Pavilion for Sustainable Peace

Rooftop view of Ramla

The team for the “Pavilion for Sustainable Peace,” a part of the Cosmopolis 2045 project, has taken on the task of envisioning what a center for sustainable peace would be and do in the year 2045.

An assignment of this nature calls on us to be creative, suspend judgment and dream big. We also realize that while it is exciting to envision a world in which “cosmopolitan communication” is the norm, the constraints that restrict us are defined by the limits of our imagination. Our sub-team of six comes from many different backgrounds of study and work and has the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) as the thread that binds us. Therefore, we recognize that every conversation has multiple layers of meaning and we try to apply the principles and practices of CMM within our team as we work.

We take a communication perspective in our approach to sustainable peace and that means we accept that every conversation is one episode embedded in a larger, longer, multi-turn, multi-party exchange. Cosmopolitan communication can be thought of as achieving coordination between and among the many different narratives people have that they bring to every conversation.  Our narratives are created from our past experiences that include and are not limited to: the values and beliefs we have instilled in us from our families, schools, communities, religions, cultures, media and society in general. We believe that in order to have social worlds in which people can live and thrive there need to be patterns of communication that are respectful and tolerant of different points of view and value systems.

A woman at a market in Ramla

Cosmopolis 2045 is a web-based eco system that holds the ideals of coordination and cosmopolitan communication at its core. Visitors will be able to enter and engage interactively with the different aspects of the community once the site is launched, which is planned for spring 2013. The Pavilion for Sustainable Peace will have many components and ways in which people can engage in learning through praxis, so that they can develop a more refined sense of self, other and episode or context, toward making better social worlds. One component of the site will be case studies and in this endeavor we have begun our work in the city of Ramla, Israel.

Ramla has a long and rich history and many different groups of people live there. The view of this history depends on how you tell the story and where you begin; is it when the city was founded about 1300 years ago or is it more recent when Israel was formed in 1948? Where you start the story can reflect how you tell the story, which information you include/exclude, how you present that information and so on. In other words, we all have points of view and that comes across in how we story people, events, places. Ramla has a diverse population and it appears to be a place where diversity works. However, if you look back at the shorter history of Ramla since 1948, there are very different and extreme ways of telling this story. Since 1948 Ramla has felt the pressure of the turmoil existing in the surrounding area of Israel and the Middle East. When you probe beneath the surface of the presentation of “we all get along” you can see there are fissures in the storyline and that everyone is not on board with the same coherent story.

There is a center in Ramla called Kshatot , which means Rainbow, where there are wonderful efforts being made to work within the different communities to make Ramla a better place to live and we were fortunate to be invited into their center and community to work with them. Our initial foray was in mid-February and we met with many leaders of different groups within the community. One of the most frequent questions we were asked by people we met was about how long we were planning on being with them? We understood this to be a way of them questioning our commitment and whether it was worth them trying to trust us, open up and participate. This message was heard loud and clear and we realized a profound sense of commitment and responsibility in working with these groups of people. We didn’t want to be thought of as researchers working on subjects who take their findings and leave without any significant benefit to the community. Instead, we want to think of ourselves as partners working together in joint exploration with these groups to figure out ways in which we can collaboratively develop ways to improve the quality of life in Ramla and achieve cosmopolitan communication. This would need to be done with them sharing their insider knowledge of Ramla, what has worked in the past, what the main issues are, combined with our knowledge of Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) in fostering cosmopolitan communication to create better social worlds, built on a foundation of trust.

Our first activity together was a “simple” exploration into identity. I say simple in quotes because it was a provocative question that stimulated a lot of rich conversation. It was a question they had rarely if ever been asked. Participants used the CMM Daisy Model to map the major influences in their social worlds that they identified as having contributed to shaping their current identities. They worked in small groups with friends and strangers and shared pieces of themselves they had not shared before, embarking on a joint journey of discovery.

We will return every two months and our goal is to develop a core group of facilitators who can take CMM back to their community groups in a trickle down effect of spreading skills and working together to co-create their cosmopolitan social worlds. We are still very much in the beginning phase and our initial goal at this stage is to deepen our mutual understanding of each other and Ramla.