I’ve been visiting the Bahamas – and specifically Nassau – for easily 25 years, and from the start, I loved the street vendors. They were as colorful as their stalls, and you could see whole families, grandma, young teens, babies, all a part of the non-stop activity of the open-air market.

In the early days, they clustered around a central square, the heat of the day cut by huge, majestic trees. Return at night, and the stalls would be collapsed into handmade wooden sheds, all things at rest until the market blossomed again in the morning.

I remember returning one year and was stunned to see the square empty. The stately trees were still there, but they now graced a picture-postcard-perfect square from an old colonial capital. If you didn’t know it, you’d think it had been this way for centuries.

But what had happened to the street vendors?

Half a block down the street, a harsh concrete structure had been erected, and the vendors and stalls had all been stuffed inside. No air-conditioning was provided, ostensibly to maintain the “open-air” flavor of the original market, but in truth, the place was dark and stifling and so … so … boxy.

What had once been casually set about the trees, also allowed the visitor to meander. It appeared to be without design, yet it had been warm and inviting. But this? This was a prison. This was a place without joy. This was a place no one should be made to live the days of their lives.

I can think of millions of urban reasons to make the change: sanitation, the preservation of the trees, economic pressure to increase the number of stalls – you name it. Yet in the name of progress, the soul of the market had been lost.

Which brings to mind the recent and devastating floods in Mumbai. Thousands of people lived in shanties, constructed from any material that could be scrounged. Sanitation, fresh water, electricity? Dream on. But now, even the protection of these haphazard huts was gone.

But what really got me to thinking was an overheard remark about what should happen next for the tens of thousands now homeless in Mumbai. It was something along the lines of “We can’t just let these people to go back and rebuild in this catch-as-catch-can manner. That would be irresponsible. That would be inhumane. These people didn’t ask to live this way.”

Yet the technological solution to this well-intentioned thought could easily be less than satisfactory.

The modern day response to such social predicaments has been to build stark multi-story structures, with each living space just like the one next door, the one upstairs, the one below. Efficient, safe, sterile, uniform.

But humans aren’t meant to live in boxes. And they certainly aren’t meant to live in identical boxes.

Give ten kindergarten kids a set of Duplo building blocks and you will get ten different designs. Give ten adults a set, and the differences may be even more pronounced.

So, could we somehow do something different here? Recognizing that individuality and creativity feed the soul and speak to a quality of life far better than any imposed solutions?

Perhaps plug-and-play building materials – complex and rich in texture, size and flexibility, able to interface with unexpected materials, available – as before – to the individual by opportunity.

Self-determinism is part of the human spirit. Personal expression is part of the soul. And … life is messy.

The word that keeps running through my mind is “co-create,” and really all I’m talking about is enabling the individual.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.

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