10th anniversary post: Homes, home churches, and hometowns

 

After Hours Denver is still going!
(Source: afterhoursdenver.org)

We have big holes in our social fabric.--RICHARD WEISSBOURD, Making Caring Common (Shaer 2024)

Ten years ago, a pastor's reference to an unconventional church in Denver, Colorado, that meets in bars and focuses on feeding hungry people, led me to reflect on the concept of "home" as applied to houses of worship, living spaces, and towns. But by the end of the piece, I had pivoted to talking about connection: Does the way we create homes of all types, in this era of suburban development, exclude others and isolate ourselves? Belonging is important, but so is connection, and maybe connection is essential to belonging.

Recently there has been a lot of attention to individual loneliness as a public problem, as opposed to a personal one. Loneliness has negative effects on physical health comparable to serious cigarette smoking including raising blood pressure, high cholesterol, and even risk of Alzheimer's disease (Magen 2018, Birak and Cuttler 2017); perhaps this is because connection to others encourages more healthy behavior, but also possibly because the presence of other people can mitigate stress which has its own negative health effects (Holt-Lunsted, Smith and Layton 2010). This goes for mental as well as physical health: loneliness is associated with greater risk of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts (Fu 2020). 

Besides preventing harms to individuals, interactions of various types--ranging from intimate to random--benefit the whole community. Jane Jacobs's landmark The Death and Life of Great American Cities is rooted in her observation that it's all those random human interactions that form the basis for community ties: 

The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eyeing the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded. ([1961] 1993: 73; cf. also Calthorpe and Fulton 2001: 32-34)

For cities, the walkable design and third places that facilitate interactions also support economic activity and financial strength. "Walkable places are thriving places," said Jeff Speck at Cedar Rapids's City Services Center in March 2015. A 2015 study of three cities found:

[S]treets with a mix of old and new buildings have [both] greater population density and more businesses per commercial square foot than streets with large, new buildings... [T]hese areas also have significantly more jobs per commercial square foot... [N]eighborhoods with a smaller-scaled mix of old and new buildings host a significantly higher proportion of new businesses, as well as more women and minority-owned businesses than areas with predominantly larger, newer buildings.... [O]lder, smaller buildings house significantly greater concentrations of creative jobs per square foot of commercial space. ("Older, Smaller, Better" 2014: 4)

Jan and Ingrid Gehl noticed the same phenomena in their observations in Italy during the 1960s, which came to inform Jan Gehl's designs for Copenhagen (Montgomery 2013: 146-150). Kim Samuel (2015), McGill professor and founder of the Belonging Forum, argues that by contrast cities designed around cars inhibit social connection, especially (but not only) for people with disabilities and the elderly.

Building for belonging can mean designing cities for the varied dimensions of people’s lives, with mixed-use environments that integrate opportunities to shop, work, learn and relax; where neighbourhoods are walkable, people of different ages and incomes are mixed together, and natural prospects for connection exist, from pedestrian zones to public parks to farmers’ markets. (Samuel 2015)

Samuel also commends attention to the quality of housing, and respecting local knowledge. (See also Montgomery 2013: 56-58; he titles this section "The Lonely Everywhere.")

But people can also experience urban areas as hideous parodies of belonging and connection, where the bad effects of loneliness are even magnified. When Olivia Laing (2016) first moved to Brooklyn, she found no sense of belonging and only intrusive connections:

I wanted very much not to be where I was. In fact part of the trouble seemed to be that where I was wasn't anywhere at all. My life felt empty and unreal and I was embarrassed about its thinness, the way one might be embarrassed about a stained or threadbare piece of clothing....

Outside the window, people threw dinner parties. The man upstairs listened to jazz and show tunes at full blast, and filled the hallways with pot smoke, snaking fragrantly down the stairs. Sometimes I spoke to the waiter in my morning cafe, and once he gave me a poem, typed neatly on thick white paper. But mostly I didn't speak. Mostly I was walled up inside myself, and certainly a very long way from anyone else. I didn't cry often, but once I couldn't get the blinds closed and then I did. It seemed too awful, I suppose, the idea that anyone could peer over and get a glimpse of me, eating cereal standing up or combing over emails, my face illuminated by the laptop's glare. (14-15)

As Laing's experience suggests, cities aren't automatic solutions for loneliness, and can even aggravate those feelings. Loneliness exists in multiple forms and has numerous external as well as personal causes, and a recent New York Times Magazine article manages to survey the whole scene without once mentioning suburban sprawl (Shaer 2024); the "holes in the social fabric" referenced by Richard Weissbourd in this post's opening quotation may or may not be surface parking lots. 

Improved design is a necessary but not sufficient condition for connection. A survey of Americans finds connection improving after the coronavirus pandemic, but still down long-term, particularly among nonwhites, the working class, and those with less than college education; for example, college-educated respondents spend more time in public and community spaces like parks and coffee shops (Cox and Pressler 2024). At least one analysis found social isolation so strongly correlated with demographics that more walkable older neighborhoods actually had more social isolation because they had more elderly and poor residents; it's worth noting the study was done in Korea, where even the newest developments are nothing like American suburbs (Kim and Kim 2024). 

However, design done right can facilitate social connection. Andres Duany and colleagues focus on the public realm, the existence of which requires places to which people can walk, narrow streets to slow the cars, a sense of enclosure (from street trees and right-sized buildings), and visible signs of other people (2010: ch 4; for a fuller treatment see Speck 2012). Jane Jacobs highlights the need for stores, but not too big as to be impersonal, and accommodations like benches in public parks (among other trenchant observations about what works and what doesn't work for sidewalks, parks, and so forth. 

Besides complete streets designed to human scale, Jay Walljasper (2011) commends housing built around common space, whether semi-private neighborhood squares or residential pedestrian streets. Happy Cities (2024) has a multi-unit housing design toolkit with plans for designing common amenities, circulation spaces, and outdoor areas. A 2018 post in The Conversation looks to "third" places where people can gather informally and interact, like community gardens and space in a park for tai chi classes (Matthews and Dolley 2018). In Shanghai, retired people, particularly singles, have been gathering at People's Park and the Ikea cafeteria (Stevenson 2024). 

Montgomery, whose book fuses city design with findings from neuroscience research, notes that certain places draw people and encourage them to linger, long enough to connect. The Project for Public Spaces is credited with the discovery of triangulation, "in which external stimuli are arranged in ways that nudge people close enough together to begin talking. In its simplest form, triangulation might mean positioning a public telephone booth, a garbage can, and a bench beside one another, or simply giving a busker permission to perform near a set of stairs--anything to slow people down in proximity" (2013:165). Things that alienate people are sharp architectural angels (light up the brain's fear centers), long dead facades like blank or smoked glass walls, painful or no seating, dark areas, parking lots, and closeness to high-speed or high-traffic roads. "No amount of triangulation can account for the corrupting influence that high-velocity transport has on the psychology of public space" (2013: 168).

Tiffany Owens Reed of Strong Towns argues that proximity does not produce connection unless there are common projects, and suggests cities outsource tasks community members can do, like playground cleanup and sidewalk snow removal (Owens Reed 2022). After Hours Denver may be onto something with its assembly line of congregants constructing peanut butter sandwiches. Jacobs, however, cautions that people want most of their connections "without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships." Faced with the choice between too much "togetherness" and no contact at all, many people will choose solitude; "either has distressing results" ([1961] 1993: 81-82).

I remember when I first read The Great Good Place and, while I was enthusing over Ray Oldenburg's depiction of third places, I was also reflecting that without prior experience I wouldn't know how to act in such a place. Once at a train station in England, Laing was chatted up by an old man until she finally succeeded in freezing him out and he walked away (2016: 25). She felt guilty afterwards, but no one wants to be the unwelcome old man in that story! When everyone else seems to how to mix (or not) in public, it can cause people to turn in on themselves, adding feelings of incompetence and inadequacy to the already-toxic personal stew. I wondered after reading Oldenburg "whether after 70 years out of practice we still know how to behave in [third places]." Maybe there are sets of lessons we could take? Or is there an app for that? Apparently the late Dr. Ruth is on the case!

SOURCES

Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Island, 2001)

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point Press, 10th anniversary ed, 2010) 

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, [1961] 1993)

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador, 2016)

Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013)

Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (Paragon House, 1999)

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012)

Now we can all sing along... (5:15):

Book review: "The Lonely City"

Olivia Laing is a British writer who found herself isolated in New York City a few years ago, and this book is the result. The title suggests personal essays on loneliness in an urban context, and in a way that's what the book delivers, albeit with a twist. Laing addressed her personal situation by studying the theme of loneliness in the lives and work of four American artists: Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Henry Darger (1892-1973) and David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992). Her writing is clear and without jargon, her discussion of artwork accessible even to this dilettante.

She achieves some insights as she studies them, in the way of random personal epiphanies, any of which is an invitation to a conversation.

Loneliness is difficult to confess, difficult to to categorise. (p. 4)

I wonder now: is it fear of contact that is the real malaise of our age, underpinning the changes in both our physical and virtual lives. (p. 253)

Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that's moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. (p. 261) 

 I think [the cure is] about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted. (p. 279)

The hook on which I'll bite speaks directly to the urbanist movement.

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. (p. 3)

The biographical approach she takes to the phenomenon of urban loneliness is at once both illuminating and unhelpful. Each of the artists lived to some degree in isolation from those around them, usually for multiple reasons: artistic sensibility itself, homosexuality, mental illness or the presumption of it, poverty, social anxiety, fame, childhood abuse. Loneliness in their cases seems to me to be merely a symptom of other, deep problems.

What interests me about loneliness is not the experience of exceptional people, but its very ordinariness. As such, it is a psychological puzzle, or perhaps series of puzzles.

It could be a social puzzle as well. Does the way we construct our societies--their values, their design, their economies--affect people's abilities to connect with others? Urbanism has since the work of Jane Jacobs noted the distances and barriers between people created by suburban sprawl. And "it gets lonely in a small town," sings Greg Brown. But everyone knows it is possible to be lonely in a crowd, and certainly, as Laing points out at the beginning of her book, possible to be lonely in a crowded city as well.

Is the answer more traditional urban design? Third places? Churches? Social media--or staying off social media?

Note that there is a difference between urbanism and urban areas as they exist today (which are largely the by-product of several decades of suburban sprawl). We are not, in other words, limited in our choices to what already exists. In an essay on shareable.net that was recently re-posted on Strong Towns, writer Jay Walljasper (cited below) notes design movements not only at the city level...

[New Urbanism seeks] to build new communities (and revitalize existing ones) by maximizing opportunities for social exchange: public plazas, front porches, corner stores, coffee shops, neighborhood schools, narrow streets and, yes, sidewalks.... [In Minneapolis] I marvel at the choices I have to mingle with the neighbors over a cappuccino, Pabst Blue Ribbon, juevos rancheros, artwork at a gallery opening or head of lettuce at the farmer's market.

...but at the neighborhood level as well. Walljasper highlights the work of Ross Chapin, a Seattle author and architect who has designed "pocket neighborhoods" of four to twelve households "where meaningful 'neighborly' relationships are fostered." This builds social capital, and from an example from Walljasper's own life, political capital as well.

I've used loneliness for years in introductory public policy classes as an example of a problem (defined as a situation with broad effects most people see as unacceptable) that is nonetheless not a public problem (defined as a problem where the public expects government to become involved). Ironically, loneliness may be a public problem. Government can't, of course, cure anyone's personal loneliness, but can design cities that facilitate interactions instead of isolation, and can facilitate access to mental health care for those who need it.

CITED:
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador, 2016)

Jay Walljasper, "How to Design a Neighborhood for Happiness," Shareable, 25 March 2011, http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-design-a-neighborhood-for-happiness?utm_content=bufferb6d1d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer