Placemaker by Christie Purifoy

Author:Christie Purifoy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2019-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

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Placemaking is a kind of peacemaking.

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Placemaking is a kind of peacemaking. It is a way of making peace within families, for instance when we rearrange the bedroom furniture to better suit siblings who share a room, or when we hang light-blocking curtains in the baby’s nursery; it is a way of making peace within communities, when we share our places through hospitality, or when communities of very different people care for a shared space such as a park or garden. Our placemaking at Eaton Place was as much about patience and kindness and careful communication as it was about tile and paint. I sometimes think of it as our own “Holy Experiment,” to use William Penn’s phrase for his utopian Pennsylvania dream.

We had never owned our own home before, never done any serious remodeling, and though we had lived for years in an apartment community, we had never participated in communal decisions regarding the minimum temperature for winter comfort or whether to replace the peeling wallpaper in the stairwell with new wallpaper or paint. Even an apparently simple question—wallpaper or paint?—involves working through a community’s concerns regarding style, budget, maintenance, and quality. The question cannot be answered or acted upon without a shared vision for the place being made. When I purchased new carriage-style ceiling lights for the building’s stairwell to replace the 1970s globe lights that had been there previously, I was acting on the responsibility given me by my neighbors, but I was a nervous wreck until I knew they approved of my choice. Yet this experience in sharing ownership of the building that sheltered each one of us taught Jonathan and me so much about the complexities and the beauties not only of making a place but of being a neighbor. No wonder that, since Eaton Place, we have always thought of the word neighbor as a verb.

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