SAMPLING
SOCIAL GROUPINGS IN 1953
THE SAME AREA
THREE YEARS LATER
Social notes, needless to say, are a highly incomplete guide—some areas are over-reported, others are under-reported, and the personal inclinations of the social reporter can be something of a factor too. But the patterns they suggest are real enough. When we made a closer study of these areas, we found more complex patterns, but the kind of regularities revealed by the social notes were there. Each area had feuds and stresses that had nothing to do with physical layout, but common to almost all was a set of relationships—at times they almost seem like laws—that were as important in governing behavior as the desires of the individuals in them.
It begins with the children. There are so many of them and they are so dictatorial in effect that a term like filiarchy would not be entirely facetious.* It is the children who set the basic design; their friendships are translated into the mother’s friendships, and these, in turn, to the family’s. “The kids are the only ones who are really organized here,” says the resident of a patio court at Park Merced in San Francisco. “We older people sort of tag along after them. Suburbanites elsewhere agree. “We are not really ‘kid-centered’ here like some people say,” one Park Forester protests, “but our friendships are often made on the kids’ standards, and they are purer standards than ours. When your kids are playing with the other kids, they force you to keep on good terms with everybody.”
That they do. With their remarkable sensitivity to social nuance, the children are a highly effective communication net, and parents sometimes use them to transmit what custom dictates elders cannot say face to face. “One newcomer gave us quite a problem in our court,” says a resident in an eastern development. “He was a Ph.D., and he started to pull rank on some of the rest of us. I told my kid he could tell his kid that the other fathers around here had plenty on the ball. I guess all we fathers did the same thing; pretty soon the news trickled upward to this guy. He isn’t a bad sort; he got the hint—and there was no open break of any kind.”
Play areas: Since children have a way of playing where they feel like playing, their congregating areas have not turned out to be exactly where elders planned them to be. In the homes area the back yards would seem ideal, and communal play areas have been built in some of them. But the children will have none of it; they can’t use their toy vehicles there and so they play on the lawn and pavements out front. In the court areas the children have amenably played in and around the interior parking bay out of traffic’s way. The courts’ enclosed “tot yards,” however, haven’t turned out to be as functional as was expected; in some courts the older children have used them as a barricade to keep the younger children out.
Find where the flow of wheeled juvenile traffic is and you will find the outlines of the wives’ Kaffeeklatsch routes. Sight and sound are important; when wives go visiting they gravitate toward the houses within sight of their children and within hearing of the telephone, and these lines of sight crystallize into the court “checkerboard movement.”
In the courts, as a consequence, the back door is the functional door and the front door might just as well be walled in. As a matter of fact, this has been done in some buildings; when they learned how the residents centered their activities around the inner parking bay, the architects decided to incorporate the fact into a new apartment building recently added. There is no front door at all; the space is given over to a picture wall, and all traffic has to funnel through the back area. By all accounts, the design is a conspicuous success.
Placement of driveways and stoops: If you are passing by a row of houses equally spaced and want a clue as to how the different couples pair off, look at the driveways. At every second house there are usually two adjacent driveways; where they join makes a natural sitting, baby-watching, and gossip center, and friendship is more apt to flower there than across the unbroken stretch of lawn on the other sides of the houses. For the same basic reasons the couples who share adjoining back stoops in the courts are drawn together, even though equidistant neighbors on the other side may have much more in common with them.
Lawns: The front lawn is the thing on which homeowners expend most time, and the sharing of tools, energies, and advice that the lawns provoke tends to make the family friendships go along and across the street rather than over the back yards. The persistence of this pattern furnishes another demonstration of the remarkable longevity of social patterns. Two years ago I was assured by many that lack of over-the-back-fence fraternization was strictly temporary. It has not proved to be so. As the areas have matured, some of the reasons for the concentration of activity in the front area have disappeared; but despite this fact and despite the turn over, over-the-back-fence socializing is still the exception. Many residents joke about not having the slightest idea who lives in back of them, and those who know one or two rear neighbors generally met them through a community-wide activity, like politics, or the church.
What makes a court Clique: In the rental courts formed around parking bays social life is oriented inward. In the large court at the bottom, for example, wings whose back doors face each other form natural social units. Buildings sited somewhat ambiguously tend to split the allegiance of their inhabitants, or else, like the lonely apartment unit at lower right, isolate them. Smaller courts like the one at the top are usually more cohesive; and though there may be subgroupings, court people often get together as a unit.
How homeowners get together: (1) individuals tend to become most friendly with neighbors whose driveways adjoin theirs. (2) Deviates or feuding neighbors tend to become boundaries of the gang. (3) People in the most central positions make the greatest number of social contacts. (4) Street width and traffic determine whether or not people make friends across the street. (5) People make friends with those in back of them only where some physical feature creates traffic —such as the short-cut pavement one woman on the lower street uses on her way to the supermarket.
Centrality: The location of your home in relation to the others not only determines your closest friends; it also virtually determines how popular you will be. The more central one’s location, the more social contacts one has. In the streets containing rental apartments there is a constant turnover; yet no matter who moves in or out, the center of activity remains in mid-block, with the people at the ends generally included only in the larger gatherings.*
Some Park Forest veterans joke that a guide should be furnished newcomers so that if they had a choice of sites they would be enabled to tell which would best suit their personality. Introverts who wished to come out of their shell a bit could pick a house in the middle of a block; while introverts who wished to stay just as they are would be well advised to pick a unit more isolated.†
Chronology of construction: Since a social pattern once established tends to perpetuate itself, the order and direction in which an area is built are enduring factors. If one side of a street is built first rather than both sides simultaneously, the group tends to organize along rather than across the street. The order of construction also helps explain why so little back-yard socializing develops. The house across the back is not usually put up at the same time, and the joint problem the new tenant has with neighbors is the front lawn. Later on he will get around to fixing up the back-yard, but by that time the front-lawn neighbor pattern has already jelled.
The chronology also has a lot to do with the size of the group. If a person moves into a new block the social group to which he will belong is apt to be a large one. The reasons are visible. Mud, paving, the planting of trees, the sharing of tools—problems common to all—and in each new block you will see the pioneer phase all over again. Go down the street to where the lawns are green and the lucite awnings long since up, and there the group will probably be smaller. Once the pressure of common pioneering problems is lifted, the first great wave of friendliness subsides, and the potential fissures present from the beginning start t
o deepen.
This process is almost visible too. To find how one block had matured we put on a series of identical maps each gathering that had taken place over a year; riff through these maps quickly, and in the few seconds that represent a year’s parties you can see in crude animation the fissures begin to widen as the original group splits up into more manageable components.
Limitations on size: One reason it’s so important to be centrally placed is that an active group can contain only so many members. There is usually an inner core of about four to six regulars. Partly because of the size of the living rooms (about twenty by fifteen), the full group rarely swells beyond twelve couples, and only in the big functions such as a block picnic are the people on the edges included.
Barriers: But the rules of the game about who is to be included are not simple. Suppose you want to give a party? Do you mix friends out of the area with the neighbors? How many neighbors should you invite? Where, as social leaders chronically complain, do you draw the line? Physical barriers can provide the limiting point Streets, for example, are functional for more than traffic; if it is a large street with heavy traffic, mothers will forbid their children to cross it, and by common consent the street becomes a boundary for the adult group.
Because of the need for a social line, the effect of even the smallest barrier is multiplied. In courts where the parking bays have two exits, fences have been placed across the middle to block through traffic; only a few feet high, they are as socially impervious as a giant brick wall. Similarly, the grouping of apartment buildings into wings of a court provides a natural unit whose limits everyone understands. All in all, it seems, the tightest-knit groups are those in which no home is isolated from the others—or so sited as to introduce a conflict in the social allegiance of its residents.
Ambiguity is the one thing the group cannot abide. If there is no line, the group will invent one. They may settle on an imaginary line along the long axis of the court, or, in the homes area, one particular house as the watershed. There is common sense behind it. If it’s about time you threw a party for your neighbors, the line solves many of your problems for you. Friends of yours who live on the other side understand why they were not invited, and there is no hard feeling.
In this need, incidentally, the deviant can be of great benefit. The family that doesn’t mix with the others or is disliked by them frequently furnishes a line of social demarcation that the layout and geography do not supply. So functional is the barrier family in this respect that even if they move out, their successors are likely to inherit the function. The new people may be quite normal enough themselves, but unless they are unusually extroverted the line is apt to remain in the same place.
What lessons can we deduce from these relationships? All other things being equal—and it is amazing how much all other things are equal in suburbia—it would appear that certain kinds of physical layouts can virtually produce the “happy” group. To some the moral would seem simplicity itself. Planners can argue that if they can find what it is that creates cohesiveness it would follow that by deliberately building these features into the new housing they could at once eliminate the loneliness of modern life.*
Not all planners go along with this line of thought, but some are enthusiastic. At several meetings of planners I have talked to about suburbia, I have noticed that the most persistent discussion is on this point. Planners involved with urban redevelopment are particularly interested. Concerned as they are with the way housing projects break up old family and neighborhood ties, they see in the tight-knit group of suburbia a development of great promise.
I hope they pause. I would not want to malign planners for becoming interested in sociology—it is a common complaint in the field, indeed, that most planners aren’t interested enough. But a little sociology can be a dangerous weapon, for it seems so objective that it is easy to forget the questions of value involved. Certainly, the more we know about the social effects of planning the more effectively we can plan. But on such developments as the integrated group it is necessary to ask not only how it can be planned but if.
How good is “happiness”? The socially cohesive block has its advantages, but there is a stiff price to be paid for them. In the next chapter I am going to sketch the impact of this cohesiveness on the suburbanites. It is a highly mixed picture and must be entirely a matter of personal opinion as to whether the cohesion is more good than bad. It is very evident, nonetheless, that this cohesion brings the suburbanite up against a serious conflict of values. It is important not only in its own right, it is important as a symbol of the conflict that pervades all of organization life.
* In only slightly lesser degree the same kind of patterns are visible in other suburbs. As one check, I plotted on a map the members of the Garden Club at Drexelbrook. Again, the map indicated the power of the group. The 120 members were not scattered in the 84 buildings at Drexelbrook, but tended to concentrate in clusters—of the 84 buildings, 33 had no members at all, 20 had one member apiece, and 31 had two, three, or four members. To put it another way, of the 120 members, only 20 were sole members of the group in their building, while 78 were in buildings containing three or four members.
* Characteristic of all the new suburbs is a highly skewed age distribution in which children between 0 to 10 and parents between 25 to 35 make up the overwhelming bulk of the population. At Levittown, Pennsylvania, for example, a 1953 census revealed that 40 per cent of the people were between 0 and 10, 33 per cent between 25 and 35. Only 1.4 per cent were teen-agers between 15 and 20, only 3.7 per cent were 45 or older. (Source: Philadelphia Council of Churches survey.)
* In a detailed study of a housing project for married M.I.T. students, the importance of centrality has been well documented. In building after building, couples located near the routes of greatest traffic tended to have many more social contacts than those on the edges. (Social Pressures in Informal Groups, by Leon Festinger, Stanley Schacter,, and Kurt Back. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950.)
† It’s not such an outlandish idea. William L. Wheaton, Professor of Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, came to somewhat the same idea as the result of studies his students had made of five communities. The social patterns he found were substantially the same as those in Park Forest, and he noted well the hothouse effect of the tightly knit unit. Streets or courts, he advised planners, should be so laid out as “to allow any one family the choice of two groups or benevolent despotisms in which to live.”
* The English experience has been instructive. In his acerb account of the development of the new town of Stevenage (Utopia Ltd. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), Harold Orlans found planners impaled by the dilemmas of happiness. Some planners, and there were many schools of thought among them, had a considerable faith in certain geometric arrangements as the means to more happiness. The planners differed on the size of the ideal neighborhood, but they all agreed on the idea of breaking up the larger neighborhood unit into a series of smaller ones which, it was hoped, would at once produce neighborliness and stimulate community-wide activity at the same time. Orlans, strongly anti-utopian, is skeptical. “Can it have been scientifically established that the ‘neighborhood unit’ will increase human happiness or neighborliness when some planners [arguing for a different type unit] … believe the opposite?” Orlans notes that while most of the planners believed that a series of neighborhood units would integrate the community, others believed that they would break up, rather than unite, the towns. “Fortunately, many planning decisions are unlikely to affect the happiness of new-town residents one way or the other,” Orlans laconically observes, “for the residents will probably be less concerned about them than are planners, and, being ordinary people and not abstractions, will be able to adjust satisfactorily to a variety of physical and social environments.”
CHAPTER 26 The Outgoing Life
The effect this web of friendship has on the individual is a problem suburbanites think about a great deal.
Like them, I am going to deal with the good aspects first, the adverse second. But the two are really inseparable, and it is this duality I wish to underscore. The Social Ethic denies it, and there is the problem. Finding a middle way in the conflicts of interest between the group and oneself has always been difficult, but it has become particularly difficult as people have come to believe there should be, ideally, no conflicts—and the happier the group, the more, not the less, intense is the problem. In the chapters on the corporation I argued that it was the very beneficence of the environment that made resistance to it so difficult. So in suburbia. As many people have sensed, it is all very well to say one should belong. But how much? Where is the line between co-operation and surrender?
On the credit side the suburbanites have much to say about the group. One of the first points they make is how it has altered their personality—or how they and the rest of the group altered someone else’s. For the good. “I’ve changed tremendously,” says one typical transient. “My husband was always the friend-maker in the family —everybody always loves Joe; he’s so likable. But here I began to make some friends on my own; I was so tickled when I realized it. One night when the gang came to our house I suddenly realized I made these friends.”
The Organization Man Page 41