and documentaries are available on our website, upstreampodcast.org,

as well as on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and most other places you listen to podcasts. Thank you.