Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Does North America have too much space? yes, yes it does.
After absorbing that Rebecca Solnit excerpt, I started thinking. Quite obviously, she had a deep infatuation with Italian cities, and the pedestrian wonders they've managed to evolve, but more than that, she'd fallen in love with the community that had to grow up in such circumstances; every packed street forced interaction with all elements of society, no matter how unscrupulous or arrogant. North Americans building cities grew up inside a different paradigm, with the dominant theme being to fill space, settle the west, claim new land, etc etc, and we live in the remnants of that expansionist dream, perhaps even its carcass; people are constantly afraid of being stuck 'between' places, on a stretch of highway between one's home and Walmart for example, and what results is not a continuous spectrum of changing scenery and people, but a discrete set of destinations one achieves in a day, with a minimum of human interaction, usually from the safety of a personal motor chaffeur. Even in suburbia, people are seen as potential sources of harm, instead of feeling the shared camaraderie of forced neighbors. When I went to Italy (yeah, you can feel the irrelevant personal epiphany coming... wait for it...) I was struck by the same elements; cars were treated like aliens intruding on a pedestrian's world, not the other way around, and its far enough back in my memory so that I remember people as being more polite/courteous than your average Edmonton SUV owner. A city that had walking as the primary mode of transport is going to feel more personal and less cold than one from the post-Ford age; even streets in the same city from the two different periods prove it (walk down Whyte and then walk down the Whitemud). Shared experience versus hermetically-sealed vehicular isolation. But where does this lead to? As the world becomes increasingly smaller, and people/dwellings/amenities start to stack up Blade Runner-style, care must be taken to foster that community feel, or else before we know it, its pre-Guiliani New York all over the globe, with everyone fending only for themselves.
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I really liked how you described that "every packed street forced interaction with all elements of society". Now Germany is not Italy, but Germany does have a large population and living in a subrub in a German city, you are a lot closer to your neighbors than what I have seen here in Edmonton, so I can relate to that. However, I would have to point out that this not always a good thing (it’s not always bad either, of course). There is not always a "shared camaraderie of forced neighbors" as you put it (in fact there can be live long wars between neighbors that aren't pretty). In my own experiences, the closeness has a negative aspect to it, because it lacks privacy. My parents have a terraced house and the house is directly surrounded by dozens of other houses and wherever you go you run into neighbors. There are no separation walls between the various backyards, so once when you go outside to sit on your terrace you not only see and hear your neighbors all the time (which can be pretty annoying), but you’re seen and heard by them. I always found that disturbing (something about being watch at all the time makes you feel like an animal in a zoo), which is why I mostly refused to sit outside in the sun and hid in my room. And it is quite sad, if you can’t even sit on your own terrace.
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