One idea I’ve found urbanism to be fascinated with is community. It’s a reasonable fascination, if you ask me. We live in a time where isolation and loneliness are rampant. People feel detached, unable to find friends, romantic partners, hobbies, places of relaxation. So it makes sense that people find isolation to be an issue, and community to be the solution. I’ve generally felt that way myself. A sentiment I’ve found growing on twitter, and tiktok, and other spaces of online discourse, however, is the idea that community (in the sense that the average person conceives of it), is really just a friend group–and that most people are generally unwilling to make concessions in their own life for the sake of their neighbors and neighborhoods–a hallmark of community.
So is community really the goal people want?
The reason why I’ve decided to blog about this is that as I write my KIPP proposal about the topic I blogged about a couple of weeks ago–the future of the suburb–I’m left to think about what that ideal future looks like. It’s obvious the suburb is an isolating place. One hardly feels connected to their neighbors there. Kids grow up with less interaction. People are forced to drive to see their friends if their friends aren’t their neighbors.
The second stream of consciousness leading me to think about this is a book that I’ve been reading for a while now to learn more about the history of urbanism, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, by Jane Jacobs. One chapter I came across in this book fascinated me, specifically “The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact”.
Jacobs asserts two seemingly competing, but complementary arguments. The first is that the (healthy) city street is essential in fostering contact and communal responsibility: one must feel like they can speak up about the issues that plague them to their neighbors, trust their children to their neighbors, trust themselves to their neighbors. At the same time, privacy and separation from the lives of one’s neighbors is essential, and in fact, lacking the ability to choose who gets more access into one’s life is disastrous. She illustrates this by explaining how anonymity is a major negative in a city context–people being able to get away with not being known means that they are not subjects of intervention when they do wrong. They’re not helped when they are suffering. And so on. At the same time, a full lack of privacy is an issue as well. If you feel *too* obligated to your neighbors, you become entangled in their lives. You’re unable to select who you confide in, engage with, enjoy the company of.
She argues that if one is too forced to engage in the lives of one’s neighbors, they withdraw and only pick and choose who to let into their lives. Places where one doesn’t experience sidewalk contact with people as their main form of contact with people force people to contact them through other means–inviting them over, for example. So she argues that the suburbs, and city developments that don’t have shops, cafes and bars, suffer from the inability for people to limit their connection with people to simply sidewalk contact. And yet, the interesting part of this is that you don’t need more than that sidewalk contact–she speaks about how people will leave their housekeys at shops when they leave town, and feel more empowered to intervene when they see something wrong.
This feels like something that is neither the community that the masses seem to desire, nor the community that critics of that desire seem to espouse the need for. The balance here appears to be key. I can sympathize with the critics–I too, feel like we should hold responsibility for people regardless of our relationship with them. Individualism is a massive curse in western societies and our rampant consumerism and cut-throat capitalist economy are both predicated on it. At the same time, Jacobs knows that we need the ability to select how much we let people into our lives. I don’t think she’d disagree with the notion that we should be protecting our neighbors’ kids when they play outdoors. Nor would she disagree with the assertion that communities should assist their vulnerable, homeless and discriminated-against neighbors.
But I do think that she recognizes that a lot of people are not ready for the latter of those two, while the former isn’t an expectation in situations where we don’t even know our neighbors. But would she see today’s cities and argue for the need for community? Would her conception of third spaces be the same? It seems like her idea of community isn’t the closeness that either group advocates for, but rather a third kind–mutual responsibility without mutual entanglement or attachment. If you are responsible for all of your neighbors, you fulfill their need for security. If you meet all of them on the street, then you can naturally grow closer to the ones who you accept into your private spaces. She talks about how important sidewalks and stores are in this regard. Neighborhoods without public space naturally dedicated to interaction will suffer for it.
I think this is also notable because she criticizes things like neighborhood parks in purely residential neighborhoods as dead spaces and vacuums when they’re not occupied in a rolling manner. So you can’t design public spaces as public spaces, but rather the neighborhood itself, at a core level, must be communal. Wide sidewalks so that people can talk, walk and children can play. Stores and cafes so that people can talk, relax, interact. The “eyes on the street”, of course.
This comes back to my project for a number of reasons, but the one that comes to mind the most is simply that I’m looking for solutions. If I’m looking for solutions, and I don’t recognize that in this field, even well-meaning ideas can backfire because objective response to issues doesn’t equal a percieved response to issues, then my solutions mean nothing. As the authors of “Emergent Tokyo” noted (and I mentioned in my last blog), communities need to be empowered to create their own emergent spaces. Design must account for that.
I think this also raises two challenges.
The first is that people desire quietude and seperation. These are not incompatible with anything Jacobs says, but they can sometimes feel like that. Convincing people to change opinions and perceptions is neither realistic nor ideal. In that case, how does one strike the balance between under- and over-connection while keeping a place quiet and residential.
The second is that I would argue that, at least in the American context, the streets that Jacobs spoke of in the 1950s, where people felt empowered to trust their keys with a business owner, responsible for their neighbors and private, but not isolated, don’t exist anymore, even in the city. So perhaps even cultural factors have brought us into a place even more isolated than what Jacobs ever saw. In that case, can we even get to where Jacobs thought we should’ve been. Or is something new and different needed?
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