There’s a lot of stuff in the news about how our current societal structure, especially in the US, is simply put, bad for us. The distances between where we work, eat, live and shop put undo strain on our relationships with our families and our bodies. Numerous studies have shown that there is a correlation between your weight and how far you have to commute. Clearly, spending 1-2 hours in a car, sitting in traffic is going to eat valuable time that could be better spent doing better things.
Christopher Alexander, the author of A Pattern Langauge, would probably agree that our way of building the states is completely messed up. In his book, Alexander suggests various city planning features that would lead to a better and more cohesive society. These patterns range from intertwining country and city to making buildings no more than 4 stories high to the distribution of offices and old people. The patterns in this book make sense logically, but obviously something’s wrong, because you never see it in practice.
In fact, our society is much more like the Sprawl in Neuromancer by William Gibson (but without the cool nano-tech, for now). The Sprawl is a large metropolis that spreads from Boston to Atlanta. In other words, it’s a complete mess, much like the cities of today. I find two things very interesting about this phenomena. The first is that we all know building the way we build sucks. However, people get caught on the idea of protecting their property values or inexpensive housing. In today’s world, both of those mean sub-divisions with set floor-plans. The solution is sub-optimal, but appears to be less risky, and therefore remains popular.
The second thing I find interesting is that despite our tendency to build disjoint physical communities, we yearn to build cohesive ones in the on-line world. In reality, this is all web 2.0 has been about. Mashups, aggregation, rss, and social networking are all about integrating all the sources of information that were always present on the web, but not combined in any sensible form.
One wonders if we’ll eventually see our physical communities start to mash up. Obviously, change does occur, just witness the trend of gentrification. However, the physical world is far less malleable than it’s virtual counterpart, therefore, any change tends to be slow and expensive. My guess is that we’ll continue to build the way we build because of momentum and it’s easy. Thankfully, we’ll have the crutch of technology to keep us from completely segregating ourselves.
