I’ve got an interesting thought that I’ve kicked around in my head and haven’t heard discussed much, so I’m going to lay it out here and invite you to comment/think with me.

We urbanists are always talking about how suburbia isolates people, especially children and the elderly. If you can’t get around without a car, you’re very limited in what you can access in terms of retail and services or social activities. We see how density makes it easier to have clubs and meet-ups and civic activities. Yes, maybe big cities have a certain asocial anonymity to them, but smaller cities and towns certainly have more of a “community” feel.

How do we square this with all of the memories people have of early suburbia being bustling, lively, and communitarian? How people looked out for each other and each other’s kids? The generally “thick” community the people who grew up in the postwar years remember?

You can argue that society simply changed. These are old values that we used to practice, everywhere, and we practice them less today, everywhere. The built environment may be a factor—it’s unreasonable to think it isn’t a factor—but isn’t a magic trick either. That’s more or less the viewpoint put forward, for example, in this piece by Patrick T. Brown, a conservative quasi-urbanist.

But I think there’s another explanation. The people who populated those early postwar suburbs were almost all former urbanites. Yes, many bought homes after spending their early adulthood at war. Yes, suburbs of some description had existed for decades already. But in this period when America truly became a suburban nation, its suburbs were populated mostly by people leaving the old cities.

These people—urbanites leaving cities for one reason or another—had all sorts of motives. Some financial, some racial, some personal preference, some whatever was available (remember that cities were in objectively rough shape coming out of the Great Depression followed by World War II). It isn’t hard to see why the connotation of “city” shifted from glamorous and elite to dangerous and run-down.

But nonetheless, the first couple of generations of suburbanites grew up in cities, and brought all of their urban social habits and habits of mind with them. Of course those early years saw suburbia retaining a lot of “urban” community and energy, because people don’t change their lifestyles and habits that dramatically or quickly. But as we got a few decades in, and you had generations of kids and adults who had never lived in a city or urban environment at all, those habits were lost—no longer transmitted.

You could go even further, and argue that we haven’t really seen a shift in social values at all as much as we’ve simply become an increasingly suburban nation.

That’s the point made in this infamous essay by Patrick Deneen on It’s a Wonderful Life:

Despite the charm of the ending, a nagging question lingers, especially when we consider that many of the neighbors who come to George’s rescue are ones who now live in Bailey Park. If the tight-knit community of Bedford Falls makes it possible for George to have built up long-standing trust and commitment with his neighbors over the years, such that they unquestioningly give him money despite the suspicion of embezzlement, will those people who have only known life in Bailey Park be likely to do the same for a neighbor who has hit upon hard times? What of the children of those families in Bailey Park, or George’s children as they move away from the small-town life of Bedford Falls? How much of our current financial crisis was in fact a result of the fundamental unfamiliarity between lenders and borrowers in today’s post-Bailey Park society?

A deep irony pervades It’s a Wonderful Life at the moment of it joyous conclusion: As the developer of an antiseptic suburban subdivision, George Bailey is saved through the kinds of relationships nourished in his town that will be undermined and even precluded in the atomic community he builds as an adult.

That piece by Patrick Brown cites a whole bunch of data that questions the assumption that urban form necessarily leads to neighborliness. He writes, for example:

Small towns, lauded by Putnam for their high rates of civic engagement, often boast the kind of low-density development and heavy automobile reliance associated with the much-maligned suburbs. But they also often feature downtown cores as traditional central hubs of social activity. Might this kind of density, with the Main Street-as-civic space ethos lauded by the New Urbanists, provide a path towards greater neighborliness?  

Research from the University of California-Irvine’s Jan Brueckner and Dublin City University’s Ann Largey casts cold water on these hopes. Density might be correlated with higher social interaction, but these effects seem to be driven largely by self-selection. Their methodology rests on a technical assumption that is defensible but not rock-solid. Yet, if we grant it, their work implies that a given individual moving from a denser to less dense census tract would see their level of both formal and informal social activity rise, not fall.  

Brueckner and Largey speculate that the kind of casual interaction that builds up community ties, such as like stopping to chat with a neighbor mowing the lawn, is less common in denser cities, where encounters might be harried or rushed. Again, the key takeaway is the importance of self-sorting—denser neighborhoods do seem not to make people more sociable, but simply offer sociable people the chance to live close to other sociable people.

I’m sure these studies could be picked apart (as could the ones that suggest opposite conclusions), but my response to this is kind of in line with Daniel Herriges’s excellent piece here on interpreting opinion surveys showing, for example, high favorability ratings for suburban living.

Suburbia is not for the most part a naturally occurring settlement pattern, and the suppression of density and traditional urban forms, in most places for coming on a century now, has made it impossible to divine public opinion. Our opinions are shaped by our surroundings and possibilities. In different circumstances, we can be different people. Of course a country which has effectively rendered the building of cities illegal will appear to prefer what actually commonly exists and is considered normative.

In other words, when Brown writes “denser neighborhoods do seem not to make people more sociable, but simply offer sociable people the chance to live close to other sociable people,” I would ask, what is a “sociable person”? How can we be confident in such categories when our built environment has subtly inculcated a certain attitude in us?

Do you not feel a little more impatient ensconced in an automobile than out for a pleasant stroll? Is one mode of transport not inherently and obviously less social than the other? How can you be confident that this is not, in miniature, what we have done to ourselves collectively?

As always, I want your thoughts!

Related Reading:

Mayberry Wasn’t a Subdivision

Strip Malls or Streets?

A Hint of America’s Lost Urban History

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