13 The special character of each community created by the collective language they have made

The patterns, the idiosyncratic human reality: all this can come only from the people themselves. In many of the cases of unfolding I have initiated or been part of the quality of belonging to the world included — and often started with — responsibility, started with the dream of what it means to be part of a living world, one which satisfied desires, supported hopes, fully supported the inner necessities of life.
When people think about this, they can articulate it. They know what is needed to give them — for their place — surroundings in which life can be lived. And when they dream of a world, imagined by people for themselves, they come closer to a life which grants true freedom.

What matters — and what we must grasp, I am quite certain — is the idea that this process of working with others to obtain a collective vision of something that is going to be built is a feasible, reasonable process.

And it brings enormous rewards. Once it is done, people then genuinely have a common basis. The process of unfolding the environment, within the area covered, from then forward, has a genuine and solid foundation. Whoever you are, whatever your profession, I hope you will read this with the idea in mind that such a process is likely to be well within your reach, that you yourself, and other people you know, might undertake a process of this kind in something which is happening in your town or your neighborhood.

The collective vision which emerges from a pattern language created by a true unfolding process is not just any vision. When people are given the freedom to speak truly about their lives, they have an unconventional wisdom, an idiosyncratic quality, which brings forth unique centers, unique living structure in each situation. That is what we mean by their culture or their “way”. It is a shared vision, not a typical one, not part of the conventional professional wisdom of architects and planners, more like the voice of Dostoevsky.

It is the same extreme differentiation in each case, but always different.
Thousands upon thousands of unique human endeavors, often local, often particular to a small town, or to a neighborhood. It is this, which receives expression through the medium of a collective pattern language. It celebrates human uniqueness, the enormous variety of human effort, human desire, human aspiration.

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