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| | Featured Non-profit: Pomegranate Center |
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 What is a Gathering Place?
A gathering place is a space for the entire community-what used to be called the commons. It usually occupies an important central location. It is designed to accommodate private and quiet enjoyment for individuals, small gatherings, and community celebrations. Its purpose is to serve all people, from toddlers to old-timers, and everyone in between. For these reasons gathering places must accommodate a spectrum of features: seating in quiet places for reading books or eating lunch, tables for card games or chess, a tot-lot with an adjacent shelter where parents can visit and supervise, as well as an amphitheatre for performances, weddings, and other forms of community events. Gathering places work best when surrounded by stores, coffee houses, restaurants, bus stops, banks, or schools. The more reasons people have to visit a gathering space, the more successful it becomes.
The Need
Our work responds to the steady decline of community life we have experienced over the last half century. Because of the rapid change in our society, modern communities are faced with a range of complex issues including sprawl, traffic congestion, environmental degradation, loss of pride and civic identity, and decreased participation in the kind of activities that increase local vitality. Many people have come to feel that the democratic concept of community itself is no longer useful, and that individuals must fend for themselves by exploiting personal advantage. Where it exists this condition has created a society of people confused about their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens. This leads to social fragmentation, ideological polarization, and the inability for the individual to see one's place in the larger world. This creeping ghettoization may one day have us all living in gated communities where the need to engage with the differences of others has been erased from our lives and the lives of our children. To us, this dark scenario cries out for alternatives. A healthy community attempts to turn diverse points of view into gifts that give rise to mutually beneficial cultural and economic relationships. These differences give a community local character and flavor-an identity that builds a sense of belonging and pride.
We recognize that the physical environments of our cities, towns and neighborhoods reflect our psychology and that to find creative solutions we must map both our material and mental landscapes. Well-designed places encourage participation, trust, and a sense of safety. They help us feel at home in the neighborhood. Poorly designed places, conversely, promote isolation, fear of neighbors, and social disease. At Pomegranate Center we work to influence the way our society thinks about communities by connecting the outer and inner realities. Our work, therefore, is both practical and educational. It bridges the hands-on construction of gathering places and public artworks with the ongoing exploration of ideas that make communities healthful and neighbors responsible.
Working Philosophy
- Art belongs in everyday life.
- A community's physical design shapes social and civic behavior.
- Successful gathering places rise from the setting-nature and culture determine their shape and character.
- Densities must increase to prevent further sprawl. As they do, gathering places serve an essential purpose as "community living rooms." They serve as incubators of community life.
- Through inclusive, decisive, honest, grass roots involvement differences between people become gifts.
- Involvement increases pride, ownership and stewardship.
- Community problems can be solved only by crossing professional, ideological, cultural and political boundaries.
- Human beings are a part of the natural environment and not apart from it. We should treat nature as we wish to be treated.
- Something gratifying can always be done right now on behalf of longer range ideas and visions.
- A sense of humor is a survival tool.
- An "early success" project is vital in generating ongoing community participation and support.
The Community Gathering Places program helps realize a vision of healthy and vibrant communities where people take responsibility for creating meaningful, art-filled environments that foster respect and safety among neighbors, nurture young people, integrate beauty and encourage citizenship.
About the Pomegranate Center:
Since it incorporated in 1986, Pomegranate Center experimented with moving art out of the conventional "art" environment of studios, galleries and museums and into the street, the workplace, and the market square. We wanted to demonstrate how artists can work outside the narrowly defined world of art and actively involve ourselves in building better communities. From the beginning, Pomegranate Center has dedicated itself to linking art with social and environmental issues. We strive to connect justice with beauty-concepts that often exist in parallel universes. When we bring them together, the result is greater social vitality.
Pomegranate Center has committed itself to link concerns and disciplines that often exist in separate mindsets. We believe that the complex problems facing contemporary communities can not be solved from any single perspective. Economy, environment, education, the arts, urban design, civic involvement, ethics--these must function together in a coherent system. To promote one interest category at the expense of the others is to do little more than move a problem, and its pain, to a different part of the community. The question is not whether economics is more important than the environment, or education more than the arts, etc. They are all important. The challenge is to see their interrelationship and get them working together.
Pomegranate Center's philosophy has been founded on the conviction that the real potential of a community lies in the spaces between interests, disciplines and ideologies. Creation of physical gathering places emerged as a specific and concrete strategy to practice this more holistic philosophy.
We at Pomegranate Center believe that well designed, livable cities preserve open land by encouraging people to live in town. Suburban sprawl creates environmental impact far beyond merely the land occupied by homes and businesses. We are reaching the point at which these impacts destroy the very amenities that people seek in suburban living. In response, communities are beginning to encourage-and, in some cases, mandate-higher density development. Amenities such as gathering places are one of the keys to making increased densities work.
Pomegranate Center
P.O.Box 486
Issaquah, WA 98027
425.557.6412
milenko@pomegranate.org
www.pomegranate.org |
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