Community Territory (1968)

PATTERN

IF: Any multi-service center,

THEN:

1. The building should contain a major area which is established as community territory.

2. Community territory is distinct from the area devoted to services, but is interlocking with it.

3. Community territory contains two main components: An arena, and an area given over to community projects.

<a href="http://coevolving.com/maps/fed/1968_Multi-Service-Centers_Community-Territory-figure.svg">http://coevolving.com/maps/fed/1968_Multi-Service-Centers_Community-Territory-figure.svg</a>

The arena is a public area, open to passers-by (whether or not they are visiting the service center), shaped in such a way as to encourage public discussions (both formal and informal), equipped with walls for day to day notices and poster, microphones, and loudspeakers. [p. 80]

Community project space is defined according to three functions:

a. It provides space where any community group can set up an office or workshop oriented towards a specific community problem. [Examples of such projects include a group fighting slumlords, a group concerned with school reform, a couple of women to decide to run a child care center, typing classes, Synanon, local tenants seeking action on rat control, a police complaints committee, and so on.] Office equipment and duplicating machinery will be provided in this zone for each community project, as well as for the community at large. Community project spaces will be owned by the community and as free as possible from any administrative strings concerning keys, janitors, permission, etc. [See Pattern 17 Community Projects Two-Sided (1968) ].

b. Community projects also included offices for local political bodies, and for the subcommittees which have control over the service programs and to whom clients can make suggestions, and complain about services.

c.The community project zone also contains small shops, run by local businessmaen, perhaps with the help of S.B.A. grants. Examples are coffee shops, barbershops, book stores, landromats, smoke shops, flea markets. These shops should be rent controlled.

PROBLEM

The functional failures of existing multi-service centers.

This pattern is the most important of the 64 patterns. In it, we try to revise the overall concept of a multi-service center, in a way that is radical enough to overcome the massive failures of the present centers. For, in blunt terms, the multi-service program has, so far, been a massive failure. Less than 10% of the poor go to multi-service centers [see Pattern 2 Location ]. The centers do not help the hard-core rock-bottom poor at all.

To some extent, the failure has been caused in inadequacies in the services themselves. The shape of the building will make little difference to that. But to a large extent, the failure has been caused by the nature of the existing centers, by the way they have been conceived: In spite of new names and new ideals, multi-service centers do not meet the real needs of the poor; they perpetuate the indignity of "welfare handouts". [p. 81]

The key to this failure is the syndrome of "powerlessness". It has demonstrated again and again that the poor are effectively trapped in a subculture of poverty, that this trap is a self-perpetuating, viscious circle, and that it precludes effective participation in society's major institutions: Because people are poor, they can get no jobs; because they have no jobs they have neither the money nor the opportunity to move about and use the city; becuse they cannot travel about the city; they are not well versed in the processes which govern the rest of society, and they are not able to participate in its processes and institutions; because they are effectively shut off from the rest of society, they have no power in the political arena; and they have few local leaders; because they have no power and no voice their needs and complaints and the details of their situation are not widely known to other member of society -- certainly they are not represented. Because they have no voice, no power, no process by which they can communication with centers of action, no jobs and no participation, they do not have the most central freedom that any free man has -- the freedom to call their own shots and to determine their own future. An so poor people stay demoralised, and isolated. And above all they stay poor.

In short, poverty is a syndrome which hinges principally on various facets of powerlessness. [p. 82]

[content through p.85 omitted]

None of this is possible without community organization. If the multi-service center is meant to help the poor, it must help the process of community organization. This means, essentially, that the multi-service should have two features> First, the whole center must be build around the process of community organization. Second, the center must be clearly recognisable as community territory.

1. The community cannot organize itself without professional organizers, acting in concert with the entire community; but the entire community should be encouraged to participate. It must be easy for any member of the community to organize the community around a given issue. This process requires a physical nerve center. The multi-service center should be the nerve center for ongoing community organization.

2. The service center cannot be a hub of community organization, unless it is clearly recognized by every member of the community, as community territory. Yet administrators of existing service centers have not succeeded in making places which belong to the community -- they are still thought of as "foreign" territory. The service center must be clearly recognizable as community territory -- a place where everyone has the right to be, day or night, a natural place to go at any time, especially in time of need.

When we translate the idea of community organization and community territory into physical terms, they yield two components: the arena, and the community projects zone.

2. Once a group is ready to move, it takes typewriters, duplicating machines, telephones, etc., to carry through with a project and develop broad based community support -- whether it involves setting up typing classes, volunteer child care services, writing to congress, or the board of education, demonstrating against the county health service, conducting an investigation into police brutality, building a third party, and so on. [....]

The community projects zone and the arena, together, form a base for community organization. And together they establish in a clear cut way, the fact that the service center is community territory. (See also patterns 16 Necklace of Community Projects (1968) and 17 Community Projects Two-Sided (1968)).

A multi-service center with these physical features, and parallel social innovations, has some chance of breaking down the syndrome of poverty and powerlessness. [p. 87]

This page is part of A Pattern Language Which Generates Multi-Service Centers (1968).