Dina Mehta lost a cousin in Gujarat last week in a tragic car accident. In traveling back to be with her family, she reflected on the Indian Joint Family, a family structure where everyone lives under the same roof, but the structure of the house is flexible and malleable to reflect the relationships in the dwelling:
This is a classic Indian Joint Family – man and wife, three sons and their wives and children. Individual quarters built for each of the sons and their families – yet under one roof with common kitchen, dining and washing areas. Provisions made to partition the home in case of rifts. That’s the structure – but what really struck us were the relationships and interactions. The grandparents are old, have been really hit badly by this – yet were always encouraging the younger ones to get on with life. The sons going off to work – but dropping in almost every hour – silent support. The daughters-in-law (including the mother who had lost her child 4 days ago) working cohesively and harmoniously – looking after so many guests – food, laundry etc – yet spending time with us sharing stories about the young girl, breaking into tears sometimes, one taking over when the other was distraught, at other times smiling and enthusiastically showing us the house they had just moved into a year ago, and buying local goodies for us to sample from the hawkers that came by the door. The children too – lovingly tending garlanded photos of their cousin, never once letting the incense sticks or lamps go out.
I was quite touched by how the structure of the house, and the family came to be used in a time of crises, creating a robust environment of care. Even in the midst of grief, everyone is looked after and there is space to cry, space to socialize, space to be alone, and still the incense keeps burning and all are fed.
Out of Davenport Iowa, comes Vital Communities, a collection of resources on new urbanism, sustainability and creating community. It’s a vast resource well worth exploring and it comes with this introduction:
Cities and towns throughout the United States are struggling with urban sprawl, declining neighborhoods, and deserted downtowns, but a new wave of interest in revitalizing our communities is sweeping the country. The resources on this site attempt to document the work being done in some cities and towns and to provide information that can inspire and assist other communities in reinventing their surroundings.
It IS possible to create robust and energetic communities — vital communities.
I love this, and I hope he keeps it up. This is the personal website of our new Prime Minister, Paul Martin. On the site is a blog which has been sleeping since October, but there is also Paul Martin with Flat Mark, a photo montage of the new Prime Minister going about his day with a cardboard cut out doll called Flat Mark. He even poses with Flat Mark as he is waiting to be called into the Governer-General’s residence to be sworn in as Canada’s 21st prime minister.
It is about time our political leaders had blogs, and a sense of humour. Good on the new PM. Hope he gets back to the blog.
The Transformation of Chris Corrigan
Micheal Herman and Penny Scott have nothing better to do than play around with Photoshop.
Will someone kindly hire them?
Over the past few months, several people have been exploring the applications of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language to endeavours other than architecture.
Peter Lindberg has been concerning himself with the application of patterns to software development. The folks at BlueOxen have been looking at Patterns of community building and collaboration, Mike Lee blogged patterns of introducing change into organizations last summer, and Michael Herman and I took a shot at defining some patterns of Open Space Technology
based on The Nature of Order. We’re not done yet.
(I have to say that pattern languages have not helped the patternlanguage.com people design very good websites)
Perhaps it is time to propose a set of patterns for blogging about patterns?
At any rate, I use this entry more as a bookmark, to gather these conversations into one place for the time being. I’ll shortly add a page on the Parking Lot wiki to extend the collection. In the meantime, what do these pattern conversations mean to you? Are there other places you have seen people talking about patterns?