The House Meeting is a cornerstone of the Mazà week. It is the forum for residents to come together each week to speak about living together.
This is a moment when all residents in an apartment come together to ask questions, propose ideas and raise problems. This might be to organise the shopping for next week, to speak about where all the laundry powder has gone, or to have a conversation about cleaning so everyone can agree on a standard.
Each individual has the space to speak. Sometimes this meeting lasts twenty minutes, and everything is at ease. Sometimes it lasts two hours, and everyone has something they need to say.
The role of our housing manager is to curate this space for people of diverse backgrounds to find common ground. It is a space to develop systems for sharing responsibilities in the house – shopping, cooking and cleaning – with the aim of encouraging confidence and negotiating differences. It is a space where residents can feel safe to communicate things with one another which in another environment might lead to conflict or tension.
The aim is that, by testing these boundaries in the house meeting, each individual comes to feel more confident about how to approach their housemates in a way that everyone recognises as respectful and is likely to lead to peaceful resolutions. This process gives everyone a stake in the house and a sense of ownership over their space.
This is one of the ways we understand whether Mazà is having an impact or not. One of the key things we try to achieve is to enable residents to feel ownership of their living space. This can mean feeling comfortable to cook in the kitchen, fixing a bulb that is broken or speaking with a fellow resident about being a little bit loud when they get back from work at 1am. This means taking responsibility for communication with fellow residents, as well as for the space as a whole.
This means the house becomes a stable base from which to navigate the city: a place of strong social connections and safety from which each resident can make decisions relevant to their life. The process of going out and accessing services or looking for education or employment in a foreign country is far less intimidating with the knowledge that there is a familiar space to return to.