Reigniting the Village – Permaculture Placemaking
with Mark Lakeman, Saturday, October 14, 2023
Workshop Information
In North America, what were once was known as villages have now been replaced by the Roman colonial grid, causing urban areas to become fragmented and disconnected from the natural world and community living.
Working within the challenges of the current colonial framework and applying Permaculture tools and strategies, how can we more actively create positive change in our own neighbourhoods and communities? How can we creatively come together to build vibrant and safe environments where everyone can thrive together?
Join Mark Lakeman, visionary architect, designer and co-founder of the City Repair Project and friends for an exciting and informative and playful daylong workshop.
Together we will focus on social engagement and place making. Participants learn tools, techniques and strategies for community design and engage in participatory processes and models. Learn to create alternative patterns that address systems of isolation and oppression, while developing networks and beneficial connections on all scales.
Discussions take place that inspire a rebalancing, healing effect on social culture by restoring interaction and identity, spatial place and gathering environments that fuse people and nature back together and reinspire the regeneration of stewardship culture, intergenerational connection, and cultural rituals.
Workshop Instructor
Mark Lakeman is a co-founder of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon, and served as the Co-Director of Creative Vision from 1995 to 2008. He is presently active as a core member, overall mentor, and project coordinator in City Repair’s annual urban permaculture festival known as the Village Building Convergence. Mark is also the founder and principal of Communitecture, Inc, a cutting edge eco-architecture and planning design firm with sustainable building and planning projects at all scales. These highly popular projects include such social-ecological innovations as The ReBuilding Center, numerous ecovillage projects and urban infill co-housing examples. Many current projects involve low income and homeless people in the self-development of tiny-home based villages. All of these initiatives were developed out of the Planet Repair Institute, which Mark co-founded, including PRI’s acclaimed urban permaculture design course which is currently taught in collaboration with Permaculture PDX and Witch Hazel Inc.
After working for several years in the 1980s as a lead designer of large scale corporate projects, in 1988 Mark embarked on a series of cultural immersion projects with numerous indigenous societies in order to derive place-making patterns which could be applied to urban settings across North America. These patterns include broad participation, local ownership, and transference of authority to local populations, creative expression in planned and unplanned processes, and social networks as the primary economic medium of change. His travels lasted until 1995 when he returned to Portland to undertake a series of creative, culturally restorative initiatives. His cooperative initiatives include the Last Thursday Arts & Culture Project, The City Repair Project, Communitecture, Inc., the Intersection Repair Project, the T-Horse mobile public gathering place, Dignity Village, the annual Earth Day celebration of localization, and the Village Building Convergence (VBC), and Planet Repair Institute.
