The Urban Front Porch: Reconnecting Community

Abstract

With the advent of cell phones and internet and cheap gasoline for the automobile, long-distance transportation and communication has never been easier. Commuters can travel 20 to 40 to 100 miles daily between work and home. Friends keep in touch from opposite ends of a city or the world. Lives become safely compartmentalized in a series of predictable pre-packaged environments – from a house to a car to an office or grocery store. While many enjoy these supposed benefits, very little is spoken about the lost opportunities as one’s car zooms by at 80 miles per hour. These continuously-advancing conveniences allow humans to be physically further away from each other. The community of pre-automobile America was as far as a human or horse could walk within a reasonable amount of time. The community of twenty-first century America is wherever a cell phone can call, or wherever a person can join an internet chat room. Human beings are social animals. It is a defining characteristic. We need each other to survive. We need to sense and be sensed. We need to touch and smell and hear and taste and see. However, in our effort to improve communication and travel, things get lost. We sacrifice certain senses to artificially amplify others. However, there is no machine replacement for the touch or taste or smell of another person. And the machine replacement for sight and sound of our fellow human beings is reduced to the minimally comprehensible level. Does a cell phone reproduce the voice of your loved one to the same quality as hearing in face to face conversation? No, it is compressed to the smallest possible frequency band that is understandable. And are we interacting with each other as we sit alone in our cars in the parking lot of rush-hour traffic? Only so much as to scream at the driver in front because he cut us off. These issues are evidenced by serious social isolation in the elderly, the rash of recent school shootings, and poor driver behavior in traffic. Our society must find a healthier physical balance in experiencing the world around us. This situation creates a unique challenge for the architect and urban planner to address. How does one solve this? How do we utilize technology for greater face-to-face contact? We need greater opportunity for physical interaction, not greater convenience to withdraw. We need immediate community, not a two-hour commute. We need a place and places where we can be human.