There is a new emotional disorder—a type of agoraphobia— making its appearance in today’s cities. Victims of this disorder are afraid to go out of their houses for any reason—even to mail a letter or to go to the corner grocery store—literally, they are afraid of the marketplace—the agora. We speculate—entirely without evidence—that this disorder may be reinforced by the absence of common land, by an environment in which people feel they have no “right” to be outside their own front doors. If this is so, agoraphobia would be the most concrete manifestation of the breakdown of common land.
The second social function of common land is straightforward. Common land provides a meeting ground for the fluid, common activities that a house cluster shares. The larger pieces of public land which serve neighborhoods—the parks, the community facilities—do not fill the bill. They are fine for the neighborhood as a whole. But they do not provide a base for the functions that are common to a cluster of households.
Lewis Mumford:
Even in housing- estates that are laid out at twelve families to the acre—perhaps one should say especially there—there is often a lack of common meeting places for the mothers, where, on a good day, they might come together under a big tree, or a pergola, to sew or gossip, while their infants slept in a pram or their runabout children grubbed around in a play pit. Perhaps the best part of Sir Charles Reilly’s plans for village greens was that they provided for such common activities: as the planners of Sunnyside, Long Island, Messrs. Stein and Wright, had done as early as 1924. (The Urban Prospect, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968, p. 26.)
How much common land must there bei There must be enough to be useful, to contain children’s games and small gatherings. And enough land must be common so that private land doesn’t dominate it psychologically. We guess that the amount of common land needed in a neighborhood is on the order of 25 per cent of the land held privately. This is the figure that the greenbelt planners typically devoted to their commons and greens. (See Clarence Stein, Toward New Towns in America, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1966.)
With cooperation among the people, it is possible to build this pattern piecemeal, into our existing neighborhoods by closing streets.
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| Berkeley street transjormed to neighborhood commons. Therefore: |
Give over 25 per cent of the land in house clusters to common land which touches, or is very very near, the
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homes which share it. Basic: be wary of the automobile; on no account let it dominate this land.
Shape the common land so it has some enclosure and good sunlight—south facing outdoors (105), positive outdoor space (106) ; and so that smaller and more private pieces of land and pockets always open onto it—hierarchy of open space (114); provide communal functions within the land—public OUTDOOR ROOM (69), LOCAL SPORTS (72), VEGETABLE GARDEN (177) ; and connect the different and adjacent pieces of common land to one another to form swaths of connected play space— connected play (68). Roads can be part of common land if they are treated as green streets (51). . . .
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. . . suppose the common land that connects clusters to one another is being provided—common land (67). Within this common land, it is necessary to identify play space for children and, above all, to make sure that the relationship between adjacent pieces of common land allows this play space to form.
If children don’t play enough with other children during the first five years of life, there is a great chance that they will have some kind of mental illness later in their lives.
Children need other children. Some findings suggest that they need other children even more than they need their own mothers. And empirical evidence shows that if they are forced to spend their early years with too little contact with other children, they will be likely to suffer from psychosis and neurosis in their later years.
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| Alone . . . |
Since the layout of the land between the houses in a neighborhood virtually controls the formation of play groups, it therefore has a critical effect on people’s mental health. A typical suburban subdivision with private lots opening off streets almost confines
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children to their houses. Parents, afraid of traffic or of their neighbors, keep their small children indoors or in their own gardens: so the children never have enough chance meetings with other children of their own age to form the groups which are essential to a healthy emotional development.
We shall show that children will only be able to have the access to other children which they need, if each household opens onto some kind of safe, connected common land, which touches at least 64 other households.
First, let us review the evidence for the problem. The most dramatic evidence comes from the Harlows’ work on monkeys. The Harlows have shown that monkeys isolated from other infant monkeys during the first six months of life are incapable of normal social, sexual, or play relations with other monkeys in their later lives:
They exhibit abnormalities of behavior rarely seen in animals born in the wild. They sit in their cages and stare fixedly into space, circle their cages in a repetitively stereotyped manner, and clasp their heads in their hands or arms and rock for long periods of time . . . the animal may chew and tear at its body until it bleeds . . . similar symptoms of emotional pathology are observed in deprived children in orphanages and in withdrawn adolescents and adults in mental hospitals. (Henry F. Harlow and Margaret K. Harlow, “The Effect of Rearing Conditions on Behavior,” Bull. Menniger Clinic, 26, 1962, pp. 213-14.)
It is well known that infant monkeys—like infant human beings—have these defects if brought up without a mother or a mother surrogate. It is not well known that the effects of separation from other infant monkeys are even stronger than the effects of maternal deprivation. Indeed, the Harlows showed that although monkeys can be raised successfully without a mother, provided that they have other infant monkeys to play with, they cannot be raised successfully by a mother alone, without other infant monkeys, even if the mother is entirely normal. They conclude: “It seems possible that the infant-mother affectional system is dispensable, whereas the infant-infant system is a sine-qua-non for later adjustment in all spheres of monkey life.” (Harry F. Harlow and Margaret K. Harlow, “Social Deprivation in Monkeys,” Scientific American, 207, No. 5, 1962, pp. 136-46.)