Loneliness, urban design, and form-based codes

A remarkable and growing body of literature is telling us that healthy communities need face-to-face interaction among their members, something that electronic media cannot replace. Physical places enable or prevent that interaction.

Humans are social, yet this primary fact of life is oddly absent as a core consideration in modern urban development regulations. To ignore the social needs of our species is to lose sight of one of the most positive drivers for shaping sustainable urban form. Providing for the satisfactions of community counters sprawl. Yet conventional land-use zoning disperses people and strips social life from the landscape. This is where form-based codes come in. They are the tool par excellence for guiding development in a socially sensitive way, configuring buildings and streets to enliven social life.

A remarkable and growing body of literature in contemporary social research is telling us that healthy, well functioning communities need face-to-face meeting, interaction, and communication among their members, something that electronic “social media” cannot replace. And it requires high quality physical space.

This has been known from ancient times by city builders and philosophers who recognized humans’ basic social nature, but didn’t have the science to back the assumption up. We are now living in an era in which this subject is now under the lens of the scientific community.  But let’s start with Aristotle, then consider insights from contemporary research, and finally see how form-based codes fit into it all.

Being together is in our blood

Aristotle observed that all animals are most alive when living at the top of their form—“thriving” is the word that Kaiser Permanente currently uses. “It is the excellent employment of his powers that constitute his happiness, as the reverse of this constitutes his misery,” according to Aristotle.[1] For him the great value of cities is not that they are economic engines; rather they are valuable because they allow us to live fully alive to our nature—in itself good for the bottom line. At the core of human nature is sociality. A human “is a social being, and by nature adapted to share his life with others ... Now if he is solitary, life is hard for him; for it is difficult to be continuously active by one’s self, but not so difficult along with others.”[2]  If the built landscape deprives us of stimulation and isolates us, it forces us into a lower gear. Social deprivation underlays issues of poverty, health, and environmental degradation.

. . . To continue reading:

https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/loneliness-urban-design-and-form-based-codes

Published originally:

https://formbasedcodes.org/blog/why-fbcs/loneliness-urban-design-and-form-based-codes/