My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #43, May 31, 1999

DESIGN FOR LIVING

Recently at our university we got to hear a consultant explain how we could make our campus more appealing to students. What people like about our university, he said, is its warmth and intimacy, the sense that here you are part of a community.

And yet if you're coming out of class talking to somebody, there are no benches scattered around that encourage you to sit down and continue the conversation, or to sit out in the open and catch the eye of people passing by. There is no flirting space.

Our surroundings are not something that are just there. They have a profound psychological impact on us, what Donald Norman, author of The Psychology of Everyday Things, calls "affordances." Open spaces for mingling, conversational groupings of benches and chairs amid greenery and flowers, encourage people to slow down, take time out, get to know somebody better. Wide sidewalks encourage people to walk in groups and continue conversations that began inside.

Safety is implied not by video cameras and security guards, but by an aura of order. The affordance of Canada's attractive, well lit subway stations, that are kept scrupulously clean, is the assumption of other kinds of order. The stations are inviting to a large middle class population, who will themselves reinforce the expectation of civility and good manners. The affordance of Chicago's dingy subways is a sense of unease if not fear. The lack of care suggests a world which only the desperate, the poor, and the predators inhabit.

Good design, whether of buildings, parks, malls, or cities, fits human needs, is scaled to human size. When we work all day inside buildings with artificial light and windows that do not open, we feel deprived of basic human needs: Sunlight. Air. Control.

What we crave in a building is not architectural grandeur, though that can be nice if it doesn't get in the way of more important needs. The buildings people love are buildings that can be readily adapted as our needs change, by slapping on an addition, or removing a wall. We want to be able to move things around. We want to control our own thermostats, not be forced to accept the computer's incorrect belief that we are comfortable.

What we crave in a city is greenery and open spaces, without which we become claustrophobic. When buildings tower over us, forming narrow canyons that block the sun, we feel dwarfed, insignificant. When streets get wider and sidewalks get narrower, it's a clear sign that the city is now about the needs of cars, not people.

Only 37 years ago, Petula Clark had a hit song about Downtown, a place you went when "you're alone and life is making you lonely." That's how quickly we've lost that sense that going downtown was a social event, where you'd run into people you knew in the stores, and chat with the clerk at the bookstore, who'd tell you about the brand new Ray Bradbury novel he knew you'd enjoy. You might then go to one of the restaurants or tearooms, or even a sidewalk cafe, for lunch.

Going downtown was entertainment even if you didn't go to a movie or concert or museum. It was a vibrant, thriving, bustling place. You didn't walk briskly and efficiently down the streets because the big wide store windows always had something to amuse and amaze you.

Lots of people lived downtown in apartments above the stores. They could walk to work, walk to the library, walk to the grocery store. There was a nightlife for them--restaurants and theaters and neighborhood bars, and it was safe to walk to them because of all the other people who were out on the streets too.

As people moved further out, though, they couldn't walk downtown. Preferring cars to public transportation, they demanded more parking downtown, and wider streets. But as the streets got wider, and the traffic got faster, walking around downtown became riskier. The narrower sidewalks didn't encourage people to linger in front of store windows, or stop and chat. There wasn't enough room on them anymore for benches and planters and sidewalk cafes.

My town was born along the Mississippi River, which remains a sight to stir the heart and imagination. The Mississippi should draw us downtown if anything could. We have a baseball park on the river front, a youth sports facility, riverboats, parks, a band shell. These are things around which one can build a thriving commercial district. So why is downtown nearly boarded up?

Perhaps because railroad tracks and a highway separate the River from the rest of the town, and the city has not built attractive pedestrian overpasses. Perhaps because the city government has done nothing to encourage people to live downtown. They have provided no money to renovate old buildings into mixed residential and commercial use, no start-up money or business expertise for fledgling businesses.

Instead they use tax receipts to make the city sprawl ever farther afield. They pour money into new sewers and streets -- even more money than strictly necessary because the new lots are so big. There is no more community in these new developments than in the downtown. There are no sidewalks, no parks, no gathering places. The houses all turn inwards on themselves, with huge garages out front, patios and decks out back. Nobody sits out in front anymore to watch life go by, because it is a given that in order to do anything, you will first get in a car.

In short, we have designed ourselves into isolation. We complain about the absence of social support for nuclear families, but we force them farther into themselves with our design.

We are social animals, who crave the company of our own kind. Failure to thrive can happen to a community as well as to a child, when we design for cars, not people, for speed and efficiency, not conversation.

It doesn't have to be this way. Many cities have rediscovered the wisdom of the town square, the beauty of human scale and open space. They have learned to tame their traffic, and temper asphalt with flowers. They cherish and restore beautiful old buildings rather than demolish them. They have learned that good design builds on and amplifies a sense of place, that ties people to their history, to their landscape, and to each other.