Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [28]
The middle-class housing crisis is not new, and there has been no shortage of ideas designed to make the single-family house more affordable. The building industry and generations of architects have dedicated themselves to the task. The results—plastic plumbing, hollow doors, flimsy walls, vinyl cladding—are very clever, but all of them put together do not generate half the savings that can be achieved by allowing a family to own one car fewer. The problem is not one of architecture but of community planning, and as long as we continue to create places where walking, biking, and transit are pointless, we will continue to exacerbate the middle-class housing crisis.
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THE PHYSICAL CREATION OF SOCIETY
ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSES OF A SOCIAL DECLINE;
DRIVERS VERSUS PEDESTRIANS; THE FOUR PREREQUISITES
FOR STREET LIFE: MEANINGFUL DESTINATIONS, SAFE STREETS,
COMFORTABLE STREETS, AND INTERESTING STREETS
The history of a nation is only a history of its villages written large.
—WOODROW WILSON (1900)
ENVIRONMENTAL CAUSES OF A SOCIAL DECLINE
Critical writing in recent years has documented a decline in the civic life of our nation. From Richard Sennett’s landmark text, The Fall of Public Man, to Christopher Lasch’s final work, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, dozens of books call attention to the same problem: society seems to be evolving in an unhealthy way. Americans are splintering into insular factions, each pursuing an increasingly narrow agenda, with nary a thought for the greater good. Further, more and more citizens seem to be withdrawing from public life into the shelter of their private homes, from which they encounter the world primarily through their television and computer screens. This is hardly a recipe for productive social evolution.
Many factors contribute to this condition, and one must be wary of focusing inordinately on just one, but it is worth investigating the significant role that our changing physical environment may play in that perceived decline. To begin with the obvious, community cannot form in the absence of communal space, without places for people to get together to talk. Just as it is difficult to imagine the concept of family independent of the home, it is near-impossible to imagine community independent of the town square or the local pub. Christopher Lasch has observed that “civic life requires settings in which people meet as equals. Thanks to the decay of civic institutions ranging from political parties to public parks and informal meeting places, conversation has become almost as specialized as the production of knowledge.”ae In the absence of walkable public places—streets, squares, and parks, the public realm—people of diverse ages, races, and beliefs are unlikely to meet and talk. Those who believe that Internet web sites and chat rooms are effective substitutes vastly underestimate the distinction between a computer monitor and the human body.
In the suburbs, time normally spent in the physical public realm is now spent in the automobile, which is a private space as well as a potentially sociopathic device. The average American, when placed behind the wheel of a car, ceases to be a citizen and becomes instead a motorist. As a motorist, you cannot get to know your neighbor, because the prevailing relationship is competitive. You are competing for asphalt, and if you so much as hesitate or make a wrong move, your neighbor immediately punishes you, by honking the horn, taking your space, running into you, or committing some other antisocial act, the most egregious of which have been well