4. AGRICULTURAL VALLEYS
5. LACE OF COUNTRY STREETS
6. COUNTRY TOWNS
7. THE COUNTRYSIDE
| 27 MEN and women |
|---|
 |
146
. . . and just as a community or neighborhood must have a proper balance of activities for people of all the different ages—
COMMUNITY OF 7OOO (12), IDENTIFIABLE NEIGHBORHOOD ( I 4),
life cycle (26)—so it must also adjust itself and its activities to the balance of the sexes, and provide, in equal part, the things which reflect the masculine and feminine sides of life.
The world of a town in the 1970’s is split along sexual lines. Suburbs are for women, workplaces for men; kindergartens are for women, professional schools for men; supermarkets are for women, hardware stores for men.
Since no aspect of life is purely masculine or purely feminine, a world in which the separation of the sexes is extreme, distorts reality, and perpetuates and solidifies the distortions. Science is dominated by a masculine, and often mechanical mentality; foreign diplomacy is governed by war, again the product of the masculine ego. Schools for young children are swayed by the world of women, as are homes. The house has become the domain of woman to such a ridiculous extreme that home builders and developers portray an image of homes which are delicate and perfectly “nice,” like powder rooms. The idea that such a home could be a place where things are made or vegetables grown, with sawdust around the front door, is almost inconceivable.
The pattern or patterns which could resolve these problems are, for the moment, unknown. We can hint at the kinds of buildings and land use and institutions which would bring the problem into balance. But the geometry cannot be understood until certain social facts are realized, and given their full power to influence the environment. In shorty until both men and women are able to mutually influence each fart of a town's life, we shall not know what kinds of fhysical fatterns will best co-exist ivith this social order.
Therefore:
*47
Make certain that each piece of the environment—each building, open space, neighborhood, and work community —is made with a blend of both men’s and women’s instincts. Keep this balance of masculine and feminine in mind for every project at every scale, from the kitchen to the steel mill.
| man’s spirit |  | woman’s spirit |
No large housing areas without workshops for men; no work communities which do not provide for women with part-time jobs and child care—scattered work (9). Within each place which has a balance of the masculine and feminine-, make sure that individual men and women also have room to flourish, in their own right, distinct and separate from their opposites—a ROOM OF one’s OWN (141). . . .
both in the neighborhoods and the communitiesy and in between themy in the boundariesy encourage the formation of local centers:
| 28. | ECCENTRIC NUCLEUS |
| 29. | DENSITY RINGS |
| 30- | ACTIVITY NODES |
| 31- | PROMENADE |
| 32‘ | SHOPPING STREET |
| 33- | NIGHT LIFE |
| 34- | INTERCHANGE |
| I49 |
28 ECCENTRIC NUCLEUS*
. . . so far, we have established an overall height restriction on the city, with its attendant limitation on average density—four-story limit (21). If we assume, also, that the city contains major centers for every 300,000 people, spaced according to the rules in magic of the city (10), it will then follow that the overall density of the city slopes off from these centers: the highest density near to them, the lowest far away. This means that any individual community of 7000 (12) will have an overall density, given by its distance from the nearest downtown. The question then arises: How should density vary locally, within this community; what geometric pattern should the density have? The question is complicated greatly by the principle of subculture boundary (13), which requires that communities are surrounded by their services, instead of having their services at their geometric centers. This pattern, and the next, defines a local distribution of density which is compatible with this context.
The random character of local densities confuses the identity of our communities, and also creates a chaos in the pattern of land use.
Let us begin by considering the typical configuration of the residential densities in a town. There is an overall slope to the densities: they are high toward the center and lower toward the outskirts. But there is no recognizable structure within this overall slope: no clearly visible repeating pattern we can see again and again within the city. Compare this with the contours of a mountain range. In a mountain range, there is a great deal of recognizable structure; we see systematic ridges and valleys, foothills, bowls, and peaks which have arisen naturally from geological processes; and all this structure is repeated again and again, from place to place, within the whole.
150 28 ECCENTRIC NUCLEUS
Of course, this is only an analogy. But it does raise the question: Is it natural, and all right, if density configurations in a town are so random; or would a town be better off if there was some more visible coherent structure, some kind of systematic variation in the pattern of the densities?
What happens when the local densities in a town vary in their present rambling, incoherent fashion? The high density areas, potentially capable of supporting intense activity cannot actually do so because they are too widely spread. And the low density areas, potentially capable of supporting silence and tranquility when they are concentrated, are also too diffusely scattered. The result: the town has neither very intense activity, nor very intense quiet. Since we have many arguments which show how vital it is for a town to give people both intense activity, and also deep and satisfying quiet—sacred sites (24), activity nodes (30),
PROMENADE (31), QUIET BACKS (59), STILL WATER (71)-it
seems quite likely, then, that this randomness of density does harm to urban life.
We believe, indeed, that a town would be far better off if it did contain a coherent pattern of densities. We present a systematic account of the factors which might naturally influence the pattern of density—in the hope of showing what kind of coherent pattern might be sensible and useful. The argument has five steps.
1. We may assume, reasonably, that some kind of center, formed by local services, will occur at least once in every community of 7000. This center will typically be the kind we have called a shopping street (32). In web of shopping (19) we have shown that shopping streets occur about once for every 10,000 persons.
2. From the arguments presented in subculture boundary (13), we know that this center of activity, since it is a service, should occur in the boundary between subcultures, should help to form the boundary between subcultures, and should therefore be located in the area of the boundary—not inside the community, but between communities.
3. We know, also, that this center must be in just that part of the boundary which is closest to the center of the larger town or city. This follows from a dramatic and little known series of results which show that catch basins of shopping centers are not