Uncovering the Meaning in Everyday Routines

In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity of having two different daily routines. I used to live in Quincy, Massachusetts and work in Providence, Rhode Island. My day-to-day experience outside of my job involved spending about two hours in my car on interstate highways in bumper-to-bumper traffic or whizzing by folks in the breakdown lane (yes, that’s legal in MA during certain hours of the day). Typically, I’d get home and throw a frozen meal in the microwave and settle into and episode of Law & Order. I’d fall asleep by 10 p.m. and do it all again the next day.

Contrast this to my regular day now where I live and work in Middlebury, Vermont. I have a five-minute walk to work. Occasionally, I’ll take the long route to grab a coffee at Otter Creek Bakery. I often enjoy lunch with my husband or run errands in town. Most nights I’m home in time for a home-cooked meal and a stroll around the neighborhood.

I make this contrast, not to pit small town against big city living, but rather to illustrate how our surroundings shape our daily routines. The way in which we’ve arranged our opportunities to live, work and play has an impact on how we experience a place and, in turn, how our experience contributes to the life of the community.

In Small Town Sustainability: Economic, Social, and Environmental Innovation, authors Paul Knox and Hieke Mayer bring the concept of “lifeworld” into their discussion about community design. They explain lifeworlds as “the taken for granted pattern and context for everyday living through which people conduct their day to day lives without having to make it an object of conscious attention” but that “leads to a pool of shared meanings.”

I find this a useful concept in making the case for why the everyday person needs to have a voice in decisions that affect their city or town. Regular citizens bear the consequences of community decisions, so it’s important they be involved. But they also contribute an essential perspective to the discussion—that of the lived experience of a place. So, how do we bring the value and shared meaning of our taken-for-granted, daily routines to light?

Working with our partner communities, the Foundation has been experimenting with different ways to do just that. For instance, we’ve been introducing different ways of sharing and gathering stories about place in order to identify common community values.

We’re interested in learning about how others capture these “lifeworlds” in ways that can inform planning and decision making in our communities. Got an idea to share? We’d love to hear it...