With Mark Lakeman, founder of City Repair

Placemaking is a growing movement across the U.S. and around the world whereby communities, neighborhood by neighborhood, are collaborating in the “creative reclamation of public space.” Mark Lakeman is the founder of the movement, whose City Repair in Portland has developed a number of model projects that have been replicated in hundreds of towns and cities across the U.S. In the last decade Mark has directed, facilitated, or inspired designs for more than three hundred new community-generated public places in Portland, Oregon alone. City Repair’s Village Building Convergence event has for over a decade been catalyzing the development of dozens of participatory organizations and urban permaculture design projects across the United States and Canada. The holistic approach to rearchitecting local spaces, bringing village-like public gathering spots back into our isolating urban and suburban neighborhoods, is having a profound impact upon communities, changing the social dynamic of neighborhoods as well as public respect for and intelligent engagement with the local ecology. This conversation covers not only the remarkable work of City Repair and the localization movement it has spawned, but also reveals Mark’s unique influences and informed vision that have ignited a do it yourself revolution in neighborhoods – with far reaching evolutionary consequences.