Portland Building Convergence 8

I spent an amazing, inspiring, confusing, overwhelming and exciting twelve days in Portland recently, attending the Village Building Convergence, put on by Portland City Repair. I have so much to say about it, but for now would like to simply quote one of my friends that I met there, Joel Catchlove, who summed up so succinctly his experience at VBC8.

"The Convergence is one of the key annual events coordinated by City Repair, a grassroots community group dedicated to building community through natural building, permaculture, and repairing the dehumanising impacts of our urban design. One of the icons of their work is "Intersection Repair", where local communities claim an intersection as a public square, painting the road with bright and vibrant images that represent the uniqueness of their neighbourhood, and in some cases, build accompanying structures around the intersection - for example, seating, information boards for community news and events, 24hr self-service tea stations, book exchanges or free boxes. What's exciting is that a number of studies have now confirmed the astonishing impact of these repairs: at places where the community has banded together to repair their neighbourhoods, crime drops, conflicts are resolved, property ownership stabilises, gentrification is halted; and the annual repainting and maintenance of the intersection - now a public piazza - becomes a ritual for renewing and strengthening the neighbourhood itself. As a result, the concept has spread throughout Portland and North America.

So it's against this backdrop that the Village Building Convergence happens, attracting participants from across North America (and with us, Australia) to work on community projects around the city, participate in workshops (on everything from permaculture to mycology (mushrooms) to appropriate technology like rocket stoves or greywater) and listen to a bunch of fine speakers, followed by exhausting amounts of square-dancing and music.

Throughout the week we worked on a number of projects, including participating in the annual repainting of an intersection in the form of a giant sunflower, and helping with the building of a sauna (out of cob) sculpted as a giant raven's head. As part of City Repair's ethic of building community, many of their structures of built out of cob (essentially clay, sand and a little straw). Cob is a wonderful thing: it's easy to learn how to make and use (and therefore accessible to everyone from kids to grandparents - it's rare that you find a building site where chickens and babies are roaming free), it's completely non-toxic and it can be sculpted to the limits of your imagination.

Among the highlights of the Convergence were: Starhawk, who discussed earth-based spirituality with characteristic wit and wisdom and then led the entire convergence in a mass spiral dance; Art Ludwig, on living simply and the nature of water; and Nulla Walla, who led an amazing workshop combining improvisational dance with permaculture (some of her writings are available online at bcollective.org). The Convergence has left us both hugely inspired and eager to bring what we've learned back home to share in Adelaide.

Portland is a great town - it's famous of course for its flourishing bike culture, but it is also characterised by a strong permaculture movement and flourishing community spirit: characterised both by the work of City Repair and also by the amount of front yards and "nature strips" planted out with vegetables. It is also bursting with farmers' markets, boasts the best public transport system in the US (which, to be honest, is probably about the same as Adelaide), and is consistently rated America's "greenest" city, in fact, it's the only city in the US where car use is actually declining. All this with a population about the same as Adelaide. While there we stayed with a great household, the owner of the house being one of the founders of "Depave" another organisation linked to City Repair and dedicated to encouraging and supporting people to pull up their concrete yards and plant vegetables."

It's gotta be free

Cob Courtyard Wall, Dufferin Grove Park

• The time: summer 2005;
• 
• The concept: create an earthen sculpture in a downtown Toronto park that would serve as a gathering place and summer kitchen;
• The method: offer free, ongoing, no sign-up fee, no commitment, earthen building workshops to volunteers all summer long, providing training to the participants and helpers for the structure;
• The partners: Toronto's department of recreation, me, and a group of core volunteers.
  

"Come get muddy" was the cry, an invitation to any and all who wanted to try their hand at earthen building. And people did. They wandered by, asked "What's this all about?", and we said, "Come try it out and see!"

Shoes and socks came off, and feet jumped into the mud, mixing sand, straw, clay and water together to form a building material known as "cob". Then they picked up the mud, slapped it on the wall, and started sculpting.

Some stayed for a few minutes, a couple hours, contributing a little bit of labour and getting to play in the mud. Others were so beguiled by the project that they came back daily or for the whole summer. Many took on leadership roles, leading different aspects of creation, like cupboards, arched windows, the fireplace.

By summer's end, approximately 500 people worked on the creation of the cob wall in Dufferin Grove Park. By any measure, the project was a resounding success. First of all, it was completed on time and on a shoestring budget.

The measure by which it was most successful though, is in the quantity of attendees, and in the quality of their connection to the project and to their fellow attendees. This, in my opinion, was directly attributable to the following aspects of the program:

• Free: no sign-up fee means participating without having to prioritize attending this vs buying food or clothes or having spending money. Free means not having to identify yourself as someone who cannot afford to attend. Free equalizes the playing field;

• Drop-in: no commitment to attendance means showing up when you really want to be there, ready to learn and contribute. People who are forced to attend because they signed up are not enjoyable to be around and do not contribute positively to the project. Not having to give your name allows the participation of people who need anonymity in order to stay safe;
• Ongoing: knowing that a program is on offer for a period of time allows potential attendees to "get there when they get there"; it allows for life to intervene without compromising their chance to be involved;
• Creative input: whoever was there that day had a hand in making creative decisions about the sculpture, and then they were able to make their ideas reality right then and there.
  

These measures allowed people who would normally shy away from community classes or projects to participate to their satisfaction in this one. There were moms with babies in slings, newly arrived immigrants, refugees, people who did not speak English, retirees who live around the corner, dads, kids on a break from the playground, people from across town, and men transitioning into civilian life after serving time, and their attendance can be directly attributed to these four aspects of the project.

That all of this could happen was the result of a fruitful partnership between the City of Toronto Recreation staff and me, the project organizer. The recreation staff took this to be part of their mandate to provide free, drop-in activities. They expanded the boundaries of "recreation" to include activities that draw in many more newcomers, across cultural lines. That made the park so much livelier, and this drop-in activity resulted in a permanent, useful and much-loved addition to the park.

Forming a project around these principles requires something very important from the organizers/administrators: trust. They need trust that people are able to decide for themselves what is best for them, trust that people can be counted on to do good work, trust that people will come and take advantage of an opportunity presented to them.

A program free of coercion is one that truly honours the participants, and one that will reap benefits well beyond the original expectations of the organizers. Do we have the enough trust in each other to offer this of ourselves and our city?


To see more pictures of community participation at the Cob in the Park website, click here.

Sourcing materials

Doing the final fabrication of something can give a person the impression that they are making something locally. However, assembling materials from China, Turkey or some other far-flung location here in Toronto hardly makes it local, if I think about it.

At the City of Craft fair late last year, I saw astonishing wools that had been hand-processed and dyed, and in some cases, sheared by women from outside the city, not too far away. Even though I had not even started knitting, I was so beguiled by some of these yarns that I returned to their tables again and again, not having the confidence to actually buy, but knowing that I was looking at something of quality and worth.

Now that I'm knitting, I am looking for local yarns to make my creations with. Any tips would be appreciated.

Handiwork

Ten years ago, I cocked an eyebrow when Dancemakers would go on tour and the dancers would knit their way across the continent. I looked askance at my roommate when she would knit away the evenings and moments between classes. But now it seems that everyone is knitting. Everywhere I look, young hip things are knocking needles together, following patterns or creating their own designs as they go. There are even folks who are spinning and dyeing their own wool.

I understand the desire to make things with your own hands; before I learned to build, I satisfied that urge by sewing. It seems to me that we're all trying to scratch a deep itch to contribute to our own shelter in some way. Despite my earlier bias against knitting, I now feel heartened when I see the kids down at the local craft sale exhibiting their funky handmade wares; I think we are connecting to the same thing when we take materials in hand and start making something.

My mother-in-law and I are going to The Knit Café on Friday, where I am going to purchase some hand-dyed wool and some bamboo knitting needles. We are going to sit at a sunny table, and she is going to show me how to knit. Finally.

Full moon

The other night my husband and I were sitting outside looking at the full moon, and I realized that it was one month since I'd been in Texas. How far I am from where I was, but here I am, looking at the same full moon.

One early morning in Texas, a friend was up and watching the sunrise while the moon set in the east, and he told me that he had the sudden, staggering understanding of the earth's place in space, and of us just standing on the side of this immense ball (I'm paraphrasing here). When he told me the story, I felt unsteady on my feet; just hearing about his experience connected me to it in a way that I experienced physically.

I'll try to stay connected to those feelings as I go forward.

Pictures

I've spent some time going through the myriad photos I took at the colloquium, and have posted them here. I have organized them by project so that you can see how they progressed, and what state of completion we left them in. Make sure to see the Threadgill Stage and the Chapel Hill albums. Gorgeous!

Busy busy

The rest of the week zoomed by, as we tried to finish the myriad projects that had been started at the Colloquium. At one point we ran out of prepared clay, so the organizers were scrambling to dig more and pulverize it in a hammer mill for use in plastering. My new red made-for-women construction boots and tool belt got a bit of a workout, but the speed of work was enjoyable and filled with laughter and conversation, as we compared techniques and traded skills.

More music ensued, and some nights of drumming and dancing. (It was so freaking cold in the evenings that it was the only way to keep warm!) Joe Jenkins gave his Humanure talk on Friday night, and he was hilarious, as usual. I guess when you are constantly talking about crap, you find a way to make it funny.

Saturday was a day of finishing up projects as much as possible. Nothing got completely done; a crew will be back this week to prepare projects for winter. But the Kerrville Folk Festival site is now blessed with a cob/adobe/earthbag welcoming booth, a strawbale staff building, a timberframe bucket toilet facility, a spiffed-up-with-earthen-plaster auditorium, and a mind-blowingly-beautiful and artful ceremonial stage for its open air church.

Saturday night after the closing ceremony, we had a talent show, and I performed a song I wrote while I was there, with the help of Pete and James who played guitar and sang back-up. It was terribly hard to leave on Sunday, but it was time for Pete to get Sun Ray and I to the airport.