blog (January, 2007)
enclosure and the death of cities
There is one important thing automobiles provide that bicycles do not: enclosure
the enclosure of the automobile also holds some far-reaching negative implications for the general character of American cities.
Perhaps the most valuable point in [Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities] is the idea that vital, flourishing, and safe city neighborhoods owe their success to what she calls "an intensity of users."
This coming and going leads to face-to-face contact among strangers and neighbors. According to Jacobs, these seemingly insignificant social contacts are the basic building blocks of safe, vibrant cities.
In his book Emergence, Steven Johnson celebrates Jacob's version of the city as an "emerging system," and compares it to the common anthill, in which individual ants at the bottom of the ant hierarchy exchange basic information in random nose-to-nose contacts, and, unbeknownst to these individuals, form a sophisticated community that can "engage in nuanced and improvisational problem-solving." The same is true of the cells in the human body, and the people on the street in the city. They all contribute intelligence, from the bottom up, to create successful self-organizing systems.
However, when everybody climbs into a car for every conceivable trip, no matter how short or insignificant, the face-to-face contact among strangers is drastically diminished. When city dwellers stay enclosed even when they leave the apartment, going from garage, to drive-thru, and back to garage in their private metal pods with blackened windows, this behavior casts a chill over neighborhoods and cities. [...] If Jacobs is right, then, American car culture starves the cities of their self-organizing fuel.
-- Robert Hurst, The Art of Urban Cycling (review w/ excerpts)
(bold: mine, italics: Hurst's)