2 The uniqueness of individuals, families, and businesses

To get the individual adaptation which is essential for true belonging, we must have a process which allows the city to evolve so that it reflects each individual in his and her individuality. We must learn how to make a city where each one of us feels at home, whether it is yours, mine, his, hers. And once again this must be based on our individual true feeling, our true nature.
What this means is that we ask whether we experience it as ours, whether each bit of the city, of the neighborhood, each door, building, fence, garden, actually reflects the human beings, reflects individuals, families, passion, reality.

Our lives work when we have that kind of intimate personal relationship to the environment. It is there of our making. Or it is there from the making of other individual human beings, we can recognize the human touch of it. It makes us feel something. It is ordinary. It isn’t fancy, it isn’t glitzy, it just makes you feel whole and comfortable.

It has to do with the individual, with individuality, with the private world, the lovely world of individual people, expressing themselves in their funny, sad, intimate, imperfection, living their lives so that we see the imprint of those lives on the streets and in the neighborhood.

The private or individual space which is created by money, in today’s society, is rarely making or fostering belonging. It creates ostentatious things, houses which express wealth and idiosyncrasy, individuality for its own sake, the appearance of uniqueness. That is an immensely different thing.

True belonging — true life — occurs when a penetration of the real into the fabric of the world occurs. This is far simpler. It is almost the very simplest thing a human being needs.

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