Urban planning student here. Seth, I'm a big fan of your work and you've been hitting 300s since you dropped Fragile Neighborhoods, so I appreciate that. I've been worried for a while that we don't have a good way to create third spaces. Places like Starbucks have been discouraging guests from lingering, so a colleague and I have been working on a proposal to a process that creates scalable third places.
The idea is basically that, currently, public spaces take the form of parks or large community centers, but we could conceivably enable individual neighborhoods to come together to build or rehab a small/medium size home to just act as a neighborhood hangout. Putting it in the neighborhood would make it walkable and small enough to feel a sense of belonging, letting the community design/build it for themselves would give them ownership and create new bonds through that shared work, and everyone would have a new place to just hang out and reconnect with their immediate physical community (especially children, who are quickly losing alternatives to the phone). Hopefully I can just get us one step forward to rebuilding actual community on the ground. Great article!
This is a great goal, but there are a lot of logistical hurdles to creating and maintaining a clean, safe space. "The tragedy of the commons" springs to mind. Some communities have focused on turning public libraries into third-spaces, with "teen rooms" and other areas where kids can hang out, do homework, and socialize. The advantage of this is that the buildings are already there and (usually) reasonably well-maintained.
And you're so right about that. This is why I've really tried to study the scale at which commons can be governed effectively by the communities themselves and why I think the neighborhood level is probably a good medium. Obviously having one giant municipal frat house will quickly be disinherited by the public, but with a more face-to-face level of management and clear rules of conduct I think there's a lot of potential there.
Most of us who had ample community ties as kids grew up in suburbs, and the majority of parents, by choice, don’t live in dense urban neighborhoods and don’t want to live in dense urban neighborhoods. We want yards and space. It would be helpful to explore why suburbs in the sixties and seventies had those community ties, such as community schools as you mention, rather than being prescriptive for a lifestyle that does not work well for most parents.
From memory, community schools, girl and boy scouts, church, and other shared activities like sports and hobbies were key, as was interacting with other kids in the neighborhood.
Also, FYI, the distance living from most early smaller cities and towns was dependent on the distance one could easily ride a horse or drive a buggy, not primarily walking. I would ballpark about ten miles out as being a typical max practical distance from some sort of town, at least in the east. Most people then lived in the rural areas around towns and cities, not in them, when those cities and towns were founded.
Regarding the decline of community schools, one factor here in Massachusetts is that most school construction projects are funded by a combination of local and state monies. In poorer communities, the state funding comprises the majority of the budget. However, a community can only have one school project in the design and construction process at a time - so if your town has, say, three neighborhood schools that are in aging buildings and in need of renovations, only one would be eligible for funding during what is often a five to ten year period. As a result, we see many communities consolidating their smaller neighborhood schools into one large facility for the entire district. This is particularly prevalent in economically disadvantaged towns; there's simply no local funds to renovate individual school buildings, but a new building can be constructed using state funding. These schools are often quite large, and require the majority of students to be bused fairly long distances. Sites are thus chosen more for their ability to accommodate parent drop-off traffic and large number of buses, rather than their proximity to neighborhoods and public parks. Often, the new school is located on the outskirts of town as it is difficult to find a site that can accommodate a large building and the associated drop-off areas in the more densely populated areas of town.
Wealthy communities tend to be more successful at retaining community schools, as they are less reliant on state funding for their projects and can afford to maintain and renovate their buildings on their own. Also, many of the most expensive towns in the state are the older inner suburbs of Boston, which for the most part predate the automobile and thus have walkable neighborhoods - and people who live there like it that way. Newton, for example, renovated one of their circa 1920s neighborhood schools and added a large playground which adjoins a public park space; the majority of students walk or bike to school and I observed parents gathering and chatting in the park and playground both before and after school drop-off, with students lingering to play and run around after school. It was a great example of the sort of third-space area that I remember from my childhood, but is now becoming a luxury only the very wealthy can afford.
How much of this desire to avoid density is unique to America because of urban disorder? Noah Smith writes a lot about this lately: the reason Europe has families in dense cities is not because of some magical European potion that makes people more civil, it’s largely because they’re way more policed and carceral (as in, you get arrested and jailed with far higher certainty).
Fix urban disorder and density becomes more realistic in the United States.
And, I should probably add explicitly, a strong preference for having private green space.
There are no circumstances I can imagine where I would voluntarily live in a dense urban environment. I do not understand the belief that’s what most people want, when actual data points in the opposite direction.
I don’t think it’s “most” people but we do exist! I live in a “dense” (it’s semi-detached houses with one shared wall and small backyards) neighbourhood in Toronto, Canada. There are advantages, primarily that everything is walkable including the school for my kids. But this depends on not having the horrible urban disorder that many American cities do.
In the US, around 27% of people describe their area as urban, about 22% as rural, and about 51% suburban.
With the rise in remote work, which made it easier for people to live where they want, large US cities lost population, while exurban and rural counties around smaller cities gained population. The Cooper Center at UVA has some good analyses of the census data.
Yeah that feels about right. Probably only 10-20% of parents in US and Canada *want* a walkable dense existence to raise their kids in. Most want the car-centric exurbs and suburbs. I’m not disagreeing with you!
I’m saying though that a big downside of density is proximity to disorder. And that if cities were more like European ones, those numbers might shift to, I don’t know, 20-30%? Still not a majority, but higher. And being close to your neighbours where you have a cultural connection and trust too, DOES create the magic for kids to have independence and get off their phones. (In addition to the other broad benefits of reduced fossil fuel consumption.)
Nobody is going to force anyone to give up suburbs. But giving people *more* palatable options is undeniably a good thing right?
Most of it is probably simply a preference to have a fenced yard for kids and dogs, a deck for entertaining, and a garden. In the exurbs, add chickens and a pony.
Europe had feudal land ownership laws that meant less of a history of private land ownership.
I think there's a piece missing here. Factor 3 touches on it but only tangentially. Cultural homogeneity.
Allowing long stretches of unsupervised play is easy when you and your neighbors all basically see the world the same way. You agree that there are objective truths, what qualifies as a virtue and a vice, and that guardrails exist for a reason. You may disagree about where those guardrails are or how far to go in promoting virtue or punishing vice, but the Overton Window of your community is relatively small. That was still true up until the 1980's. It is not today.
Today we are far more diverse both ethnically and culturally (these are tangentially related at least in the first generation or two.) The decline in homogeneity has enlarged our Overton Window considerably. Parents can trust each other less, so they must supervise more. This applies to everyone from Christian parents worried about secular influences to secular progressives worried their kid might be corrupted by that Jesus-freak friend. Many commentators see parents helicoptering despite the fact that children are "safer than ever today." But they miss the point that cultural diversity has made parental supervision more important.
There are communities that still function though, and we've been fortunate to be in one. There are 200 families in our homeschool coop. We are all Christian but come from all different denominations. This similarity narrows our Overton Window to a reasonable size. Any coop parent can correct any other child (including ordering them to do something) and have complete confidence that child's parent will back them up. I have been on both sides of this, and it's a reminder of how our neighborhoods and and culture used to work.
I wish we could get that back in our larger communities, but until we're willing to reassert the basic right of freedom of association, we will be unable to do so.
Some people deal with it by saying “well we should all just be better”, which I think is true and laudable for superficial traits like skin colour. But other than the outright bigots, I think most people are fine with diversity of race. It’s the _values_ that matter and that make it hard when your neighbours don’t share your core values. You outlined it really well, especially the example on eg disciplining other peoples kids.
We are now into our second generation of young people who don't know how to have experiences that are not mediated and diluted by technology. Like the character in the Twilight Zone episode, they don't recognize the value of being around other people in real life.
This nails it exactly and is a well stated version of my critic of this post in particular and some of the other comments here about planning. I would just tack on the idea that many young people (sub 40’s) also straight up don’t know how to build community with each other. They can’t imagine “free exchange of gifts”. So It doesn’t matter what we build - most of these age groups don’t understand why they’d even want to go to a “third place” - aside from the fact that phrase is very hip and cool these days (cynical remarks have been redacted). All of these academic ideas and solutions are fine but they fundamentally miss the reality of just how deeply disaffected most young people are today. Yes that was probably caused by all the known isolations and whatever’s, but you can’t fix it by just bringing those things back. Most of these things (churches, community centers, etc…) might as well be alien technology for how much people understand them or how to use them. This is (imo) why libraries are still doing okay - most schools still have one and so young people still mostly know how to engage with them. But if we don’t realize that the real task is retraining youth to understand how to use social technologies, if we don’t show them the value right away and fast, if we don’t create contexts that encourage the best of them to emerge in inter-generational ways, and all we do is build community centers and churches they will be empty even if they are well lit, staffed, and literally in the middle of every block.
Not mentioned is the change in house design after WWII.
Prior to WWII, houses quite often had large porches on the front of the house, providing a social area for adults to connect with people walking by their houses. Children would play on those porches as well.
After the war, most new houses were built without porches. Social activity was confined to (possibly) fenced-in backyards. Not including a porch allowed larger interior square footage for a given parcel of land.
Finally, post-war houses were often built with forced-air systems for heating as they were cheaper than boiler and steam/water radiator systems. In the 60's these began to be widely used to deploy central air conditioning - another social isolator as kids (and adults) spent more time inside instead of time on the porch when it was hot.
I’ve actually never read Bowling Alone (though I need to at some point) but didn’t Putnam also raise air conditioning as a contributor to declining social interaction? It makes total sense. But it’s one of these things where even if true, nothing we can do about it. We can’t un-invent central air conditioning.
Another day, another article showing the transition of After Babel to becoming a religious-social-conservative blog!
All due respect to Mr. Haidt and Mr. Kaplan (practicing Jewish) and Ms. India (born-again Christian) but it would be good to get some intellectual diversity here about how to restore community (undo phase 1 of the anxious generation) without having to live in a monocultural Abrahamic monotheistic intentional community.
I know the author probably thinks that that’s impossible — that the only way to restore shared ties is religion. But there are other thinkers out there, and the publishers here (Haidt and Rauch) should publish some of them! And it doesn’t need to be communists who fantasize that after the leftist revolution that overthrows capitalism there will be community. There are plenty of centre-right writers lately who want to restore community, see the bad state American civic life is at, but don’t think we need to necessarily RETVRN.
Addison Del Mastro here on substack is a good writer, thinks deeply about community design, and isn’t a parent-bashing arrogant childless activist like too many urbanists. Noah Smith would write a guest article here about carceral urbanism and European community; hell if you want to get away from urbanism entirely, Joel Kotkin (The Suburbanist himself) would probably come out of retirement and write something. There are a dozen other suggestions people could probably make.
You have a huge platform here, I’d love for you to use it as more of a true salon or forum on this incredibly important (existentially important!) topic.
Well said. And the idea that we need to remove or constrain individual choice (read: individual rights) in order to re-create community (which in Latin, literally means "free sharing of gifts") is also inherently wrongheaded IMHO. It's a false binary and false dichotomy. And the overarching undercurrent to such an idea is also very patriarchal as well, even if it may appear to be a "kinder, gentler patriarchy".
One thing is for sure: community (which in Latin, literally means "free sharing of gifts") cannot be forced, it must develop organically. Attempting to force it on people from the top down will backfire.
100%, and I think the problem with a lot of public policy aiming to respark community misses what exactly creates community. It's not just "a bunch of people in a place doing stuff". IMO community will be generated when people have a reason to depend on each other. Back in the Gilded Age, we had a civic renaissance when factories destroyed ripped apart a lot of the social fabric, but then civic groups rose up in droves to provide for each other. I think, at the local level, we can find new ways to let people be a little more interdependent on each other by allowing for more shared projects, but that may just be my perspective as an urban planning student.
That said, we should also be careful NOT to romanticize the Gilded Age as some sort of golden age either, or use it as an excuse to dismantle FDR's New Deal like the reactionaries have long salivated over doing. There was some pretty extreme (by today's standards) poverty, inequality, abuse, violence, corruption, and vice galore during the Gilded Age as well. And of course, it was really only "golden" for rich, white, straight males for the most part.
Imagine, a whole essay on community without mentioning the economy, when no politician’s speech is complete without ‘Economic Growth.’ And where is economic growth happening? Remote work, mass off-shore production, ‘cultural industries,’ Amazon, Netflix. Think there’s something essential missing from this effort.
Being a camp counselor for over 20 years - I can say that the best thing, and the easiest thing, we can do to get children healthy is to march them outdoors FIRST thing for the Sunrise, before any exposure to artificial first thing.
This will then ensure they have reset their circadian rhythm for the day, which optimizes mood and energy. How hard is that?
We live in a walkable suburb of 1/4 acre lots interspersed by multi-use paths, playgrounds, and wooded commons. It's not the acreage of nature I grew up on, but we chose it because we wanted friends and independence for our kids.
Unfortunately, the two-income trap has meant that few homemakers besides myself can afford to move here anymore. I haven't been able to set up playdates with the other families on our block, because the kids are always off at aftercare and sports, since both parents are always off at work.
So I'm casting my net wider. I've created a map of the neighborhood within about a mile's walk on paths and slow streets. It roughly overlaps with our public elementary bus route.
I plan to create a neighborhood play group and put flyers on any houses where I see any evidence of childhood. I think I'll host a monthly meetup at a park and a text thread, but the group will mainly function as a directory service to facilitate smaller playdates.
Hopefully by the time my kids are old enough to walk more than a block alone, they will have made some friends to walk to.
Wow! This was so good, basically what has been floating around in my head but I don't know how to say it. Thank you for writing this, this is like a consolidation. I actually made my own little messy consolidation, called "How it Feels to be a Teen in the 2020s". I would love if you read it and gave me feedback, since it ties closely with this essay you've written.
Urban planning student here. Seth, I'm a big fan of your work and you've been hitting 300s since you dropped Fragile Neighborhoods, so I appreciate that. I've been worried for a while that we don't have a good way to create third spaces. Places like Starbucks have been discouraging guests from lingering, so a colleague and I have been working on a proposal to a process that creates scalable third places.
The idea is basically that, currently, public spaces take the form of parks or large community centers, but we could conceivably enable individual neighborhoods to come together to build or rehab a small/medium size home to just act as a neighborhood hangout. Putting it in the neighborhood would make it walkable and small enough to feel a sense of belonging, letting the community design/build it for themselves would give them ownership and create new bonds through that shared work, and everyone would have a new place to just hang out and reconnect with their immediate physical community (especially children, who are quickly losing alternatives to the phone). Hopefully I can just get us one step forward to rebuilding actual community on the ground. Great article!
This is a great goal, but there are a lot of logistical hurdles to creating and maintaining a clean, safe space. "The tragedy of the commons" springs to mind. Some communities have focused on turning public libraries into third-spaces, with "teen rooms" and other areas where kids can hang out, do homework, and socialize. The advantage of this is that the buildings are already there and (usually) reasonably well-maintained.
And you're so right about that. This is why I've really tried to study the scale at which commons can be governed effectively by the communities themselves and why I think the neighborhood level is probably a good medium. Obviously having one giant municipal frat house will quickly be disinherited by the public, but with a more face-to-face level of management and clear rules of conduct I think there's a lot of potential there.
great idea! check out my "essay" please! It's written from the perspective of a 15 year old (me) https://julianarivera.substack.com/p/how-it-feels-to-be-a-teen-in-the
Most of us who had ample community ties as kids grew up in suburbs, and the majority of parents, by choice, don’t live in dense urban neighborhoods and don’t want to live in dense urban neighborhoods. We want yards and space. It would be helpful to explore why suburbs in the sixties and seventies had those community ties, such as community schools as you mention, rather than being prescriptive for a lifestyle that does not work well for most parents.
From memory, community schools, girl and boy scouts, church, and other shared activities like sports and hobbies were key, as was interacting with other kids in the neighborhood.
Also, FYI, the distance living from most early smaller cities and towns was dependent on the distance one could easily ride a horse or drive a buggy, not primarily walking. I would ballpark about ten miles out as being a typical max practical distance from some sort of town, at least in the east. Most people then lived in the rural areas around towns and cities, not in them, when those cities and towns were founded.
Regarding the decline of community schools, one factor here in Massachusetts is that most school construction projects are funded by a combination of local and state monies. In poorer communities, the state funding comprises the majority of the budget. However, a community can only have one school project in the design and construction process at a time - so if your town has, say, three neighborhood schools that are in aging buildings and in need of renovations, only one would be eligible for funding during what is often a five to ten year period. As a result, we see many communities consolidating their smaller neighborhood schools into one large facility for the entire district. This is particularly prevalent in economically disadvantaged towns; there's simply no local funds to renovate individual school buildings, but a new building can be constructed using state funding. These schools are often quite large, and require the majority of students to be bused fairly long distances. Sites are thus chosen more for their ability to accommodate parent drop-off traffic and large number of buses, rather than their proximity to neighborhoods and public parks. Often, the new school is located on the outskirts of town as it is difficult to find a site that can accommodate a large building and the associated drop-off areas in the more densely populated areas of town.
Wealthy communities tend to be more successful at retaining community schools, as they are less reliant on state funding for their projects and can afford to maintain and renovate their buildings on their own. Also, many of the most expensive towns in the state are the older inner suburbs of Boston, which for the most part predate the automobile and thus have walkable neighborhoods - and people who live there like it that way. Newton, for example, renovated one of their circa 1920s neighborhood schools and added a large playground which adjoins a public park space; the majority of students walk or bike to school and I observed parents gathering and chatting in the park and playground both before and after school drop-off, with students lingering to play and run around after school. It was a great example of the sort of third-space area that I remember from my childhood, but is now becoming a luxury only the very wealthy can afford.
How much of this desire to avoid density is unique to America because of urban disorder? Noah Smith writes a lot about this lately: the reason Europe has families in dense cities is not because of some magical European potion that makes people more civil, it’s largely because they’re way more policed and carceral (as in, you get arrested and jailed with far higher certainty).
Fix urban disorder and density becomes more realistic in the United States.
And, I should probably add explicitly, a strong preference for having private green space.
There are no circumstances I can imagine where I would voluntarily live in a dense urban environment. I do not understand the belief that’s what most people want, when actual data points in the opposite direction.
I don’t think it’s “most” people but we do exist! I live in a “dense” (it’s semi-detached houses with one shared wall and small backyards) neighbourhood in Toronto, Canada. There are advantages, primarily that everything is walkable including the school for my kids. But this depends on not having the horrible urban disorder that many American cities do.
In the US, around 27% of people describe their area as urban, about 22% as rural, and about 51% suburban.
With the rise in remote work, which made it easier for people to live where they want, large US cities lost population, while exurban and rural counties around smaller cities gained population. The Cooper Center at UVA has some good analyses of the census data.
Yeah that feels about right. Probably only 10-20% of parents in US and Canada *want* a walkable dense existence to raise their kids in. Most want the car-centric exurbs and suburbs. I’m not disagreeing with you!
I’m saying though that a big downside of density is proximity to disorder. And that if cities were more like European ones, those numbers might shift to, I don’t know, 20-30%? Still not a majority, but higher. And being close to your neighbours where you have a cultural connection and trust too, DOES create the magic for kids to have independence and get off their phones. (In addition to the other broad benefits of reduced fossil fuel consumption.)
Nobody is going to force anyone to give up suburbs. But giving people *more* palatable options is undeniably a good thing right?
Most of it is probably simply a preference to have a fenced yard for kids and dogs, a deck for entertaining, and a garden. In the exurbs, add chickens and a pony.
Europe had feudal land ownership laws that meant less of a history of private land ownership.
I think there's a piece missing here. Factor 3 touches on it but only tangentially. Cultural homogeneity.
Allowing long stretches of unsupervised play is easy when you and your neighbors all basically see the world the same way. You agree that there are objective truths, what qualifies as a virtue and a vice, and that guardrails exist for a reason. You may disagree about where those guardrails are or how far to go in promoting virtue or punishing vice, but the Overton Window of your community is relatively small. That was still true up until the 1980's. It is not today.
Today we are far more diverse both ethnically and culturally (these are tangentially related at least in the first generation or two.) The decline in homogeneity has enlarged our Overton Window considerably. Parents can trust each other less, so they must supervise more. This applies to everyone from Christian parents worried about secular influences to secular progressives worried their kid might be corrupted by that Jesus-freak friend. Many commentators see parents helicoptering despite the fact that children are "safer than ever today." But they miss the point that cultural diversity has made parental supervision more important.
There are communities that still function though, and we've been fortunate to be in one. There are 200 families in our homeschool coop. We are all Christian but come from all different denominations. This similarity narrows our Overton Window to a reasonable size. Any coop parent can correct any other child (including ordering them to do something) and have complete confidence that child's parent will back them up. I have been on both sides of this, and it's a reminder of how our neighborhoods and and culture used to work.
I wish we could get that back in our larger communities, but until we're willing to reassert the basic right of freedom of association, we will be unable to do so.
Well said.
This “inconvenient truth” is widely ignored and downplayed. Even when so preeminent a researcher as Putnam himself finds it!
https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/downside-diversity
Some people deal with it by saying “well we should all just be better”, which I think is true and laudable for superficial traits like skin colour. But other than the outright bigots, I think most people are fine with diversity of race. It’s the _values_ that matter and that make it hard when your neighbours don’t share your core values. You outlined it really well, especially the example on eg disciplining other peoples kids.
We are now into our second generation of young people who don't know how to have experiences that are not mediated and diluted by technology. Like the character in the Twilight Zone episode, they don't recognize the value of being around other people in real life.
https://technoskeptical.substack.com/p/the-good-news-is-you-dont-have-to
This nails it exactly and is a well stated version of my critic of this post in particular and some of the other comments here about planning. I would just tack on the idea that many young people (sub 40’s) also straight up don’t know how to build community with each other. They can’t imagine “free exchange of gifts”. So It doesn’t matter what we build - most of these age groups don’t understand why they’d even want to go to a “third place” - aside from the fact that phrase is very hip and cool these days (cynical remarks have been redacted). All of these academic ideas and solutions are fine but they fundamentally miss the reality of just how deeply disaffected most young people are today. Yes that was probably caused by all the known isolations and whatever’s, but you can’t fix it by just bringing those things back. Most of these things (churches, community centers, etc…) might as well be alien technology for how much people understand them or how to use them. This is (imo) why libraries are still doing okay - most schools still have one and so young people still mostly know how to engage with them. But if we don’t realize that the real task is retraining youth to understand how to use social technologies, if we don’t show them the value right away and fast, if we don’t create contexts that encourage the best of them to emerge in inter-generational ways, and all we do is build community centers and churches they will be empty even if they are well lit, staffed, and literally in the middle of every block.
let's collaborate?
💯
Great piece.
Not mentioned is the change in house design after WWII.
Prior to WWII, houses quite often had large porches on the front of the house, providing a social area for adults to connect with people walking by their houses. Children would play on those porches as well.
After the war, most new houses were built without porches. Social activity was confined to (possibly) fenced-in backyards. Not including a porch allowed larger interior square footage for a given parcel of land.
Finally, post-war houses were often built with forced-air systems for heating as they were cheaper than boiler and steam/water radiator systems. In the 60's these began to be widely used to deploy central air conditioning - another social isolator as kids (and adults) spent more time inside instead of time on the porch when it was hot.
I’ve actually never read Bowling Alone (though I need to at some point) but didn’t Putnam also raise air conditioning as a contributor to declining social interaction? It makes total sense. But it’s one of these things where even if true, nothing we can do about it. We can’t un-invent central air conditioning.
Another day, another article showing the transition of After Babel to becoming a religious-social-conservative blog!
All due respect to Mr. Haidt and Mr. Kaplan (practicing Jewish) and Ms. India (born-again Christian) but it would be good to get some intellectual diversity here about how to restore community (undo phase 1 of the anxious generation) without having to live in a monocultural Abrahamic monotheistic intentional community.
I know the author probably thinks that that’s impossible — that the only way to restore shared ties is religion. But there are other thinkers out there, and the publishers here (Haidt and Rauch) should publish some of them! And it doesn’t need to be communists who fantasize that after the leftist revolution that overthrows capitalism there will be community. There are plenty of centre-right writers lately who want to restore community, see the bad state American civic life is at, but don’t think we need to necessarily RETVRN.
Addison Del Mastro here on substack is a good writer, thinks deeply about community design, and isn’t a parent-bashing arrogant childless activist like too many urbanists. Noah Smith would write a guest article here about carceral urbanism and European community; hell if you want to get away from urbanism entirely, Joel Kotkin (The Suburbanist himself) would probably come out of retirement and write something. There are a dozen other suggestions people could probably make.
You have a huge platform here, I’d love for you to use it as more of a true salon or forum on this incredibly important (existentially important!) topic.
Hi Geoff, I appreciate the feedback and think this its a great to find additional intellectual diversity here. I will do some thinking and outreach.
Well said. And the idea that we need to remove or constrain individual choice (read: individual rights) in order to re-create community (which in Latin, literally means "free sharing of gifts") is also inherently wrongheaded IMHO. It's a false binary and false dichotomy. And the overarching undercurrent to such an idea is also very patriarchal as well, even if it may appear to be a "kinder, gentler patriarchy".
One thing is for sure: community (which in Latin, literally means "free sharing of gifts") cannot be forced, it must develop organically. Attempting to force it on people from the top down will backfire.
100%, and I think the problem with a lot of public policy aiming to respark community misses what exactly creates community. It's not just "a bunch of people in a place doing stuff". IMO community will be generated when people have a reason to depend on each other. Back in the Gilded Age, we had a civic renaissance when factories destroyed ripped apart a lot of the social fabric, but then civic groups rose up in droves to provide for each other. I think, at the local level, we can find new ways to let people be a little more interdependent on each other by allowing for more shared projects, but that may just be my perspective as an urban planning student.
That said, we should also be careful NOT to romanticize the Gilded Age as some sort of golden age either, or use it as an excuse to dismantle FDR's New Deal like the reactionaries have long salivated over doing. There was some pretty extreme (by today's standards) poverty, inequality, abuse, violence, corruption, and vice galore during the Gilded Age as well. And of course, it was really only "golden" for rich, white, straight males for the most part.
It is unlikely that any of these changes can be made until after the revolution.
Imagine, a whole essay on community without mentioning the economy, when no politician’s speech is complete without ‘Economic Growth.’ And where is economic growth happening? Remote work, mass off-shore production, ‘cultural industries,’ Amazon, Netflix. Think there’s something essential missing from this effort.
1
We must ask each other: "Do you want to kill?"
2
It's the law. Calif 5150
3
We don't cry due to Mirror Neurons.("everyone will start")
4
"Tears are the cum of love" wrote a high schooler in the 1960's(me).
5
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/will-trump-claim-credit-for-bidens/comment/85946588
6
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/conspiracy-theorists/comment/86083294
7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0fJSvGJOuI
0:22
whenever I get gloomy with the state of
0:24
the world I think about the arrivals
0:26
gate at Heathrow Airport. General
0:29
opinions starting to make out that we
0:30
live in a world of hatred and greed but
0:33
I don't see that. It seems to me that love
0:35
is everywhere. Often it's not
0:37
particularly dignified or newsworthy but
0:40
it's always there:
0:41
fathers and sons mothers and daughters
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husbands and wives boyfriends
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girlfriends old friends when the planes
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hit the twin towers as far as I know
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none of the phone calls from the people
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on board were messages of hate or
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revenge they were all messages of love
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if you look for it I've got a sneaky
1:00
feeling you'll find that Love Actually
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is all around
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Being a camp counselor for over 20 years - I can say that the best thing, and the easiest thing, we can do to get children healthy is to march them outdoors FIRST thing for the Sunrise, before any exposure to artificial first thing.
This will then ensure they have reset their circadian rhythm for the day, which optimizes mood and energy. How hard is that?
We live in a walkable suburb of 1/4 acre lots interspersed by multi-use paths, playgrounds, and wooded commons. It's not the acreage of nature I grew up on, but we chose it because we wanted friends and independence for our kids.
Unfortunately, the two-income trap has meant that few homemakers besides myself can afford to move here anymore. I haven't been able to set up playdates with the other families on our block, because the kids are always off at aftercare and sports, since both parents are always off at work.
So I'm casting my net wider. I've created a map of the neighborhood within about a mile's walk on paths and slow streets. It roughly overlaps with our public elementary bus route.
I plan to create a neighborhood play group and put flyers on any houses where I see any evidence of childhood. I think I'll host a monthly meetup at a park and a text thread, but the group will mainly function as a directory service to facilitate smaller playdates.
Hopefully by the time my kids are old enough to walk more than a block alone, they will have made some friends to walk to.
If it is possible, then it ought to be by all means and methods - recovered.
Here in California, fences do not make good neighbors.
Wow! This was so good, basically what has been floating around in my head but I don't know how to say it. Thank you for writing this, this is like a consolidation. I actually made my own little messy consolidation, called "How it Feels to be a Teen in the 2020s". I would love if you read it and gave me feedback, since it ties closely with this essay you've written.
https://julianarivera.substack.com/p/how-it-feels-to-be-a-teen-in-the
Amazing piece!