1 Who, today, can truly enjoy belonging to the earth?

Much of the emotional misery of the 20th century was caused by the terrible loss of belonging our contemporary processes inflicted on society.

The forms of environment we have learned to create in modern times have caused us to lose the sense of true connection to ourselves and our society. That has happened, in large part, because of the nature of space we have created. It has happened because the public space of our present-day cities, both legally and metaphorically, no longer belongs to us to any deep extent.

One of the most frightening aspects of the 20th-century city was its faceless, nameless character. We saw identical apartments, identical offices, identical apartment windows, identical columns, identical bricks. The individual was hardly visible. Cities do not reflect the idiosyncrasies and human characters of people. They do not reflect the multitudes of differences which are the source of our humanity.

Because they cannot create uniquely adapted centers, and cannot create “inhabited,” “lived-in,” positive space, they bespeak the character of not-belonging. That is the anonymous quality our age has created.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/1 Belonging and not-belonging#