Connecting to place & being in place
7 everyday patterns to shift systems
This piece is part of exploratory work we have been doing into everyday patterns, and the role and power of re-patterning in systems change with friends and peers at The Southern Initiative and Auckland Co-design Lab. In our introduction we shared seven patterns we have identified across our work and that of others that go some way to making visible active re-patterning for equity and powersharing. Here we examine the sixth one: Connecting to Place & being in place.
This piece was written across 2022/2023 and reflects our thinking at this time.
While a recent wave of place-based policies have identified the importance of collaborating with communities in generating better outcomes, policies and programs still mostly consider place as a spatial or geographical category from which to shape specific responses. There may be an emphasis on integration and collaboration, however this is often still agency and service delivery focused.
This pattern engages with place as more than a ‘container’ for program or service delivery. In this pattern the physical and less tangible relational dimensions of place, relationships to place and connections within place are valued for wellbeing. The pattern recognises the role of connection and culture in creating and maintaining wellbeing and the potential of spaces as sites of connecting, healing and strengthening particularly when power is shared with communities in their design and use.
‘Place’ refers to a physical location, including the geography, land, people, institutions and infrastructure.
It also refers to less tangible but powerful aspects of relationships, peoples, histories, stories, rituals, knowledge, energy, identity, meanings, spirit, lifeforce. The lens of place grounds us in the context of history including past harms and trauma, as well as the particular characteristics, strengths, capacities and cultures of a place and communities within it.
Being grounded in place encourages us to see people as whole, and in relationship to their environment, rather than through single issues/interventions.
From this perspective place isn’t just a specific site to “deliver into”, it’s a core activator and contributor of wellbeing. Approaches such as place-making recognise this power of place to connect, heal, tell stories and build connection to story of place, however this doesn’t often carry over into government and service dominated sites. For example, seeing education, health, or community spaces within our communities as healing and strengthening entities in their own right, not just places to deliver services from.
A key shift in this pattern is in seeing these spaces as formed with community, not for community. “Formal” staff of such sites working in partnership, power sharing with community rather than owning and controlling spaces. This disruption of where expertise sits is connected to the shift away from a focus on deficit services to “fix” people, and more towards activating or strengthening the local social and cultural infrastructure that is in place (and is closely related to our first pattern, Beyond Services).
In this pattern we share examples from Te Paataka Koorero o Takaanini (The Takaanini Community Hub) and Plunket which look at the detail of how this can be enacted in traditional services spaces.
Places and spaces are not neutral, and not just containers for initiatives or actions. We need to work intentionally to actively ensure places can be genuine channels for wellbeing.
Recognising and reflecting on how places are shaped by and in turn shape people’s lives is a good starting point.
Adding a more socially, culturally and ecologically rich understanding of place in the design of initiatives and how they are situated in spaces could also deepen the focus and measurement towards what really matters to people and families.
“Good” looks different in different places. We may even start to evaluate place-based initiatives on questions such as ‘how are the stories of this place recognised and valued in the work’, ‘how have communities shaped this space’ ‘how welcome do families feel in this space’, and ‘how do babies play here’. That in turn may support deeper learnings towards better outcomes in place.
Read the full PDF for:
- the wonderful examples from Te Paataka Koorero o Takaanini (The Takaanini Community Hub) and Plunket; and
- our suggestions on the mindsets, behaviours, structures, values and spaces it may take to embed this pattern.
Core contributors to this piece
Ingrid Burkett
Penny Hagen
Angie Tangaere
Winnie Hauraki
Thank you also the many others who we talked with, and those who undertook the work we observed
