“Howdy mate, I’m going to be around town for a while. I’ll see you around”, says Mick as he shakes the hand of a bewildered passenger who is waiting for a light in New York downtown. Mick, in the 1986 motion picture, “Crocodile Dundee” comes from a small Australian town which has a small well knit sense of community where it is not uncommon to introduce yourself to a stranger. The New Yorker who had never been exposed to that very sense of community ends up driving off thinking Mick is insane. The New Yorker is representative of the American population which has shifted from a community based culture to an individualistic and isolated culture. The primary causes for the problem of place that Ray Oldenburg describes in his essay entitled “The Problem of Place in America” are the modern day construction of suburbs, the mainstream usages of automobiles, and our preconceived notions of individualism.
Ray Oldenburg in his essay on “The Problem of Place in America” writes about these very changes in American culture from his perspective. He begins by stating that Americans are not a contented people and they lack a form of “integral community” which binds them to one another. The automobile suburbs that sprung up around America during the Post-World War II era were deceptions of the small communities that existed in the prior periods. He claims that though suburban life may have “satisfied the combats veteran’s longing for a safe, orderly, and quite haven, but it rarely offered the sense of place and belonging that had rooted his parents and grandparents”. (Oldenburg)
Oldenburg believes that American society has become materialistic and find moving away from their suburban home fairly easy, as the most cherished items can be moved from home to home. There are no goodbyes to be said when as there are no random places to meet friends and meeting friends is no longer a coincidence but rather planned in advance. We have chosen to over schedule ourselves to try to overcome the feeling of isolation and the lack of community. As both parents start working in attempt to gain some type of community the typical suburban child gets even more isolated due to the fact that no parents are home upon his return from school. Oldenburg says that the failure of suburbs to provide a sense community has not discouraged their growth because “Americans have substituted the vision of the ideal home for that of the ideal city”. (Oldenburg) Homes in expensive neighborhoods have become methods of secluding oneself even more from community due to the size of the lots.
New generations in America are encouraged to isolate themselves from the public and to set personal achievements above the public good. From childhood they are thought that the good lives are “pretty much confined to one’s house and yard.” They witness this in their parent’s happiness from moving to bigger houses and associate good lives with lot size. Additionally the “two-stop” model of daily routine of work and home are “pressed to supply all that is wanting and much that is missing in the constricted life-styles of those without community”. (Oldenburg) Another side effect of the problem of place is that United States now leads the word in the rate of divorce and fatherless children comprise the fastest growing segment of infant population. He also claims that American industry loses $50-$75 billion dollars a year due to stress-related absenteeism because Americans are denied those means of relieving stress that server other cultures so effectively. “While the Germans relax amid the rousing company of the bier garten or the French recuperate in their animated little bistros, Americans turn to massaging, mediating, jogging, hot tubing, or escape fiction.” (Oldenburg) We praise our freedom not to associate and stay aloof, while other cultures take advantage of their freedom to associate. Oldenburg goes on to say that we have replaced the idea of leisure with the idea of shopping and “our drive to consume and to own whatever industry produces” is our way of relaxing. He says that people go about spending money on home decoration and new wardrobes in an attempt to “add zest to their lives”. (Oldenburg) Having been able to associate to the problem of place that Oldenburg discusses, I worked to find how the problem of place became part of the American culture.
Everywhere in America laws have been enacted that prevent building the type of places that Americans pay premium prices to vacation in. Laws prevent building towns with traditional streets, trees, fences, railings, walls, lampposts, and gardens that scale and shape the civic space. There are laws that prevent building anything but another Los Angles. Zoning laws in America dictate how we build our cities and these very zoning laws are one of the primary reasons for the problem of place in America. This idea of building according to zoning exploded after World War II, and the idea “began to overshadow all the historic elements of civic art and civic life (Kunstler)”. For example, because of the mainstream usage of cars by people to shop and thus the need for parking lots, it was written in the zoning codes that “shopping was [...] and obnoxious industrial activity which people shouldn’t be allowed to live [around] (Kunstler)”. This separation of commercial and residential created the idea of a modern day shopping complex which has no sense of community that traditional market places evoked. David Gutterson in his essay “One Week At The Mall Of America” claims that “the mall exploits our acquisitive instincts without honoring our communal requirements, our eternal desire for discourse and intimacy, needs that until the twentieth century were traditionally met in our marketplaces but that are not met at all in gain shopping malls. (Gutterson, 82)”
What zoning produces is the modern idea of the “suburban sprawl”, whose chief traits are the separation of commercial and residential; mandatory driving to get from one activity to another; and the shortage of public places. The basic idea of zoning is that every activity requires a separate zone and this clearly separating the role of commercial and residential. This gave rise to the “bedroom community (Encarta Online)” meaning that the majority of the population worked in the city and traveled home for the purpose of going to sleep. Furthermore zoning codes produced centralized parks which took away yet another place to find community.
Another major contributor to the problem of place in America is the advent and the mainstream usage of the automobile. In early portions of the century and before World War II only one in every six Americans had cars (Automotive History). The majorities of people were constrained to areas close to their houses and were not able to travel which created an artificial wall that helped maintain some of the community that was existent prior to the 1950′s. However as automobiles became mainstream not only was there a need to change city landscape to accommodate them, but it radically enlarged the reach a family had for their private time. They could choose to drive to other portions of the state and to opposite ends of the city. The flexibility and the lack of constraints that the middle class received helped remove any small sense of community that was left within neighbor hoods. Kunstler states, “The practice of maximizing car movement at the expense of all other concerns was applied with particular zeal to suburban housing subdivisions (Kunstler)”. He claimed that due to automobiles, suburban streets were given the characteristics of county highways even though children played in them and was another reason that suburban developments notoriously lack park.
An indication of whether a city has a good sense of community can be found in the ease of tourism there. If a city or suburb often encourages visitors to park their cars and travel in the public transportation it can be generally stated that the city has a fairly strong sense of community in various sections. The absence of cars increases the effect that community has on its residents as seen in a few cities. Cities such as Boston, London, and Paris seem to have a strong sense of community. Not only do these cities have good and usable public transportation but custom coffee shops, and corners that get associated with the city.
A more contested theory proposed by some scholars is that Americans have an intuitive sense of individualism. Nearly in ever aspect of our lives we try to assert our independence and proclaim our desire to be independent. High school student desire to move off to college and “I want to spend some time alone” shows the American longing to be left alone. Goodwin, the author of the book titled, “The American Condition” states that the American condition is one of “unfreedom, alienation, and fragmentation” and that condition comes from “the dissolution of community, shared social consciousness, and moral authority” (Goodwin). The deeper causes of the lack of community, according to Goodwin, lie in history of the “individualism” planted by the Renaissance. During the Renaissance period people promoted personal experience and thoughts above the notions of the common people. After World War II “people wanted to settle down, apparently and calmly blow their way out of years of rationing. They wanted to bake sugary cakes, burn gas, go to church together, get rich, and make babies (Dillard, 48)”. This new desire in people following the war when combined with the previous notions that were planted in the European ancestors during the Renaissance Period created an inward retreat of the American family.
Since the end of World War II academics have warned that suburban sprawl presents major problems for society and the community. They have condemned cars as the cause of breaking communities’ growth and have praised mass transit. They have condemned our way of building and accepting our cities to be plain and color less. The problem of place that has shifted American culture from a highly social to a more introverted society can be attributed to the building of the modern day city, the mainstream usages of the automobile, and our preconceived notions of individualism.