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The first six months of a rhesus monkey’s life correspond to the first three years of a child’s life. Although there is no formal evidence to show that lack of contact during these first three years damages human children—and as far as we know, it has never been studied—there is very strong evidence for the effect of isolation between the ages of four to ten.
Herman Lantz questioned a random sample of 1,000 men in the United States Army, who had been referred to a mental hygiene clinic because of emotional difficulties. (Herman K. Lantz, “Number of Childhood Friends as Reported in the Life Histories of a Psychiatrically Diagnosed Group of 1,000,” Marriage and Family Life, May 1956, pp. 107-108.) Army psychiatrists classified each of the men as normal, suffering from mild psychoneurosis, severe psychoneurosis, or psychosis. Lantz then put each man into one of three categories: those who reported having five friends or more at any typical moment when they were between four and ten years old, those who reported an average of about two friends, and those who reported having no friends at that time. The following table shows the relative percentages in each of the three friendship categories separately. The results are astounding:
| 5 or More Friends | About 2 Friends | No Friends | |
| Normal | 39-5 | 7.2 | 0.0 |
| Mild psychoneurosis | 22.0 | 16.4 | 5.0 |
| Severe psychoneurosis | 27.0 | 54.6 | 47-5 |
| Psychosis | 0.8 | 3-1 | 37-5 |
| Other | 10.7 | 18.7 | 10.0 |
| 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
Among people who have five friends or more as children, 61.5 per cent have mild cases, while 27.8 per cent have severe cases. Among people who had no friends, only 5 per cent have mild cases, and 85 per cent have severe cases.
On the positive side, an informal account by Anna Freud shows how powerful the effect of contact among tiny children can be on the emotional development of the children. She describes five young German children who lost their parents during infancy
in a concentration camp, and then looked after one another inside the camp until the war ended, at which point they were brought to England. (Anna Freud and Sophie Dann, “An Experiment in Group Upbringing,” Reading in Child Behavior and Development, ed. Celia Stendler, New York, 1964, pp. 122-40.) She describes the beautiful social and emotional maturity of these tiny children. Reading the account, one feels that these children, at the age of three, were more aware of each other and more sensitive to each other’s needs than many people ever are.
It is almost certain, then, that contact is essential, and that lack of contact, when it is extreme, has extreme effects. A considerable body of literature beyond that which we have quoted, is given in Christopher Alexander, “The City as a Mechanism for Sustaining Human Contact,” Environment for Man, ed. W. R. Ewald, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1967, pp. 60-109.
If we assume that informal, neighborhood contact between children is a vital experience, we may then ask what kinds of neighborhoods support the formation of spontaneous play groups. The answer, we believe, is some form of safe common land, connected to a child’s home, and from which he can make contact with several other children. The critical question is: How many households need to share this connected play space?
The exact number of households that are required depends on the child population within the households. Let us assume that children represent about one-fourth of a given population (slightly less than the modal figure for suburban households), and that these children are evenly distributed in age from o to 18. Roughly speaking, a given pre-school child who is x years old will play with children who are a1 — 1 or a- or x -j- 1 years old. In order to have a reasonable amount of contact, and in order for playgroups to form, each child must be able to reach at least five children in his age range. Statistical analysis shows that for each child to have a 95 per cent chance of reaching five such potential playmates, each child must be in reach of 64 households.
The problem may be stated as follows: In an infinite population of children, one-sixth are the right age and five-sixths are the wrong age for any given child. A group of r children is
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CHOOSING A LANGUAGE FOR YOUR SUBJECT
you have the power to help create these patterns, at least In a small way, in the world around your project. The ones at the end are “smaller.” Almost all of them will be important. Tick all of them, on your list, unless you have some special reason for not wanting to include them.
4. Now your list has some more ticks on it. Turn to the next highest pattern on the list which is ticked, and open the book to that pattern. Once again, it will lead you to other patterns. Once again, tick those which are relevant—especially the ones which are “smaller” that come at the end. As a general rule, do not tick the ones which are “larger” unless you can do something about them, concretely, in your own project.
5. When in doubt about a pattern, don’t include it. Your list can easily get too long: and if it does, it will become confusing. The list will be quite long enough, even if you only include the patterns you especially like.
6. Keep going like this, until you have ticked all the patterns you want for your project.
7. Now, adjust the sequence by adding your own material. If there are things you want to include in your project, but you have not been able to find patterns which correspond to them, then write them in, at an appropriate point in the sequence, near other patterns which are of about the same size and importance. For example, there is no pattern for a sauna. If you want to include one, write it in somewhere near bathing room (144) in your sequence.
8. And of course, if you want to change any patterns, change them. There are often cases where you may have a personal version of a pattern, which is more true, or
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chosen at random. The probability that this group of r children
4
contains 5 or more right-age children in it is 1 — 2 Pr> u, where
lc = o
Pr k is the hypergeometric distribution. If we now ask what is the
4
least r which makes 1 — 2 Pr, k > 0.95, r turns out to be 54.
k = o
If we need 54 children, we need a total population of 4(54) = 216, which at 3.4 persons per household, needs 64 households.
Sixty-four is a rather large number of households to share connected common land. In fact, in the face of this requirement, there is a strong temptation to try to solve the problem by grouping 10 or 12 homes in a cluster. But this will not work: while it is a useful configuration for other reasons—house cluster (37) and common land (67)—by itself it will not solve the problem of connected play space for children. There must also be safe paths to connect the bits of common land.
 |
| Connecting faths. |
Therefore:
Lay out common land, paths, gardens, and bridges so that groups of at least 64 households are connected by a