How to turn your Neighborhood into a Village

Source: How to turn your Neighborhood into a Village, Andrew Millison, 16:08, uploaded 2023-03-16, Watch Later position 39.

Andrew Millison visits Portland, Oregon, to speak with architect Mark Lakeman, who founded Communitecture Architecture and the City Repair Project. Lakeman uses a model of an ordinary North American block to ask how a neighbourhood shaped by property lines, straight roads, and private houses could recover the shared life of a village. The model is a design exercise, yet the argument reaches beyond layout. It asks who gets to shape the places where people live and what those places teach their residents to expect from one another.

The gridded neighbourhood

Lakeman opens with a claim about American neighbourhoods: amongst wealthy nations, the United States has the fewest community gathering places in its residential areas. He links that absence to a development system in which developers and bankers make money by producing housing. Lakeman defines a village as a place that villagers make to meet their own needs. He describes development as a financial process that treats housing as a commodity, leaving residents with little power over the places they receive.

The familiar North American block makes the problem easy to miss. Houses face the street, and each property has its own back door, porch, deck, and perhaps a garden. Property lines say where one person’s interest ends and another’s begins. Lakeman does not object to private interests. He points to the missing counterpart: across thousands of years of village design, people also made spaces that they would care for together. The contemporary block supplies private parcels without a common piece that tells residents they belong to a larger whole.

His model treats the block as a place that people can redesign. Lakeman calls this a villager sensibility. The question is how to release the creativity already present in a neighbourhood where people may live close together without speaking to one another. The design starts with patterns that he associates with villages around the world.

Commons and portals

The first pattern is a village commons. It belongs in a central position between the homes so that everyone can reach it with similar ease. In the model, the commons can cross property lines and join the back edges of several lots. Its physical location makes a social claim: the residents form a whole that exceeds the separate houses. Lakeman calls it the most important piece because it gives people a place that they steward in common.

The second pattern appears at the perimeter. Portals, gateways, or entrances mark the point where someone enters or leaves the village. Lakeman imagines an arch with grapes or kiwis growing overhead. The detail carries two messages at once. Arrival receives a welcome, and departure contains an invitation to return. The boundary acquires a social meaning and marks a lived transition between areas.

Paths, intersections, and public space

The colonial grid gives American streets a long, straight, flat form. Lakeman connects that repetition to a reluctance to walk. He also links the built environment to obesity, arguing that monotonous surroundings offer little reason to go outside and move. A village path leads somewhere. The destination might be a gathering place, a cafe, a market, or a friend’s house. Without such places, the street becomes a route between private interiors.

In his model, paths run from the gateways to the common centre. They curve and adjust as people move between places, breaking the repeated line of the grid. A path can begin with something as simple as wood chips, so the first step need not involve a major construction project. The form of the route changes the experience of the block because it gives movement some purpose and variation.

Lakeman then turns to the public right-of-way. Portland, he says, has made it possible for residents to transform street intersections into public squares by painting the street, installing benches, and adding kiosks through collaborative agreements. He places this change against a historical claim that, before 1920, the federal government decided that streets were for cars. For most of human history, he says, streets held several kinds of daily activity. In neighbourhoods, children’s birthday parties once brought families into the street, where children could play together in safety.

The model fills the block with the small provisions that make shared life ordinary. Trees can have tree houses. A swing can sit within a block of every child. A bench can stand within fifty feet of each home. A community market, tool-sharing library, sacred space, greenhouse, art studio, cafe, or music venue gives people a reason to remain in their neighbourhood. Lakeman asks why people should have to leave for a festival or Burning Man to experience that kind of integration, then return home and save money for the next escape. The village programme belongs in daily life.

At every intersection, paths meet. Lakeman treats these nodes as places of community convergence because the crossing of paths has long formed one of the basic patterns of village gathering. The village can therefore expand outwards through connected points of contact. A node might hold a gathering space, a sacred space, a community bike station, or a vehicle-charging station. The specific object matters less than the decision to make the crossing available for people to meet.

Water as a common system

The next layer begins with an orange circle at the back corner of each house. The circles represent cisterns that catch rooftop water. Lakeman imagines the roofs as a landscape of hills and valleys. Rain falls on the high points, travels towards the low points, and meets a cistern before it can run away. The stored water can serve the neighbourhood, then return to the wider landscape and recharge the water table.

The shared watercourse also changes the path. Each time a path crosses the water, it creates a bridge. A resident can walk along a curving route through a planted landscape, crossing water on the way to a friend’s house. That sequence gives a visit a spatial character that a straight walk from one front door to another lacks.

Ponds extend the system. Rooftop runoff can feed a pond at the top of the watercourse, with a fountain, ducks, frogs, and dragonflies. As the water moves towards the common centre, further ponds can sit along the gathering place and catch the light at sunset. Lakeman treats these features as things villagers make for their own aesthetic legacy, with an intention to leave something to future generations. He sets this against a view of the home as a commodity to liquidate and replace whenever a better place seems available.

Food, sunlight, and animals

Lakeman’s urban agriculture plan begins with perennial systems, especially food forests. Native species belong in the same layer, whilst annual crops occupy the open spaces that receive enough light. He names tomatoes, basil, artichokes, eggplant, and corn as examples of crops that can fill the lawns people scarcely use.

The model accounts for the sun across the year. If one side represents south, annual gardens occupy the light-green areas on the south-facing open ground. Winter gardens need different sites because the available light falls as the sun takes a lower path. Lakeman says that people rarely study how the sun rises, crosses the land, and falls below the horizon when they decide what a neighbourhood can grow. He extends the point beyond passive solar gain, photovoltaic panels, and solar hot water. Village design also includes a broader knowledge of how indigenous people have placed living systems within a landscape.

Private boundaries can remain whilst their edges become productive. For residents who do not want to see each other often, Lakeman suggests a living edge, or “fedge”, a food hedge that replaces a fence with planted species. The food forest can spread through the block rather than staying in one designated garden. Animal husbandry adds another layer. Lakeman names piglets, goats, rabbits, chickens, ducks, other fowl, and bees as species that can live with people in an urban setting. He gives children a particular reason to include animals: caring for them teaches responsibility and lets children grow up around living work.

Energy and the scale of agency

Lakeman starts the energy section with a reduction in demand. Before calculating how to build an alternative energy system, he says, residents can reduce the load they need to supply. One practice on his block is painting roofs in reflective colours to reduce the heat absorbed during summer. A south-facing greenhouse can concentrate warmth, whilst a reflective roof can reduce the need for cooling. A green roof adds a living surface where the structure and slope can support it.

The final image joins the houses into a local energy network. Each home could generate solar hot water and solar electricity, then connect with the others so that the neighbourhood has enough resilient local capacity. The proposal remains an imagined design. It does not specify an engineering plan. Its force comes from the change in scale, as energy becomes something residents can discuss and shape together instead of an invisible service that arrives from elsewhere.

Lakeman returns to the gridded streets with this new capacity in mind. Paths could curve whilst driveways still reach each home. Filling the hard surfaces of the grid with gardens, shared spaces, and routes for walking makes more land available for growing and gathering. The intersections then become the points where the lives of residents meet. Food could grow beside the routes that adults and children use every day, which leads Lakeman to ask what food insecurity would look like in such a neighbourhood.

The video closes with agency. A block that appears boring and fixed can become a setting in which residents discover that they can change their surroundings. Lakeman calls it a palette for rediscovering the ancient village that remains within human social life. The claim reaches far beyond the block. The model gives it force through small acts such as painting a street, placing a bench, catching water, planting a food hedge, and making a bridge.

Limits

The video offers a design model and a set of examples. It does not present a tested programme for retrofitting American neighbourhoods. Lakeman’s claims about the comparative number of gathering places, the history of streets, public health, obesity, indigenous village design, food insecurity, and water-table recharge receive no named studies or measurements in the captions. They should remain claims made in the video until those sources are checked independently.

The model also leaves practical questions open. Property law, maintenance, safety, disability access, water quality, structural requirements for green roofs, animal regulations, and the cost of changing streets would shape any real project. The video is strongest as an account of the social patterns that a neighbourhood could choose to support. It does not establish that every proposed feature would work in every climate, block, or legal system.

Further reading / references

• Communitecture Architecture, Mark Lakeman’s architecture firm.
• City Repair Project, the Portland organisation founded by Lakeman.
• Maitreya Ecovillage, the Eugene, Oregon ecovillage credited in the description as a filming location.
• Andrew Millison and the Permaculture Design course at Oregon State University.