I am someone who has many dreams – I mean the night kind of dreams….very seldom would they be a night mare, but they come with incredible detail! Maybe this is because my mind is processing, maybe it’s because I’m a bit weird or maybe it’s because I’m finally quiet and the Spirit of God can talk to me!
Anyway, one of the things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit is the ‘corporate personality’ of cities. My great friend, Martin Scott, has previously done some work on this. Just as people, with their own history and nurture form their own personality, so too does a place. Personally, I’m a fan of the Enneagram as a way of helping understand who we are, why we are, what our shadow self is like and how to become more our ‘true-selves’. I believe this can also be applied to our towns/cities/regions and nations. If we understand the personality of the place we live in, we can help it become fully flourishing and enable it to become the right kind of ‘gift’ to other places. If you don’t know anything about the enneagram, then I would recommend Richard Rohr’s excellent take on it.
Anyway, recently, I had a dream about the city of Coventry (the city where I grew up – I love it!) which I think is a type 4 personality. In the dream, I was in the New Cathedral (one of my all time favourite buildings) and I was helping to facilitate a discussion with a diverse group of people from all over the city. The discussion took the form of a ‘world-cafe’ (a brilliant technique taught by the ‘Art of Hosting’). The underlying premise for the discussion was recognising that the 3 main ‘gifts’ of Coventry’s personality are as follows:
1) A place of peace and reconciliation
2) A place of refuge and healing
3) A place of creativity, innovation and development
And so the question being discussed was this:
If Coventry was ‘well’ how would it be flourishing in it’s primary gifts?
I wonder if we connected more with the personality of our cities and asked our selves similar questions, just how different our cities (places) could be? One of my passions is for health and wellbeing……what are the places we live in like – what do they look like, sound like, smell like, taste like, feel like, behave like, when they are healthy and well?
