No Front Porch & The Double Garage | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Harry Pasternak (Harry_Pasternaktvo.org) | |
Date: 29 Jul 1995 17:19:37 GMT |
Barry I have been doing a modest amount of research for the past 30 years on how the front porch as well as the front "lawn" promotes or denies "social networking"-that is, the day to day, "natural" meeting of people living in a neighborhood. It is pretty easy to see, if you live in a older city, the history of the porch and the double garage. Generally, in the past/before suburban sprawl, low income housing was often the row type, usually close to the factories, usually with no porch other than a 2 foot by three foot concrete stoop, this stoop was usually left uncovered. The "front lawn" was about two or three foot deep. During the same period, middle income homes typically did have a front porch big enough to sit three or four adults and a baby carriage. The porch was usually roofed over. The front lawn varied in size; but in North Toronto or Waterloo (Canada) for example, the lawn was typically about 10 to 12 foot deep, with sidewalks running between the lawns and the road. Often there was a laneway running between the backyards. The garage was a the back of the property and was entered via the laneway. Most of the garages had basketball backboards and hoops mounted on the garages-on a typically day you could see several hundred kids playing basketball in the laneway ( example, Lewiston New York) After the second world war, the middle class as well as low income housing changed drastically, when planners and architects across North American produced Suburbia. The middle class post war housing's lawns got deeper and the covered porches typically disappeared and were replaced by the 2 foot by 3 foot concrete stoop that is usually not roofed over (same as in the low income homes of the past). Instead of the porch, the architects added the two car garage stuck onto the front of the home- with the ashphalt drive.The architects decided/assumed that all socializing would best be done in the backyards-perhaps to keep folks off the streets in the front of the homes so that the auto could rule supreme. Typically sidewalks disappeared or were just placed on one side of the road. At the same time, childrens playgounds appeared. Apparently, children were supposed to play in the playgrounds rather than in and around the homes and the streets. The post war low income families were moved into high rise-high density housing projects or medium density housing that looked like army barracks. Of course, people living in the high rise buildings lost their 2 foot deep lawns and two foot deep porches. The low income families in the barrack style housing usually retained their 2 by 3 front porch and two foot strip of front lawn (example is Regent Park, Toronto). A few years back, Jan Gehl returned to the school of architecture at the University of Toronto, where he had been a guest lecturer for a year (10 years before). He has been asked to return for a series of lectures on what has happened in the intervening 10 years in the field of "community building" in the middle class neighborhoods. Jan asked me to tag along for part of the week. During a session with fourth year architecture students, who were about to graduate in a few weeks, Jan had a discussion about whether people buying single family homes wanted to be isolated from their neighbors or wanted to interact with them. Almost all the students believed that folks wanted to be isolated from each other. One student did a slide show to proove this. He had just returned from Vancouver, he showed slide after slide of homes with 6 foot fences surrounding the front of the newly constructed homes to proove that people did indeed wish to be isolated. The class all agreed that the slides depicted the kinds of homes that they were going to design upon graduation. Harry Who works at The Thousand Islands Institutute- The Independent Centre for Housing Research and Education. One project the Institute is involved in is helping (there are no consulting fees) cohousing/collaborative (intentional neighborhoods) groups who intend to self-design and self-manage the construction of their neighborhood and homes. The deal is the Institute will assist a group --- in turn each group is then responsible for assisting two other groups etc.--- etc. I can be contacted at Harry_Pasternak [at] tvo.org,Internet - sent via an evaluation copy of BulkRate (unregistered).
- (no other messages in thread)
Results generated by Tiger Technologies Web hosting using MHonArc.