The Art & Peace Cafe at COV&R 2024
Creating Space to Flourish
I’ve got an absolute brick of a book that sits on my shelf called A Pattern Language. Written by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein and published in 1977, the book accompanies their classic work on architecture, The Timeless Way of Building. In these works, the authors claim to present a “fundamental view of the world,” a whole vision for how humans use space:
When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
It’s easy for me to take “space” for granted; the arrangements of tables and chairs are rarely the first things I notice about a room. I don’t often think about how people might move in or out of it, or how they might be feeling as they do. Not even my own house intrigues me in these ways, though I know my wife wishes I’d pay a little more attention.
And honestly, the description Alexander et al. give of space makes me want to pay that kind of attention. When they describe the act of place-making as “repairing the world,” I get chills. When they speak of things “becoming more coherent” for everyone who inhabits that space, I want to know how that’s possible.
How the environment connects to flourishing; how the ways people behave and the things they say and what they imagine in that environment might make them feel more alive and human.
Photos from the Art and Peace Cafe at the 2024 COV&R Conference in Mexico City, Mexico. Photo credit: Samuel Sorich.
The Art and Peace Cafe at COV&R 2024
This summer, I had the privilege of working on this question with my unRival colleagues. Together, we transformed the usual forward-facing space of an academic conference into a true space of welcome and excitement. Through food, music, and easygoing conversation, Artisans of Peace alumni Joel Aguilar and Diana Gameros invited attendees of the 2024 Colloquium on Violence and Religion in Mexico City to see and experience each other in new ways at unRival’s Art and Peace Cafe.
At conferences like this, it’s very easy for me to get excited about new ideas. In that excitement, I forget those ideas come from real humans in real contexts, formed by people and places they love. When that core piece of humanity disappears into the background, spaces like this can lose all sense of warmth and welcome. It’s an honest oversight, and understandable, but ultimately costly.
It’s what happens when we assume a space will primarily be enriched by the people we gather into it, without considering what the space itself might provide for those we invite.
What needs or burdens might they bring?
What might be keeping them from showing up as their whole selves?
How might we build space in a way that “repairs” those feelings, that makes the world feel coherent enough for us to fully show up in it?
How the environment connects to flourishing; how the ways people behave and the things they say and what they imagine in that environment might make them feel more alive and human.
I couldn’t have anticipated just how transformative such an experience could be for attendees of a conference like this. While I orchestrated seating and a buffet lunch, Joel and Diana introduced a gentle, generous pause into the participants’ week, allowing them to have brand new experiences of people many of them had known for years. When lunch was over, everyone commented not only on the conversation, but also on the space: the placement of the food, the feel of the chairs, the easiness of the atmosphere. We had already been provided with a stunning, open room by our hosts at the Colegio de San Ildefonso, and with the help of some patient and dedicated caterers and technicians, our guests felt free to move around, meet new people, and share new sides of themselves.
The theologian Bernard Lonergan says that, whenever we learn something new, we are never only experiencing new content. We are also experiencing the pattern of how those new insights come to us. How we learn makes just as much of an impact as what we learn, and the environment in which we learn also shapes what we remember. The “building” of an experience affects how its lessons live inside us.
It’s a lesson I keep learning over and over again at unRival: 90 minutes in a carefully-crafted space can help people feel more human, can transform their sense of possibility in the present and their hope for the future. Honestly, I still find it shocking; there are so many factors that can contribute to the feeling of human flourishing, and to the expansion of our imaginations into new realms of peace and possibility. I am learning to never underestimate the power of any one of those factors–space least of all.
Are you a peacebuilder?
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If you enjoyed this, please consider these other blog posts:
- Moving Together: Seven Reasons Group Work Works
- Why We Need Nonrivalrous Space Now More Than Ever
- We Need Not Be A Hero: Lessons from Artisans of Peace
- Play, Peacebuilding, and “The Quiet Year”
Want to learn more about how unRival Network our programs are disrupting rivalry and advancing the cause of justice and peace? Click here to access our free resource, Peace is Possible.
