The call for a new commons: by Robert Leaver

In William Butler Yeat's poem, The Second Coming, he notes that it is the center of our humanity that longs to hold together, but..."things fall part...mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." 

In the spirit of Yeats, I call upon you to say it is time to create a newcommons to help find a way to re-establish many "centers" or many new commons so people and ideas come together, across unusual boundaries to connect in meaningful ways. 

History:  When America began, the commons was the land held in common by all, for the use by all.  Today, when you drive through New England, the town commons is where you experience the remnants of this idea.  The idea of "the commons"--wherever people still come together to connect, or get some work done -- is still alive.  Starbucks is our 21st century application.  Office water coolers create "the commons", albeit it is fleeting.  Historically, parts of Central Park in NY, recreated the commons.  Well thought out downtowns in villages and cities throughout the world still express the essence of the commons.

In early America, on the commons, the cows of everyone grazed, town meetings were held there, people posted notices to either buy or sell something and people met on the commons to foster community, information sharing, and innovation.

Today: Today, times have changed. The call for a new commons is not nostalgia, pulling us back to what was.  Rather, it is about creating the next generation of places--many new commons--for people to gather, commune, and get work done--both online and in person.  The call today is for anintercultural milieu not vanilla or exclusion.  It is about bringing together, for impact, differences in thinking, disciplines, culture, and ways of working. 

This is what New Commons is about.

City and Soul Why Now?

To better understand people, community, ecology, and place, we are invited to experience city and soul. City is both a physical place and of Greek origin, citizens gathering in masses. The Greeks thought of city as both polis - the throng of people - and civitas, or citizen. Interestingly, The Oxford English Dictionary cites the presence of a cathedral for what marked our early ideas of a city. This is probably due to the fact that it was one of the largest public gathering places in post Greek civilization.

Soul is the depth of origins, the layering of memories, often invisible. One might say soul is what is underneath, the underground, the underbelly - or messes.

James Hillman tells us that psychology belongs in cities because that is where we intensely experience the energy of people who have to learnto be citizens together. Individuals are required to learn whom we are by being with so many others. Our immediate recollection of soul and city might be the walk on the street, perhaps the arresting face of an elder, or the patina of an old building. Soul is doing its work when we slow down to experience another face or look at the edges of a building. Further, city and soul is knowing the origins of a place or what story got it started as a place. Further, it is the layers of memory which evolve beyond origin both in collective stories and in tales of rogues and business leaders. Further, the memory layers are revealed in what was built at different times, for different purposes, and with different architectural styles. A building does not have to be classical or traditional to reveal soul. Finally, soul is what is unknown, either longing to be revealed or to remaining unknown and unfinished - what is to come next in a city.

To sense soul one must let go of the mind and drop into soul, most often through the heart.  Thus, we can't fully know a city and soul through our head. To glimpse the richness of a city and soul we must feel it. The soulful way in is by slowly attending to the particulars of a place: that lamp post, this curb, that storefront, that character -all arresting us in profound imagination. The door into soul is not the mind, or even knowledge, but aesthetics. Here we are not associating Art with aesthetics. In fact, we are leaving Art (with a capital A) altogether out of an aesthetics of city and soul. Art matters to a city, but that is a different conversation. Before we engage art, we have to put it aside or it dominates our understanding of aesthetics.  Hillman invites us to step in, return to the root of aesthetics,  breathe in through our senses, and conjure up an arresting image, or experience the presence of another person on the street. The heart is open, the body tingles, and that is the affect of the aesthetic response. Beauty is present.

Understanding a city requires three distinct lenses, three realms of experience. And we need all three to be in soul and a city has to fine tune itself based on all three. There is the concrete of the here and now facts. City infrastructure, potholes, is my street plowed, and human needs reside here. Next comes the psychological or the back and forth conversation between two forces; where tensions and differences are present. Wants are located here; we are in meetings, people are doing the business of the city, or conversing on streets and cafes. Then, there is the mythological. The realm of images and ideas beyond all we know with the mind, out beyond the concrete, and out beyond the psychological. This is the realm of the unexplainable. The desires of the polis, images of a future city are found in the mythic. A city's destiny is located here as well.