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This section highlights and links to people whose work is revealing and unfolding city and soul. Christopher Alexander Christopher Alexander is an architect who starts with the premise that the land and people reveal what building will be built. The architect comes later. The architect is an integrator of land and people and is not the supreme designer. Alexander’s process is one of unfolding the look and feel of the building out of the desires and constraints of the land: what does the land want? What does the soul of the place want? It begins by sensing and feeling and then moves on to logic and the use of building science. Alexander uses a “slow”soulful process.
A Pattern Language, written in 1977, reveals 253 useful patterns for building a building, a town, or a city. It is the kind of book you can sample because its many curiosities pull you in. The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature ofthe Universe. 4 books published in 2002. The question this material keeps asking: “does this place have life,” and if not, why not, and what will be required to breathe life and soul into it? "Building Living Neighborhoods" is a site dedicated to how wholeness applies toneighborhood building and the use of generative building codes to get our next buildings and retrofits aligned with the desires of the land. You will find actions and practices as well as “A Charter for Professional Developers” aiming to protect and care for the beauty of the living planet. In June 2006, Chris Alexander authored “A Charter for Professional Developers”, in Providence, RI, at which time he gave two major talks at the 14th Congress of the New Urbanist. Jane Jacobs Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-60047-7 and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) ISBN 0-394-72911-0 (for more on her bio see Wikipedia)
These books put people and place back into planning; removing the professional planner as the all-knowing producer of the built environment. Everything she wrote has heart and insight. According to Jacobs, urban development cannot be planned from behind a drawing table. For her, a city is not something abstract. From the title of her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it is clear that she prefers to use a biological metaphor: the city is like a living being that is born, grows, matures, decays and can revive. The elements of the city, "the people, streets, parks, neighborhoods, the government, the economy," cannot exist without one another and are, like the organs of the human body, connected with each other.
Robert J. Leaver Robert J. Leaver is the founder and convener of New Commons, a think, link and do tank with it headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island. As a community psychologist, Robert has worked with the cities of Providence, Albuquerque, Atlanta, the Island of Martha's Vineyard, and the town of Provincetown, MA. In Providence, the focus is the city's creative and innovative economy, innovation in city government, entrepreneurship, and neighborhood local economy. He consulted with the City of Albuquerque on its economic plan which was fueled by entrepreneurs, artists, and community activists. In Atlanta, the focus was community building.
Robert has taught psychology, human development, organizational theory and entrepreneurship at Providence College, Leslie, Goddard and Roger Williams. Since 1993, he has been on the faculty of Boston College's Leadership for Change - a year long graduate level, credit bearing, executive leadership program for change agents. Formerly, he facilitated the CEO Forum in the Center for Responsible Leadership at BC for three years. He just finished editing James Hillman's Uniformed Edition 2: City & Soul, a collection of 42 papers of James Hillman as part of his 11 volume Uniform Edition. Spring Publications. 2006.  Soul Making in City(DNA talk)
Lessons to Learn: Providence to Albuquerque Archetypal Psychology City and Soul Link to APYR essay from November 2006 Michael Singer Michael Singer is a sculptor and ecologist who works on design teams that build public works. Michael’s work is to make the public works, public art (the whole building and not just hanging some art pieces on the walls or mounting sculptures outside) and feature transparent learning experiences so the public understands what goes on inside. Goto: www.MichaelSinger.com
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