Badass democracy - reclaiming the public commons: Mark Lakeman at TEDxSantaCruz
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ม.ค. 2025
- With the lowest number of community gathering places of all first world nations, it's time for the USA to transform space into place. This talk will describe a grand but doable community-level strategy that is already underway across the American grid.
This TEDxSantaCruz talk is one of 22 surrounding our theme of "Activate" at the third full-day TEDxSantaCruz event held March 8, 2014 at the Hotel Paradox in Santa Cruz, CA. www.tedxsantacr...
Mark Lakeman is an unusual urban designer, social catalyst, and a place making pioneer. As founder of the design activist cultures of the City Repair Project, communitecture design collaborative, and Planet Repair Institute, Mark's work challenges conventions of thought and action, and even dares to suggest that much of history, that seems long past, may not yet be settled. His work to transform the American colonial grid into a network of intersections of convergence and cultural expression has become a movement that spans the continent. With more than 350 projects in Portland, Oregon alone, the projects emerge from communities as outrageous fusions of unheard of functions and irrepressible forms, in which design is employed as a means to bring people together. As a son of Portland, Oregon's visionary culture of design activism, Mark helps keep his city on the edge. www.communitect...
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Yesss! Mark Lakeman, you are such a brilliant radical revolutionary! Appreciate you so much! 🙏🏽💜🤩
This has been on my heart for a long time. Thank you!
Ready to start painting the intersections with our community. I've seen some of these Portland intersections and they are beautiful and inviting.
Can’t we make this guy president? 🇺🇸
Yes please! 🤩
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:58 🌎 The USA has the fewest outdoor gathering places among first-world nations, leading to a sense of isolation and violence.
02:07 🏢 Many U.S. cities are structured based on the Roman grid, which lacks the communal spaces necessary for human interaction.
04:42 🌟 Portland, Oregon has passed an ordinance allowing local communities to transform public spaces, creating vibrant gathering places.
08:24 🛠️ Children's creative ideas for public spaces demonstrate the potential for building vibrant community hubs.
13:50 🌆 Community-driven projects have the power to revitalize neighborhoods and bring people together.
16:51 💪 Community activism and engagement can help communities rebalance and address various challenges, including climate change.
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Such a great inspiring talk.
Schools can be utilized during evening, weekend and summer.
Yeah that's my uncle!!!
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
The United States has a shortage of outdoor gathering places, leading to high rates of violence and isolation.
The layout of many U.S. cities follows a colonial grid system that hinders community interaction and participation.
The speaker, along with others in Portland, initiated an ordinance to transform street intersections into vibrant community gathering spaces.
Creating these gathering places can foster community engagement, bridge societal divides, and address various local issues.
These projects use design to empower communities and build a sense of place, promoting what the speaker calls "badass democracy."
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The grid system did not arrive in America with Europeans.
"Teotihuacan, near modern-day Mexico City, is the largest ancient grid-plan site in the Americas. The city's grid covered eight square miles."
It is not exclusively Roman. It was present millenia before the Romans in Egypt, Babylon, India and China.
Imperial, perhaps, yes. But that's not just a white-people thing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan
Ian, ho ho! You want to discuss the grid? This is subject that I am quite well versed in. I know the histories that you refer to in China, Egypt, Assyria/Babylonia, and the others. I'll also add to your list add that South America also featured early grid designs such as Chan Chan, and perhaps earlier urban centers, rivaling Teotihuacan.
No, it's not just a white people thing, but then none of the locations that you referred to were white either, eh?
Saw you speak at Arcosanti, AZ for Convergence Festival! I loved that talk!!! Is there a Video of it out yet? :) You're amazing, I would love to work with you someday!
But don't cars still go through the intersections? I don't get how this works
Check out Badass Democracy/City Repair's indiegog Fundraising Campaign here: www.indiegogo.com/projects/village-building-convergence#home
VBC 14's Placemaking sites including the intersection repairs Mark talks about in the video AND an exciting line-up of speakers and performers here: www.scribd.com/doc/224633840/City-Repair-s-2014-Village-Builder-magazine
And volunteer with us by filling out our worktrade form here: docs.google.com/forms/d/1-gYgeNPdJce4_Mp9m9_z2EzWHO1mxORwHkF7b496ZbQ/viewform
fine, but the grid is not the enemy. The grid connects people. Cul-de-sacs and superblocks disconnect people.
Ian, where do you live? Anywhere near Portland? We should have a coffee to enjoy this subject. I swear that if we have a half hour I will leave you persuaded that the grid of the western hemisphere is much more than a mere traffic design. For instance, the grid is always initiated through unbelievable violence. You will certainly agree that in this context it is always used as a device for colonial expansion, forming a geographic framework for an economy that has been designed to depend upon expansion and voracius extraction. If we get a chance to talk I bet that you'll end up agreeing that cultural development and sustainability, in the context of the grid, is deeply hampered by the fact that such a policy-driven set of settlement patterns doesn't even provide places for people to gather.
That's really just for starts. If we have coffee then we can explore how life in the grid is so very different than in communities that are generated by place-based peoples, who for themselves design their own integrated communities, and economies. Public health issues are entirely diametric, with geomorphic place based communities being far healthier mentally and physically. The fact is that the western grid is commonly referred to as The Roman Grid, because it is an extension of that historical continuity of colonial expansion. You could say that I have a problem with imposed frameworks that have resulted in such placeless, imposed systems designed to embed the construct that the world is for sale, to commodify indigenous lands.
About traffic and the grid, you are stating the issue based on a few assumptions that I think should be questioned.
1 - Should place-based communities simply give up their local sense of place to drivers who want to pass through a community, perhaps because by design zoning separates working from living?
2 - Like millions of multi-use pathways in the world, are ours not also able to accommodate more than one function? Are cars "more important" than a place for cultural activity where people live?
3 - Here's a good question- Though cars are only a century or so old, should they displace the multi-use places in the spaces between our homes? Should they, when the consequence has been to engender the most intense effects of social isolation in the developed world, and innumerable forms of resultant violence?
4 - Where IS the village square where developed our urban character? WHERE?
Ian, you know that the plaza is provided for in all the Spanish colonial grids, but why are they not present in so many cities, towns and neighborhoods in the USA and Canada? Why would anyone develop American neighborhoods without providing gathering places? The problem is that the grid is an expression of colonial design, where some people decide the geographies of others' lives, omitting, forgetting, and cutting the budget on pieces of lives that can only ever be rightly created by place based people for themselves.
Ian, it would be very nice to have coffee some time. I travel a bunch and spend time immersing in neolithic cultural landscapes. I bet that you know, it's very helpful to have familiarity with pre-colonial settlement patterns, so you can get a sense of the fabulous spectrum of geomorphic structures that can actually be created by place based communities. These are ecological responses and true cultural expressions. Anyway, my thoughts for now.