Local "Planning" Follies part 6 “Friends”—The Missing Community

“Friends”—The Missing Community

(c) by Mark Dempsey 

Part of a series. See Local "Planning" Follies Part 1 - The state of play in land use planning for links to all posts.

Sprawl is notorious for isolating people. That is one of the hallmarks of its design: maximum privacy and precious little space for social interaction. Suburbs are famously devoid of any culture except television. 

The British are different. Compared to its U.S. counterpart—aside from a few brilliant productions—British TV is awful. It has only four channels, and “shows” like two presenters asking callers to identify a mystery card, naming another TV presenter. Banter can only carry so much. 

Apparently the Brits don’t have the motivation, or population, to need a gazillion cable channels for entertainment (although I'm sure they have cable by now). They can manage with public broadcast of only four channels and a few brilliant shows because they have something the U.S. does not have: pubs. 

Pubs (short for “public houses”) are not exactly bars, although they serve alcohol. They also serve food. They also have public gatherings for football (soccer) matches and other entertainments. 

Visiting England on business, I once bought a British cab driver lunch. We were sitting in the pub and a fellow with a blue-and-brown afro wig rushed past us to yell the score in a game to his fellow fans. “He’s British,” counselled my cabbie, with a knowing smile, “we don’t pay him.”

So the Brits find each other entertaining. The pub we ate in advertised “?uiz Nite!” every Wednesday. The English don’t watch others answer Alex Trebec’s questions on Jeopardy, they play “?uiz” themselves—far more satisfying entertainment, if you ask me.

As mentioned before, pubs are typically within a walk of homes, and the availability of their community entertainment—and the walk—may be at the root of the difference between American and British health. A recent study discovered that the British diet was not particularly healthier, and they weren’t even less obese than Americans, but British patients were significantly healthier. 

Could the U.S. health effect something resulting from the missing community discussed in works like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community?

Says Putnam: “Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values—these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.” 

Putnam, is a Harvard professor of sociology who charts the past two generations’ deterioration of the organized ways people engage in civic life in the U.S. One example he cites: in 1960, 62.8% of Americans of voting age participated in the presidential election, whereas by 1996, the percentage had slipped to 48.9%. (See this more recent blog post about the current state of voting in the U.S.)

Most Americans still claim a serious “religious commitment,” but church attendance is down roughly 25%-50% from the 1950s, and the number of Americans who attended public meetings of any kind dropped 40% between 1973 and 1994. Even the once stable norm of community life has shifted: one in five Americans moves once a year, while two in five expect to move in five years. This has created a U.S. population that is increasingly isolated and less sympathetic toward fellow citizens, one that is often angrier and less willing to unite in communities or as a nation.