How To Build Neighborhoods
www.discoursemagazine.com
Seth Kaplan speaks with Ben Klutsey about cooperation, social entrepreneurship and why our society is too focused on politics.

I would say that the biggest problem…It’s the decline of our relationships, the decline of our institutions, the isolation, the lack of practice. If you’re not practicing being in relationships, you’re not practicing working in institutions, you’re not practicing being involved with other people—it’s not only friends. It’s actually, more importantly, relationships. If you don’t have those relationships, you don’t have that practice, too much of your focus will be on politics. You will easily be more mistrustful of other people because you don’t have a lot of experience in trusting relationships.

  • PizzaMan@lemm.ee
    73·
    11 months ago

    What we’re seeing is that there’s something about our society that’s isolating us. Even as we’re becoming materially well-off, we’re becoming relationship-poor, and it’s affecting our health, our well-being, on many levels.

    You don’t need to look far.

    Compare this neighborhood:

    To this one:

    Only one of these neighborhoods allows you to organically meet and socialize with your neighbors. The first one, you hop in your car, and drive away to some starbucks at a coffee shop several miles away, and then don’t talk to anyone there. If you don’t own a car, you’re shit out of luck. The second one, you take a 2minute walk to the coffee shop across the street, go there every day, and because you consistently go to the same place every day, the chances of you talking with and socializing with others is far higher. In the second one, there is a park with lots of shade. It has an actual place for you to spend time and exist.

    Only one of these neighborhoods doesn’t have this flaw:

    You live in a place—we’ve built the placeless society, and you have very little interaction with people. But the way life used to be, and the way life still is in those thriving neighborhoods, there’s a lot of the similar dynamic going on that you would have seen in those towns in the Wild West.

    The way we design our cities is half the problem. Mixed use/density development is the solution for this half of the problem.

    • TJD@sh.itjust.works
      36·
      1 year ago

      Since your response is somewhere in the lemmy void of inaccessible comments, the reason i prefer it is because I have little interest in the community shit you’re talking up, especially considering the tradeoffs where it’s harder and more expensive to travel by car, and I can’t just own my own little chunk of land to live on as I please.

        • TJD@sh.itjust.works
          36·
          11 months ago

          Almost like there’s some middle ground to be had. Not at the absolute center of everything, but still within reasonable proximity.

          • PizzaMan@lemm.ee
            43·
            11 months ago

            That’s called a suburb. And our current ones are dogshit for all of the reasons I already listed above. Everything is either a single family detached unit, or a high rise in the middle of town. It’s a terrible design.

            • TJD@sh.itjust.works
              35·
              11 months ago

              Yeah, believe it or not, people are allowed to hold different values and make different judgements than you

              • PizzaMan@lemm.ee
                41·
                11 months ago

                I never said otherwise. If people value a society where everybody hates each other, never sees one another, and everything is inefficient, then good for them.

                But I value a society that actually functions instead of one that hobbles along. I don’t want to live in a soul-less backrooms level.