No Front Porch & The Double Garage
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).

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