B. But growth through the Life cycle is not inevitable.
It depends on the presence of a balanced community, a community that can sustain the give and take of growth. Persons at each stage of life have something irreplaceable to give and to take from the community, and it is just these transactions which help a person to solve the problems that beset each stage. Consider the case of a young couple and their new child. The connection between them is entirely mutual. Of course, the child “depends” on the parents to give the care and love that is required to resolve the conflict of trust that goes with infancy. But simultaneously,
the child gives the parents the experience of raising and bearing, which helps them to meet their conflict of generativity, unique to adulthood.
We distort the situation if we abstract it in such a way that we consider the parent as “having” such and such a personality when the child is born and then, remaining static, impinging upon a poor little thing. For this weak and changing little being moves the whole family along. Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them ; in fact, we may say that the family brings up a baby by being brought up by him. Whatever reaction patterns are given biologically and whatever schedule is predetermined developmentally must be considered to be a series of potentialities for changing patterns of mutual regulation. [Erikson, ibid. p. 69.]
Similar patterns of mutual regulation occur between the very old and the very young; between adolescents and young adults, children and infants, teenagers and younger teenagers, young men and old women, young women and old men, and so on. And these patterns must be made viable by prevailing social institutions and those parts of the environment which help to maintain them —the schools, nurseries, homes, cafes, bedrooms, sports fields, workshops, studios, gardens, graveyards. . . .
We believe, however, that the balance of settings which allow normal growth through the life cycle has been breaking down. Contact with the entire cycle of life is less and less available to each person, at each moment in time. In place of natural communities with a balanced life cycle we have retirement villages, bedrooms suburbs, teenage culture, ghettos of unemployed, college towns, mass cemeteries, industrial parks. Under such conditions, one’s chances for solving the conflict that comes with each stage in the life cycle are slim indeed.
To re-create a community of balanced life cycles requires, first of all, that the idea take its place as a principal guide in the development of communities. Each building -project, whether the addition to a house, a new road, a clinic, can be viewed as either helping or hindering the right balance for local communities. We suspect that the community repair maps, discussed in The Oregon Experiment, Chapter V (Volume 3 in this series), can play an especially useful role in helping to encourage the growth of a balanced life cycle.
But this pattern can be no more than an indication of work
that needs to be done. Each community must find ways of taking stock of its own relative “balance’3 in this respect, and then define a growth process which will move it in the right direction. This is a tremendously interesting and vital problem; it needs a great deal of development, experiment, and theory. If Erikson is right, and if this kind of work does not come, it seems possible that the development of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, generativity, integrity may disappear entirely.
| STAGE | IMPORTANT SETTINGS | RITES OF PASSAGE |
| I. INFANTT rust | Home, crib, nursery, garden | Birth place, setting up the home .... out of the crib, making a place |
| 2. YOUNG CHILD Autonomy | Own place, couple’s realm, children’s realm, commons, connected play | Walking, making a place, special birthday |
| 3. CHILD Initiative | Play space, own place, common land, neighborhood, animals | First ventures in town .... joining |
| 4. YOUNGSTER Industry | Children’s home, school, own place, adventure play, club, community | Puberty rites, private entrance paying your way |
| 5. YOUTH Identity | Cottage, teenage society, hostels, apprentice, town and region | Commencement, marriage, work, building |
| 6. YOUNG ADULT Intimacy | Household, couple’s realm, small work group, the family, network of learning | Birth of a child, creating social wealth . . building |
| 7. ADULTGenerativity | Work community, the family town hall, a room of one’s own | Special birthday, gathering, change in work |
| 8. OLD PERSON Integrity | Settled work, cottage, the family, independent regions | Death, funeral, grave sites |
144
l6 LIFE CYCLE
Therefore:
Make certain that the full cycle of life is represented and balanced in each community. Set the ideal of a balanced life cycle as a principal guide for the evolution of communities. This means:
1. That each community include a balance of people at every stage of the life cycle, from infants to the very old; and include the full slate of settings needed for all these stages of life;
2. That the community contain the full slate of settings which best mark the ritual crossing of life from one stage to the next.
settings to support any single stage of life
• settings to support ritual passing from one stage to another
o settings to mark
interaction between stages
The rites of passage are provided for, most concretely, by holy ground (66). Other specific patterns which especially support the seven ages of man and the ceremonies of transition are HOUSEHOLD MIX (35), OLD PEOPLE EVERYWHERE (40), WORK COMMUNITY (41), LOCAL TOWN HALL (44), CHILDREN IN THE CITY (57), BIRTH PLACES (65), GRAVE SITES (70), THE FAMILY (75), YOUR OWN HOME (79), MASTER AND APPRENTICES (83), TEENAGE SOCIETY (84), SHOPFRONT SCHOOLS (85), CHILDREN’S HOME (86), ROOMS TO RENT ( I 5 3 ) , TEENAGER’S COTTAGE ( I 5 4) , OLD AGE COTTAGE ( I 5 5) , SETTLED WORK ( I S 6) , MARRIAGE BED
(187).
SUMMARY OF THE LANGUAGE
which you can make a language for your own project, by choosing the patterns which are most useful to you, and leaving them more or less in the order that you find them printed here.
•J* *2* 4*
We begin with that 'part of the language which defines a town or community. These patterns can never be “designed” or “built” in one fell swoop—but patient piecemeal growth, designed in such a way that every individual act is always helping to create or generate these larger global patterns} will, slowly and surely, over the yearSy make a community that has these global patterns in it.
1. independent regions
within each region work toward those regional policies which will protect the land and mark the limits of the cities j
2. THE DISTRIBUTION OF TOWNS
3. CITY COUNTRY FINGERS