Street Walkers
Why the suburbs are overrated.
by Steven Johnson
December 11, 2006
My book had included an extended analogy between the way that ant colonies organize themselves into robust communities and the unplanned, bottom-up way that city neighborhoods form. Ants secrete pheromones as a way of communicating with other ants that they stumble across in their meanderings; out of those multiple interactions, the broader unit of the colony takes shape. As Jacobs observed more than forty years ago, something equivalent happens in successful city neighborhoods, which rely on the chance interactions of sidewalk life to create the magic of city living. Jacobs' vision was an implicit critique of the automobile-centric city, where the channels of communication were necessarily limited by the speed of highway traffic, where the only chance encounters were car accidents. Pedestrian-centric cities, on the other hand, broadened the channels linking people, making the city into a web of connections rather than a space of isolated units, each trapped in their own solitary vehicle.
But after we moved to Brooklyn, I started to think that maybe there was something even better than the pedestrian-centric city: the stroller-centric city. Kids made the sidewalks more lively and humane spaces, but they did something else as well: they spread the pheromones more thickly; they made connections happen between strangers who otherwise wouldn't have reached out to one another. The addition of our children transformed our sidewalk promenades. Strangers suddenly had a reason to talk to us, and I had a reason to talk to them. Before long, we stopped being strangers.
The beautiful truth of urban parenting is that it flows against the current of traditional cliches about parenting in the suburbs: rather than pulling you into an ever-tighter circle of close friends and family, making you a prisoner of the rec room and the back yard, having a child in the city makes you more interwoven in the fabric of that exposed, public life. Children help create a city where diversity is not just a slogan, where encountering difference is not just a grad school seminar topic. Children make our shared spaces — our sidewalks and elevators, our stoops and laundromats — into places where you can finally get to know your neighbors, after trading glances for all these years. They widen the net.
photo courtesy Marina Phillips-Kisse
©2006 Steven Johnson and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Steven Johnson is the author of bestsellers Everything Bad Is Good for You and The Ghost Map. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Johnson was co-founder of FEED and Plastic.com. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU's Journalism Department and the creator of the new community site for neighborhoods, outside.in. |
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