7 The visionary process

If you ask me how to get the deepest stuff from people, the stuff which matters most, I would not have them meet all together, under conditions of imagined communality. I would rather talk quietly, to one person at a time, drawing from each individual his, her, their most important feelings, and their most authentic visions.

Talking like this to people, persistently asking them such things, until they tell you something true, working at it, working at it, until the thing they tell you is authentic. That is the way, one thing at a time, to get the real juice, the real stuff that will make the place alive.
This kind of stuff, if real, is almost universal. Once one reaches that level of depth, what is being said is then rarely idiosyncratic or private. It moves from that realm, enters a new realm of psychology, reality of feeling, becomes something which will raise a deep effect in all of us. […]
We see from this example how much hard work has to be done. I think this work has to be done by an architect. Or, if you like, an architect- psychiatrist. A person, anyway, who cares about people, who cares about the real forces flowing in people, the real visions which people have in them, who loves those visions, and who is then willing to write those visions down, step by step, one by one, in the form of a communal language which can be used and shared by everyone in that community.

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