City Soul

After spending the evening at a friend's house in southern Durham, anonymously tucked away in one of those forcefully innocuous housing developments (with names like "Piney Woods") I was thinking of the Jetsons. I was initially trying to remember if we were ever given a glimpse of terra firma, but soon began to wonder if the Jetsons had neighbors. I don't mean people that happened to show up at their hoverhouse for martinis, but immediately proximate domiciles. And if there were "next-hangar" neighbors, would they have had any means to interact other than by skirting across the short airspace in their aircars?

Because I began to think that these places that we build really aren't that different. Sure, minus the aircars. But I came to realize that people could live next door to one another in these places and yet, in the absence of surveillance equipment, never see one another.

There are no sidewalks. Even if there were sidewalks, where would they lead? A sad strip of narrow concrete on the side of the 6 lane highway? As Mom, Pop, n' Squirt enter and leave the house, they don't ever need to bear the assault of sunlight and unconditioned air. They exit the house into the garage, get in their cars and then leave the house.

Where is the community? At the "Clubhouse"? Will they reserve the clubhouse for a weekend afternoon weiner roast so that they can meet some of their neighbors? Doesn't this seem a bit contrived?

Yes - Americans are almost pathologically individualistic. But we're disturbingly close to an airlock society. Isolating yourself in the sanitized reality of Piney Woods may seem to protect you from the vagaries of humanity, but is the result a disturbing lack of empathy in the world?

I think we really are better off living in places where there is a crazy old lady on the corner who yells about "Nat-zis" and has her washing machine on the porch. We are better off walking to the corner store to get some milk rather than driving a few miles to Wal-Mart. I think we are better off when the center of our community is the center of our city = an open air place with people preaching about conspiracies in the same spot as someone did 100 years ago.

Because the homogenized housing haven is the easy way out. Society is messy. People are messy. But running away and pretending that messy people don't exist except in the reassuringly controllable confines of the big-screen TV robs all of us of heart. And leaves our communities without soul.

Can we recreate the benefits of the places we built before we could escape in our cars? Can New Urbanism, Traditional Neighborhood Design, Transit-Oriented Development and other monikered ideas create an incubator for societal soul? Possibly, within a larger framework. Real personal responsibility dictates that we take responsibility for our cities and realize that we live in Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, Baltimore, Durham, etc. - not "Piney Woods".