Places That Are Truly Alive
“The Empty Square is a meeting place for connecting and structuring knowledge on how to create places that are truly alive. The need for it is urgent in every corner of the world. Though the level of comfort differs tremendously from the most to the least affluent places, the need for aliveness is everywhere.”
Have you ever been to a place that was truly alive? If yes, how did it make you feel? If no, have you ever considered what you can do to make life blossom?
By The Empty Square
Photo: Glodi Miessi/Unsplash
Importantissimo!
That’s our answer to the question we ask in the theme introduction (how important is it, that we put the question of aliveness in the center of what we do and build?)
Building strong communities and places that are truly alive might be the most important of all. If we succeed on a local level and manage to connect all the dots in an intelligent, holistic way, we’ll make it.
As was the case in the world’s earliest complex society (the Ubaid civilization that spread from Southern Turkey to the Southern tip of Iraq (5500-4000 BCE)), the power of our future civilization doesn’t lie in the advance of any one town but in the network effect of connecting all of them*. Not the fragile way we do today but in ways that make sense for everybody, including Mother Earth.
Do you live in a place that is truly alive? Do you work in one? Have you ever been to one?
Basically, we established The Empty Square because of the lack of places that are truly alive – in a Biological-Organic-Cultural-Economic-Social-Spiritual-Aesthetic way.
What does that mean? What’s your take?
To us, places that are alive aren’t made up of a few separate, attractive elements.
On the contrary they are defined by a complex wholeness and integrity.
They function as “containers of experiences” with many layers of meanings and stories.**
They nourish our souls, stimulate our senses and mind, make us belong, and help us bring forth our personal and united potentials.
And they maintain the balance between humans and nature.
The Empty Square is a meeting place for connecting and structuring knowledge on how to create places that are truly alive. The need for it is urgent in every corner of the world. Though the level of comfort differs tremendously from the most to the least affluent places, the need for aliveness is everywhere.
So, please bring to the Square what you know, think, tried, or want to do regarding places that are truly alive. It is importantissimo.
*Read more about the Ubaid society and what modern science, ancient civilizations, and human nature can teach us about the future of urban life in the must-read book The Well-Tempered City (2016) by Jonathan F. P. Rose.
**The notion of “containers of experience” is taken from E. V. Walter: Placeways. A Theory of the Human Environment (University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 72.