I'm reading Witold Rybczynski's new book "Last Harvest" slowly. In part this is because it's a book filled with complex ideas that I want to make sure I 'get' and in part it's because I find myself putting the book down for long periods of time to think about what he's been saying. The book is a detailed description of the conversion of a farmer's field to a suburban housing development. Along the way, we learn much of the history of North American architecture, planning, politics, and sociology.
It's something we see every day as we whiz past the outer reaches of cities in Canada. In my neighbourhood, the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge region, we've seen accelerating growth, an influx of new workers spurred by a growing knowledge industry (I'm told that this year we're the world's most intelligent community, whatever that means), and until very recently, a merry game of rapid conversion of corn fields to tracts of cookie-cutter housing developments. Like so many other urban centres in North America, the response to this growth, with some interesting marked exceptions has been the appearance of large tracts of bedroom bunkers, often miles from any interesting mixed use or employers, unfriendly to pedestrians and serviced by box store 'power centres' with parking lots extending off almost to the horizon.
Why do we want to live this way? The answers are, of course, many and complex. One simple answer is to say 'we don't'. In the clever mockumentary film Radiant City by Gary Burns and Jim Brown, we listen to actors tell stories based on real life experiences in which they sound as though they are trapped in some kind of vacuous middle zone between expectation, promise and reality. They hover between the steak and the sizzle, not really being able to enjoy either. In Radiant City, we are invited to consider the possibility that perhaps suburban dwellers, understanding all the shortcomings of their living arrangements aren't that keen on the status quo but feel they have little choice. Affordable housing in affluent cities is usually well outside the urban core, if it is available at all. Even in my own relatively small city, the only new housing developments in the urban core are trendy 'lofts' built in converted industrial spaces. These homes are beautiful, compact, mostly unsuited to family life, and sometimes prohibitively expensive. The classic, affordable, 3 bedroom family home is only available in the outer fringes of the city, far from any urban amenities.
Rybczynski's book, even in the early going, makes it clear that the answers to the question 'why suburbs?' are very much more complicated than this. Average house and lot sizes in North America have tripled in the last 50 years. Moving to the suburbs not only allows us to have a nice roof over our heads and a modern kitchen, but it also offers the possibility of gigantic multi-storey great rooms, vast master bedrooms with attached spa bathrooms, and backyards big enough to house small herds of sheep. We're ineffably attracted to these large spaces at a biological level. When imagining where we'd like to live, we look longingly at these grand vistas of space, both interior and exterior. In short, these are the kinds of houses that are built because they are the kinds of houses that sell.
But when we get there, move our furniture into these cavernous spaces and sit down to take it all in, we soon come to understand the inevitable down side. We're all alone in our huge electric caves and there isn't that much to do there. We dash to the electronic agora -- television and the Internet -- to recapture what we've left behind in the city. Even though the picture quality is not better (indeed, it is often worse!) we rush to fill walls of our homes with gigantic screens as if to try to readmit the world we severed from our lives by moving outward to less crowded environs.
Our attractions to wide spaces, the prospect of seeing far off into the distance (especially if we feel as though we own it!) from the comfort of a protected picture window looking out on a manicured yard or a swath of greenbelt is so compelling because it soothes ancient impulses designed to protect us from predators and to lead us to plenty. We know what we like, though it may no longer be what is good for us.
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en Domijan presented participants with words on a screen and then they asked them about their meanings. They found some fascinating interactions between the locations of words on the screen and the speed with which they were identified. For example, words for flying animals were identified more quickly if they were presented near the top of the screen, and reaction times were slower if the bird words were presented near the bottom of the screen. The experimenters found much the same pattern of effects for non-animal words as well.