Charlotte loves the word “community.” It’s everywhere, from planners’ optimistic blueprints for a better society, to developers’ advertisements promising instantly cozy utopias. Everybody, it seems, believes in community. Everybody, that is, except most residents. Let me explain.
The whole concept of community is based on connections — between people, between people and the places they live, and between places themselves. In a network of connectivity, no one is isolated, and the concept forms the foundation of a socially rich, caring society. But to a large degree, community has become a mere marketing label; at its worst, it has been corrupted into a mechanism of social prohibition and privilege — exclusive “communities” where only a certain class of person (usually affluent and white) is deemed worthy of sharing the streets and spaces of the neighborhood.
In various surveys over the past few years, Charlotte has scored poorly in terms of real community. Some months ago, local NPR station WFAE produced an in-depth series on the topic, and revealed that our city primarily pays lip service to the notion of community without embracing the more complex realities of it. Here, as in many other New South cities, our lives are based on mobility and transience. People move on average every four or five years, and in this context community is reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold, merely a component of house resale value.
This empty embrace of the word “community” and the rejection of its substance are nowhere more clear than in the continual battles waged by residents of Charlotte neighborhoods to keep outsiders away from “their” space. Homeowners seek to isolate public streets for their exclusive use, and dislike strangers who have the temerity to walk or drive by their property, or, even worse, actually park outside their house. This resentment of others strikes at the heart of the social and spatial connectivity that is, in fact, essential to true community fellowship.
Just as linking neighborhoods reinforces community, so connecting the public spaces of our city’s streets has many advantages, notably dispersing traffic and reducing congestion. To imagine that we can reduce congestion without connecting streets is like believing we can lose weight without dieting. But our judgment in these matters is warped. Since the 1950s, we’ve become so used to living in unconnected pods of development — where one type of housing is separated from another and both are divorced from shopping, which in turn is segregated from offices — that we take this framework of isolation as normal.
It didn’t used to be like this. Prior to the 1930s, the streets of American towns and cities were designed as a connected network, either a utilitarian grid like Charlotte’s downtown, or a curvy pattern like Myers Park, following the tradition of the “romantic garden suburb.” But as car ownership increased, and the urge to be modern overrode all other factors, these old forms were abandoned, not by the private sector but by government edict. In the 1930s the Federal Housing Administration issued national planning standards that decreed the traditional grid, with its multiple intersections and pedestrian crossings, slowed down traffic movement to an unwarranted degree. It was thought that America’s future car-oriented culture would be better served by long, curving arterial roadways with few cross streets. Developers loved the new rules. Larger blocks with fewer connecting streets reduced costs and improved profits.
The government standards that spurred the suburban boom in America after the Second World War were based on traffic engineering concepts that put all the emphasis on cars and none on pedestrians. If pedestrians were considered at all, they were regarded as “impediments to brisk traffic movement,” and figured as such in the transportation engineers’ calculations. In an increasingly car-based world, America forgot the pedestrian, and neighborhoods forgot about connectivity; walking became equated with suspicious behavior, practiced only by the poor or the deviant, and connectivity with other places was perceived as a threat to isolated enclaves.
This pattern of segregated development and reduced connectivity has evolved into today’s suburban quagmire that typifies Charlotte and most other American cities. During the 1990s, however, progressive architects, planners and engineers challenged the decades-old design dogmas, and highlighted unforeseen faults and consequences in conventional thinking. Chief among these are: obesity and other serious public health issues due to the decline of daily physical exercise; increased air pollution due to longer commutes; lost productivity and higher stress due to the amount of time spent sitting in traffic jams; and increased costs to taxpayers for community services like police and fire protection and school transport because of longer distances and travel times.
To all those factors we can add the decline, even the decay, of community. For community to be more than just a cynical sales pitch, Charlotte’s neighborhoods must connect and support each other, not segregate into mutually suspicious enclaves. Simply put, sharing public space is fundamental to a civilized society. We isolate ourselves at our peril.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2004.
