1 A shared vision

The community is ours because we share it; and to share it, we must have an agreed-on understanding of life there, what life means, how life is embodied in that place.
This means that to have true belonging in a place, people must share a vision of the place where they belong. […] It is not only agreement about practical matters, but agreement about the deeper meaning of the place.

Since people have different values, they have different visions of the world. […] A shared pattern language which defines our generic centers, one by one, gives us the tool we need to reach agreement, at a profound level, about what really matters in our world. And because this tool lets us build the picture, one pattern at a time, we can discuss things slowly enough among ourselves, to get agreement.

The idea is that the language of patterns captures the essential “soul” of the people and of the place, and gets the essentials fixed in people’s minds strongly enough so that it can become a basis for their dreams, and a practical basis for acts of planning and construction by any number of participants, as the neighborhood gets shaped and built.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/8 Forming a collective vision of a neighborhood#