If meditation can actually make minds and bodies healthier, could the same approach be taken with cities? What if, as a supplemental process to traditional quantitative analysis, planners and urban shapers meditated on their city? What does it mean to be that city? Would such a process reveal truths typically unseen?
The Dalai Lama says that no one should take any of Buddha’s teachings on faith; one should investigate them and decide for oneself. My extrapolation of this is that teachings taken solely on faith become dogma and are no longer truth. What dogma should planners investigate? Certainly, automobile-centric dogma has been questioned and in large part rejected of late, but what other supposed truths of urbanism falter when put beneath the microscope?
