Divija Madhani

In Vancouver, BC, she's practicing small ways of an alternative future.

“I don't think we were meant to live like this.”

By this, Divija Madhani means “isolated, scarcity-oriented, hyper-individualistic.”

The way we're living, she says, “is a blip in our history.”

Divija is a systems thinker, economic sociologist and community weaver who grew up in Mumbai, India, and has lived in Vancouver for nine years. Through her studio, POP Praxis, she works at the intersections of justice, imagination and strategy, exploring how care can be built into the structures that shape everyday life.

So when Divija talks about changing how we live, she is thinking about economics, public space, democracy and institutions. She is equally interested in how change begins: with an invitation to imagine something different and start “practicing small ways of an alternative future.”

One of hers begins at 5:15 on a Friday evening.

Divija scrambles down the elevator of her apartment building with a basket of cardstock and colored pencils and a tote bag filled with cookies, teas and homemade cupcakes. In the spacious lobby, sofas surround an oval table. She sets out Sudoku books and pens and props up a little chalkboard sign: “Free cupcakes and crafts.”

Soon, backpacks are scattered around the sofas, left by people who were coming home and decided to stop. A baby runs around, enamored by dinosaur-headed bubble sticks. Someone brings freshly baked banana bread. There is laughter and conversation about everything from insurance companies to the physics of movies. Soft light pours through the enormous windows.

Looking around at all of it, Divija feels her heart is at peace.

The gathering grew out of Next-Door Table, an experiment Divija had already begun when she joined the Welcome Committee, a national network of people testing ways to strengthen connection where they live. She was drawn to the Welcome Committee in part because the Chamber treated connection as a public good, taking seriously the responsibility to care for it, and appreciated seeing how other members were creating it on porches, driveways and in parks.

The experience also helped her rethink Next-Door Table. She had started the project because her building had wonderful shared amenity spaces that were, she thought, “shockingly underused.”

So she began showing up on Friday evenings, creating a place where people of any age could drop in. The idea was partly to create “a rhythm for connection.” See the same faces often enough, she says, and relationships have the chance to deepen. Some neighbors have become friends she now sees a couple of times a week.

But showing up every week also meant doing all the emotional labor of welcoming and hosting. “I wasn't able to experience the community I was building,” she says.

She is moving toward monthly gatherings where others can host so she can toggle between being both participant and host. Gathering this way still isn't a cultural norm. But “it’s possible. It just takes one person to kind of start, right?”

“I believe caring is revolutionary,” Divija says.

For her, that isn't merely a sentiment. It's structural. When care for one another and the planet becomes “organized and shared,” she says, it can ripple across institutions to create “local spaces of belonging, distributed power and resilience.”

She sometimes describes this as creating an “infrastructure for care”: shaping the places, practices and systems of everyday life so that caring for one another becomes easier to do.

For all that structural thinking, much of what Divija is describing happens in ordinary life.

Some of those ways of living are familiar from Divija's childhood in Mumbai, where people might drop in for afternoon snacks or stop for an evening chat before heading home. She calls it “the practice of social intimacy”: cooking a neighbor a meal, entertaining someone’s child, running errands together, walking to the bus stop together because you're both going anyway.

For Divija, sharing more of ordinary life also means expanding the circle of people to whom we feel some responsibility. “Try to find somebody you're responsible to who's younger than you and older than you,” she says. “I think that will really add life to your years.”

Her interest in bringing more of life back into relationships with other people extends to something adults often leave behind: play.

She points to the scale of contemporary problems and the corresponding loss of agency: we can see enormous political, economic and social problems while knowing we cannot individually solve them.

Her response is physical: Where do you live? What spaces can you touch? Who is next to you? What do you hear in laughter, whispers and song? What does your body experience?

Her examples are tangible: ceremony, celebration-specific dance moves, shared meals, autumn leaf wands, chalk drawings and Stick Ninja, a game that involves batting flying sticks out of the air with another stick. These experiences return people to their immediate surroundings and remind them that they can affect something. Shared with others, that sense of agency can become collective.

We need whimsy, she says, if we're going to “function as a society and be responsible for the shared finite resources we have.”

Those kinds of relationships also depend on having enough stability for a rhythm to develop.

Asked what displacement and unaffordability do to our ability to form lasting relationships, Divija says connection requires frequency, repetition and consistency.

“There's a rhythm and an anchoring that is required for connection.”

If people are continually forced to move, she argues, they can be “filtered out of the possibility of being connected.”

Place isn't the only possible anchor. For someone without residential stability, connection might grow instead around shared experience, identity, language, history or culture. Divija is reluctant to prescribe what connection should look like for someone else, and she is wary of defining communities by what they lack and instead prefers to recognize the richness and forms of connection already there.

Perhaps the smallest version of Divija's alternative future involves peanuts.

She enjoys baking, and one day discovered she needed peanuts she didn't have. So she asked her neighbors.

They didn't have peanuts. They had peanut butter.

Divija describes the exchange as the real-life equivalent of improv's “yes, and.” The peanut butter couldn't give her what she'd gone looking for. But it made the experience of needing something less solitary.

And when she eventually got the peanuts, she knew who she would share them with.

Cupcakes in a lobby won't defeat hyper-individualism. Borrowing peanuts won't repair structural inequality. They do something smaller, and perhaps necessary first: they let us experience another way of living before that way of living feels normal.