The Village Building Convergence is the annual conference of the City Repair Project, created right here in Portland. Architect Mark Lakeman, living and developing his architectural and urban planning theories in a garage in Sellwood, created a creative community around serving tea for free and sharing desert potlucks in a dreamy environment constructed of recycled materials and decorated by artists. Each week the creative people of Portland gathered to converse and play music in a sort of Ewok Village. The City Repair grew up into the Rebuilding Center and all those rounded benches and structures constructed of adobe around town. I'm a confirmed modernist, but concrete is much too energy intensive to use to build a structure intended for less than a 5 year lifespan. The Village Building Convergence allows volunteers to learn to collaborate in creating experimental structures, in the physical realm, perhaps in the social realm too.
In the evening, the Village Building Convergence transforms the former Disjecta space, in perhaps its most successful instance, into a sort of Oregon Country Fair filled with nice people who are trying to change the world.
Tonight one of their speakers is rabbi Michael Lerner. Psychotherapist an author Lerner has good insights into how to get down to actual world changing. He often extends his ideas one step beyond their natural application, but that is more a problem of the pace of change in society. So you might find his ideas filtered through your world view a source of hope that, yes, the world can be changed, sustainably, for the better.
VBC Disjecta SE 2nd and Burnside 7PM $15
