The Solitude of Suburbia and Our Political Unwinding

Questioning how our built environment acts upon our politics.

How do the spaces we inhabit, such as a poor downtown neighbourhood or a more affluent suburb, shape our understanding of each other and, thus, our politics?

Thoughts and questions provoked by my family’s move from the former to the later several years ago.

In a scene from Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”, the young idealist Darney and old cynic Carton watch as passers-by on the street rush to find shelter, as thunder cracks above and a storm rapidly approaches. The storm, here, foreshadows what’s to come for Darney and Carton.

Later in the story, on the morning Darney is condemned to be executed by guillotine (stormy stuff!), Carton visits him in prison. Carton drugs the young Darney, getting accomplices to carry him away so that he can be reunited with the lovely Lucie. Carton does this knowing that he will take Darney’s place under the executioner’s blade; a transcendent act of selflessness by Carton, who was also deeply in love with Lucie.

But back to when they are watching people run to find shelter from the storm. (Sorry for the abrupt change in course. Executions and hopeless love is heady, heart-rending stuff, but  I’m no Dickens so best to lessen expectations quickly and reorient you to my more humble fare.) 

All this brings me to a quote from Darney that ties to the topic I sketched out in the intro, how our experience of place shapes our sense of each other and our politics.

Observing the commotion outside, the noise of footsteps and the single-mindedness of pedestrians trying to get out of the rain, Darney comments, “A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” 

This quote, to me, encapsulates my suburban experience in many ways. So many of us live in these spaces, but we do so without really getting to know one another. There are two main reasons for this that come to mind for me. 

First is the distance of solitude, the separation between people.

Suburbs have a different sort of distance from what downtowns have. It is difficult to live in a suburban area and use just your legs to get around. Suburbs are designed based on the assumption that those who live in them will have a car. This means that if you do not own or have access to a car it is unlikely that you will choose to live in a suburb.

Second is the purposefulness of the space we inhabit.

For those rushing to get out from under the storm in Dickens’ story, the purposefulness of their action creates solitude. Purposefulness is single-minded in intent, which leaves little time to pause for a conversation or engage in some other diversion.

The next time you’re driving to work or for groceries or to drop your kids off at school take a look at how public spaces function in suburbs. They are almost all expressly designed for one purpose or another, whether that’s children’s play, or education, or this sport or that.

Even leisure is built in with purposeful paths, which buck “desire lines”, or paths that people tend to take naturally. It’s easy to see these paths when there’s a little bit of snow on the ground, tracks appear across lawns or other opens spaces that don’t conform to the routes planners intended.

The distinction I want to draw here isn’t that a downtown lacks purpose, but rather that there’s a difference in how that purpose has emerged, over time, a distinction between a planned community and one that emerges more organically, where layers of usefulness have built up, one on top of the other, as an accretion, to borrow a term from geology, of varying uses.

Now, here’s where I think that becomes a problem. 

The more we build things expressly for a purpose, or for a strictly designed use, the more we also constrain possibilities of experiencing the world differently, of stepping outside of what the designed environment allows. As Maslow said, “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

The implications of this dynamic, with respect to what it might do to our politics, was really brought home to me when my family moved from a downtown area, with smaller houses and roads in disrepair, to the suburbs several years ago.

In our old neighbourhood there were recycling facilities a few blocks away. (I recognize this isn’t characteristic of most downtown neighbourhoods and it’s more accurate to include the fact that this was a poorer one.) We used to see people pushing shopping carts filled with scrap metal towards them to sell for a bit of money.

There were also several houses around that were in advanced stages of disrepair. The people who passed in and out of these houses often acted strangely, as if their limbs weren’t communicating properly with their brains.

When it comes to the politics of it, everything was in our face – poverty, substance abuse, physical abuse... Police were a near constant presence.

My eldest son was just old enough to start asking questions about some of the things he saw, and this, in turn, required some difficult and carefully thought through conversations.

There was, absolutely, a solitude of a sort here, perhaps one even more profound than what I outlined in the suburbs, above. These people were struggling with issues very much on their own, with little in the way of a safety net or social support. 

But in the sense that we were forced to confront the challenges, even if it was to a limited degree, there was the start of an awareness, a glimmer of understanding on the part of myself and my son, I like to hope, that perhaps gives him a capacity for empathy he might not otherwise have been able to achieve.

In the sense that we were co-experiencing the struggles of these individuals, even if it was to a very limited extent, that solitude became something else, or at least represented the possibility of becoming something else.

The value of empathy, of being able to understand, even if to a limited degree, the experience of another, is essential to creativity and innovative thinking. It moves us from the place we are at and takes us somewhere else, to a position of seeing the world differently.

When it comes to the built environment we need more spaces that enable this capacity of meeting and understanding others. 

There’s a relatively robust literature on how certain kinds of spaces that bring people together so that they engage in ways they might not anticipate or be prepared for can spark this creative fire.

One of history’s most innovative organisations, Bell Labs, famously designed its office space in a way that caused its employees to bump into each other often and informally. (This is a design choice now used in many Silicon Valley offices.) 

Meeting each other informally – unexpectedly – creates the possibility of something new resulting, of events occurring that were not necessarily intended, and it’s with this sort of novel interaction that new neural pathways are formed in our brains.

And so the question I’ve been pondering is, what happens to us as a society when the opportunities for these ways of meeting each other are reduced? What happens when more and more of us live in communities that constrain possibilities for novel experiences, both of others and of ourselves?

Here’s a funny thing about the Bell Labs campus. It’s the location for much of Apple TV’s Severance show. The enforced rigidity of its characters work lives are in stark contrast to the happenstance sort of meetings Bell’s office space was designed to encourage. For those who’ve watched the show, you’ll know that this rigidity isn’t entirely successful.

The beautiful thing about humans, about life in general, is that come wintertime, even in the most standardised and uniformly planned environment, those desire lines always tend to wander off the path.