City or Suburbs Part V

Today I'm going to talk about community life, and why city dwellers may have more connection to their neighbors than suburbanites do.

The idea of this seemed a little radical to me. I mean, I grew up in the suburbs, and my parents still live there, and they're very involved in their community. What I found was that this might not be the norm however. There are many people that believe the suburbs are highly anti-social. Apparently this is not a new idea, though it was a new idea to me.

When you think about it, there is some logic to this idea. A person can literally wake up in the morning, get into their car in the garage, drive all the way to their place of employment, park in an underground parking lot, take the elevator to their floor, and enter their cubicle without ever seeing another person. The fact that practically all people living in the suburbs have to drive to school, work, shopping, etc., they are constantly surrounded by several thousand pounds of steel and glass and have little opportunity for spontaneous meetings and getting to know their neighbors.

Contrast this with living in the city which are designed to be walkable and where people are able to develop more personal relationships with their neighbors and family run corner stores.

Community life is very important, whether we think about it or not. According to Mark Kingswell, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto,
“Humans have always found meaning by living together with each other. And in fact, if you go back millennia, many political theorists from Aristotle on, think that community is what defines us as who we are, and without community we’re less than ourselves. We’re either beasts or gods he said. Well since most of us are not gods, we probably end up being beasts if we don’t have people around.
Cities grow up over the course of centuries, a grand migration of people towards the kinds of diversity, excitement and opportunity that close proximity of other humans offers them. The fascinating thing about the development of the suburbs as an ex-urban or anti-urban form of building is that it is the reverse movement under the conditions of the urban. That is, people have come together seeking each other, and they’re fleeing from each other into isolation.”

The suburbs have lost the traditional community based structures of our historic areas. They have no central meeting places, no community arts centers, no public forum places etc. The performing arts centers, theaters, libraries, city halls, and other community minded places are all downtown. The suburbs induce privacy, where the city promotes gett"ing to know your neighbors.

There's a quote in the movie "Radiant City" which pretty much sums it up:

“What is it doing to the very idea of citizenship when we don’t share public spaces with each other and we spend no time whatsoever in a community with our fellow citizens. This isn’t just about the car. The car is a handy bashing point but it’s not about the car, It’s about how we have chosen to live. My particular worry I guess would be the deteriorating sense of citizenship when people live so isolated from themselves….Community becomes just a word in the overheated rhetoric of advertising for most of these developments. Community is shorthand for cluster of houses with people inside them not talking to each other. It’s not at all community in any meaningful or deep sense. So you can talk about the community in the sense of that named suburb or that tract but in many cases if not most, there’s no community there."

That's a pretty frightening outlook. It's also a very difficult thing to quantify. So you may or may not agree with it. I am at least glad that people are having the conversation, and that we are becoming aware of the potential problem.

Stay tuned for the next post where I explain how preservation can help to solve some of the suburban problems.