Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction: Follow Up

In an older post - Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction - I introduced an argument about how Orange County purposely designed its neighborhoods to have a lack of public spaces and opportunities for interaction. Every time I cite this argument, people ask for my references and I always feel bad to come up empty-handed.

Well, Matt has helped me address this grievance once and for all --

Lisa McGirr's "Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right", published by the Princeton University Press, contains the much sought after reference. Pages 41 through 44 or so are the most condemning with the most powerful passage on page 42:

Convenience, privacy, and decentralization were the keys to the master plan, with few central public spaces except those dominated by consumption. Irvine executives, with a good sense for business, conciously created solidly middle-class neighborhoods. They preferred to forgo federal subsidies that would have required them to open their developments to poorer residents, and they did not incorporate open-housing provisions into their master plan. Their desire to build high-priced homes helped to reinforce an already existing social homogeneity in Orange County. The result of development along these lines, of both the corporate and the free-market models, was spatial isolation and an abscence of community, which, in a complicated way, helped to reinforce a conservative ethos.

Page 41 introduces the company that was responsible for designing the Irvine area and there are plenty of other interesting things said later as well. In particular, I found the "NIMBY" political movement ("Not In My Back Yard") referenced on page 43 to provide another powerful defense of the idea that home ownership, with a focus on cultivating your own private landscape, encouraged a protective attitude towards private property and a dislike of communal spaces.

I must confess that the idea of simply mulching your own flower beds and garden (something my grandmother so enjoyed in her previous large suburban home) on the weekends hardly seems like an act of conservatism, but it does seem like a selfish act compared to donating your time to working on the community play ground or garden, something to be built and enjoyed by many.

Page 42 is not by default part of the limited preview of the relevant section, but if you use google books to search for the phrase "open spaces" in the book, the first result is on page 42, allowing you to view the missing page.