Strong Towns: We Built Isolating Places. Can We Get Out?
Strong Towns: We Built Isolating Places. Can We Get Out?
People are lonely. Is it because we are addicted to our phones, or is that a symptom of larger design choices we made when building our places? We cover some of the general concepts related to social infrastructure an try to evaluate what to do next.
I've talked a fair bit about this with my brother. I'm the urbanist nerd, and he's the PhD psychologist. The United States is a deeply traumatized society, which has a great deal to do with our history and hyper-individualist ideology, but it's now a feedback loop in which the hyper-individualist ideology perpetuates the trauma. Our built landscape is largely a redirection of that, so it's both a symptom and a cause.
You see how the two are wrapped up together by the number of people who say (often in this very community) that they hate being around people, that they couldn't live in a city, that they don't want neighbors, or at least want to keep them at figurative arm's distance, so they NEED cars. That's a manifestation of the chronic fight-flight-or-freeze response, because at an individual level, our mental model is of other people as competitors and possible existential threats. (What's wrong with public transit? CRiMinALs wIlL KiLl mE!)
Thing is, to we're a highly-social animal, so the more we pull away from other people in fear, the more stressed and traumatized we get. That is to say, that it's not simply that the built landscape causes loneliness, but loneliness and car-dependency are interlocked in a feedback loop with other factors.
Modern suburbs are a manifestation of the neoliberal mindset, which is summed up in this well known quote from Margaret Thatcher:
...who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families...
Detached, single family homes on their own parcels of land, with clearly defined borders. Each plot is like its own sovereign territory. That is not a society, that is a rejection of society.
But this arrangement wasn't established for no reason, it was done out of a desire for freedom and independence. With society comes shared culture, language, traditions, beliefs and expectations, things that can limit one's individual freedom. So, you reject the larger society, procure your own piece of land and form your own micro society where you and your family can have whatever culture, speak whatever language, and practice whatever beliefs you want. Of course this is very isolating, but freedom and independence often are. A totally free and independent person is a person who is totally alone.