Whether in cities or, more commonly, in the forts, manors and villages of rural life, humans have lived in relatively close quarters through most of their history. This physical proximity has produced enduring social institutions and private codes that regulate daily interchange, and it has brought the ineffable satisfactions of belonging and mutual aid that we frequently describe as a sense of “community.”
In America, however, clustered settlements have not always been the rule. American farmers, for instance, often occupied isolated homesteads where they had no regular contact with neighbors - in contrast to their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere who lived within walled settlements and walked out to their fields each day. And, of course, in this century America has popularized the suburb - a new residential form quite unlike town life in either its agricultural or urban forms.
One attitudinal factor driving suburbanization seems to have been the hunger of twentieth-century Americans for “warmer” living and closer community feeling. In practice, however, suburban life has tended to increase household autonomy, to reward transiency, to blur local affections, and to elevate the importance of commercial transactions in daily affairs. As a result, it isn't at all clear that suburbs have strengthened neighborly ties among Americans as proponents had hoped. In certain aspects, they seem even to have contributed to the loosening of communal bonds.
The Origins of Cities
The United States is an urban nation: Three-quarters of its residents now live within metropolitan areas (places with at least fifty thousand people). The large majority of those urbanites live outside the central city though - in suburbs. Overall, nearly half of all Americans, including a disproportionate number of our most successful citizens, reside in suburbs. Suburbia is the undisputed center of the nation's domestic life. To appreciate the significance of this fact, one has to consider how much current residential geography differs from traditional patterns.
History's earliest cities arose on alluvial plains in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, where rich soils and improvement in agricultural technique allowed for surpluses to be produced for the first time. Instead of practicing subsistence tilling, small numbers of occupational specialists - initially priests and military leaders, as well as some craftsmen and artisans - were then able to cluster together, consuming foodstuffs garnered from the surrounding countryside through either tribute or exchange.
Communal settlement was driven by more than just division of labor, however. In ancient Greece, where for centuries rocky land made it impossible to support more than just a percent or two of the population in nonagricultural activity, villages of farmers nonetheless sprang up. By “setting up house together,” they gained the benefits not only of mutual defense but also of culture: They shared a common calendar, religion, and set of traditions and myths. They had opportunities to meet in common space (the agora) for festivals, for economic marketing, for political discussion, and for the translation of leisure into artisanship, art, education, and civic ventures.
It is not accidental
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