After the long awaited reunion with my good friend Matt, I was truly amazed to hear the changes in thinking and creative ideas he's explored in the last year.
The one idea which I want to highlight is how space affects people's interactions and their political, economic, and social tendencies. The main thrust of the argument is that in large city design where there is a high degree of connectivity and interaction between people, the favored way of political thinking is liberal not by self-selection and income bracket, but rather interaction with people makes liberal people. Suburbs and sections of sprawl, where everyone has to drive everywhere, and little or no interaction with other people actually occurs, tends to promote conservative thinking.
The thrust of Matt's argument comes from using Orange County as a case study of intentional urban planning of conservatism. As you may or may not know (wiki it), Orange County is a very conservative section of California that routinely votes Republican. Apparently in the 60s or 70s, there was a pushing front of liberal culture in all the areas surrounding Orange County. In an effort to rebuff their influence, city planners actually designed large sections of Orange County to have classic suburban sprawl as a design, where interconnectivity and the chance for encountering other people is intentionally low. In doing so, the structure of the space of Orange County has created a safe haven and virtual breeding ground for conservative thinking. Although I haven't found specific evidence for this claim, I've heard it said that actual minutes of the meetings of the city planners captures this intention to design cities to be conservative.
This idea I find completely striking. It is not the case of classism, where the rich are more conservative and thus live in large suburban mansions with their personal golf course in the back yard, but rather that well-off people are being conditioned into conservative ideals by their lack of interaction with people. This idea makes sense, as there are tons of wealthy people living in cities (Who else can live in those million dollar brownstones in Boston?) but they happen to be more liberal in tendency.
The Congress for the New Urbanism documents these ideas much better then I'm doing here. Their Charter, makes some interesting points and does a better job of fleshing out the complexity of the issues involved. In addition to the political tendencies that cities engender, by optimizing already developed areas, we can reduce our impact on the environment. This has been already realized by many European cities in the form of Green Belt Policies. I was amazed at how Europe has 10 times the population density of the US and yet there is so much green area. I spread these memes in passing, and turn again to some of my own thoughts.
Matt and I have been considering how this "space affecting interaction affecting people" idea is manifest on even the smaller level of living communities at MIT. In particular it seems striking to me that the reason why East Campus is particularly liberal is not because some how a large group of liberal, progressive, hippy MIT undergrads managed to get lotteried into the dorm and the culture just snowballed, but rather the actual architecture of the dorm has created such an environment. In particular the long connected hallways provides immediate line-of-sight to anyone who might else be out in the hall hanging out. Seeing people milling outside their room provides a nucleation site for interaction and suddenly people are talking and socializing and sharing ideas and expanding each other's minds. This is to be contrasted with Simmons, which has each long floor divided arbitrarily into towers so that in order to get from point A to point B, one has to really do some work in navigating different floors quickly so that one can get inside one's room and hunker down for the night. The only chance for interaction is maybe the elevators, which is often stifling, awkward, non-committal and brief. In fact it is interesting how each of the major MIT dormitories has an architecture which is conducive to the type of people which live there. Granted there is a process of selection on the part of the student, but for formation of these cultures they really are governed by the structure of the space.
This brings me nicely to one of my favorite living groups to visit, tEp. As Matt correctly points out the structure of the spaces for interaction in tEp really are conducive to certain activities and sometimes the disorientation caused by the frequent, bizarre happenings, is just what is needed to stretching ones consciousness and tolerance.
The effect now seems pretty self-evident. Interaction with people on a frequent basis, implies a wider exposure to opinion, culture, beliefs, and backgrounds. The necessity of sharing a common space and living area encourages tolerance in all of these dimensions. Tolerance often is the seed to open-thinking about various subjects and policies and consequently, dis-attachment from dogma, conservative values and general narrow thinking.
Of course an already existent inclination towards liberal thinking, has also promoted the growth of communes, but it is interesting to see the causality go the other way.
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4 comments:
Wow, that is a fascinating idea!
Actually this reminds me of something that Nietzsche talked about, that when we perceive outside stimulus like sounds when dreaming, our mind automatically invents a cause for it in the dream, and we perceive the cause before perceiving the sound, even though in reality it happens in the reverse order.
Nietzsche holds the opinion that often times a similar thing happens in reality - that people mistake the result of something for the cause, and vice versa. This is a perfect example of that - the people don't make the building, the building makes the people.
Very nice example, Curran!
These are some interesting speculations about what could be driving the political distinctions between urban and suburban areas, but I think you've left out an important factor that could lead to self-selection.
People with families disproportionately choose suburbs (for whatever reason), and marriage and family are perhaps the highest indicators of conservative politics. Likewise, singles have incentives for choosing cities.
I agree with you that looking at class is barking up the wrong tree.
The family connection certainly does not account for the whole divide, but sometimes it can only take a relatively loose correlation for the snowball to begin rolling.
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