Mark Lakeman, City Repair Project

Mark Lakeman is a co-founder of the City Repair Project in Portland, Oregon. City Repair is a multi- disciplinary, non-profit organization which works with place-based communities to creatively recreate the infrastructure of the public commons where people live. Whether converting street intersections into public squares, or organizing other forms of permanent or ephemeral place interventions, City Repair is effectively engaging citizens in the reinvention of the public landscape. All of these projects are ecological in emphasis, using natural building and permaculture techniques.

After working for several years in the 1980's as a lead designer of large scale corporate projects, in the 1990's Mark embarked on a series of cultural immersion projects with indigenous societies in order to derive placemaking patterns which could be applied to urban settings in the United States. These patterns include broad participation, local ownership, transference of authority to local populations, creative _expression in planned and unplanned processes, and social capital as the primary economic engine of change.

Mark is the principal of Communitecture, a private design firm specializing in ecological building and planning projects at many scales. He also sits on the Board of Directors of Southeast Uplift, Portland's proactive neighborhood coalition that is undertaking numerous initiatives to remake the civic landscape.

For more about Mark, visit his website: www.cityrepair.org