Happy Cities (4) N Street

N Street is a wonderful story from Happy City.

It started in 1986, when Kevin World and Linda Cloud, a pair of young environmental activists, bought neighbouring homes on N Street on what was then the edge of the university town of Davis. At some point they tore down the fence between those homes and their roommates starting sharing meals in the bigger house. As more community-minded people bought or rented the adjoining properties, more fences came down, and more people dropped for dinner.

The core of the block had been transformed into a lush open green. There were no backyard fences left inside the block. There was an orchard of apple and oranges, a chicken coop, gardens and lawns scattered with children’s toys.

I told Wolf the place felt a little bit like a commune. “But it is not” he corrected me. “None of this land is communal. All the lots are privately owned. We live in our how homes and have our own yards. It’s just that we choose to share those yards and some of our resources.

The setup is remarkably simple. Some take turns cooking meals for dozens of neighbours in the big kitchen. Some prefer to cook and eat alone. Some mix it up. Some have chipped in for a Jacuzzi, which they share with their neighbours for a small fee. Others wouldn’t dream of hot-tubbing with the gang. People do what they want with their yards, but they agree to maintain common paths through them.

Amid all this voluntary intimacy, remarkable things happen... When a single woman died of cancer, the change in her child’s family life was organic. As her mother’s health declined, the child spent time with key neighbours, sleeping over at Kevin and Linda’s house more and more often. The bonds of intimacy and care were so tight that when her mother finally died, the child had already transitioned into a new loving household (and she was formally adopted). The village had become her extended family and wrapped itself around her like a cocoon (p.143).

Happy Cities (3) Community Destroyed

The automobile combined with the detached house in a dispersed suburb has destroyed community life in the modern city. Charles Montgomery says in Happy City,

We have this Conundrum. The detached house in distant dispersal (of a modern suburb) is a blunt instrument: it is a powerful tool for retreating with your nuclear family, and perhaps your direct neighbours, but a terrible base to nurture other intensities and relationships. Your social life must be scheduled and formal. Serendipity disappears in the time eaten up by the commute, in the space between windshield and the garage doors. On the other hand, life in places that feel too crowded to control can leave us so over-stimulated and exhausted that we retreat into solitude.

What we need are places that help us to moderate our interactions with strangers without having to retreat entirely.

We need the nourishing, helping warmth of people, but also need the healing touch of nature. We need to connect, but also need to retreat. We benefit from the consequences of proximity, but these conveniences come with the price of over-stimulation and crowding. We cannot solve the conundrum of sustainable city living unless we understand the contradictory forces and resolve the tension between them (p.123).

Being around too many strangers involves a stress full mix of social uncertainty and lack of control.

Crowding is a problem of perception, and it a problem of design that can be addressed, at least in part, by understanding the subtle physics of sociability (p.126).

We spend a great deal of effort insulating ourselves from stranger, whether its retreating to the edge of suburbia or adding more security features to our urban apartment. But this habit can deprive us of some of the most important interactions of life: those that happen in the blurry zone among people who are not quite stranger, but not yet freed.

The lighter relations we have in volunteer groups, with neighbours, or even with people we see regularly on the street can boost feeling of self-esteem, mastery, and physical health (p.127).

People who say they feel that they “belong to their community are happier than those who do not.

And people who trust their neighbours feel a greater sense of that belonging.
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And the sense of belong is influenced by social contact(p.134).

It has been a terrible mistake to design cities around the nuclear family at the expense of other ties (p.134).

Happy Cities (1)

In his book Happy City: Transforming our Lives through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery explains that Urban Design has an effect on the way that people live. Here is a good quote.

We have this Conundrum. The detached house in distant dispersal (of a modern suburb) is a blunt instrument: it is a powerful tool for retreating with your nuclear family, and perhaps your direct neighbours, but a terrible base to nurture other intensities and relationships. Your social life must be scheduled and formal. Serendipity disappears in the time eaten up by the commute, in the space between windshield and the garage doors. On the other hand, life in places that feel too crowded to control can leave us so over-stimulated and exhausted that we retreat into solitude (p.128).

What we need are places that help us to moderate our interactions with strangers without having to retreat entirely (p.128).

This suggests that it is extremely difficult to establish a real church in which people can love one another in a modern city. Modern urban design is hostile to the body of Christ.

Separation
The design of our modern cities is still based on a principle of separation of activities, even though the problems it was designed to deal with have been solved.

The school of separation believed that the good life can only be achieved by separating the various functions of the city, so that certain people can avoid the worst of its toxicity (p.64).

Separation was the natural response to the Industrial Revolution, which created cities, choking on soot and sewage (p.64).

In the modern city, people live in the suburbs, a long way from their work, schools, and leisure activities. They are forced to move from place to place in the city during their day. This rapid movement depends on the automobile.

Despite their love of liberty, Americans have embraced the massive restrictions of property rights that the separated city demands  (p.67).

Suburban zoning rules have ensured that every city is as separate and static as any Soviet-area housing scheme (p.69).

The reorganization of cities could not have happened without breathtaking subsidies for roads and highways, a decades-long program that required a culture transformation (p.69).

Once the system of dispersal was established in early suburbs, it began to repeat itself in plan after plan. It was easier for city builders in communities with limited budges (p.75).

The modern separated city is based on the city and the automobile. The automobile transformed the city. I will explain how in my next post.