Free Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery Page B

good. Collective problems such as pollution and climate change demand collective responses. Civilization is a shared project.
    The Lonely Everywhere
    It is impossible to deny that the dispersed city has altered the ways and speeds at which we cross paths with one another. Dispersed communities can squeeze serendipitous encounters out of our lives by pushing everyday destinations beyond the walker’s reach. In that way, Mountain House is a lot like Weston Ranch. If you need anything more substantial than a slushie, you have to get into your car and drive to some other town, which is what everyone does. Randy Strausser might have the gas money, but this hypermobility alters his social landscape. That guy watering his lawn down the street is just a passing blur on Randy’s eight-mile drive to the FoodMaxx over in Tracy. He might give a nod to a couple of people in the cavernous grocery store, but chances are, he will never see them again. His network is stunted, wrapped around a social core, like the roots of a pot-bound tree.
    This withering of social capital is not strictly an exurban phenomenon. * But a closer look at those surveys reveals the insidious, systematic power of dispersal to alter our relationships. It is a neighborhood’s place in a city, and the distance its residents travel every day, that make the biggest difference to social landscapes. The more time that people in any given neighborhood spend commuting, the less likely they are to play team sports, hang out with friends, watch a parade, or get involved in social groups. In fact, the effect of long-distance living is so strong that a 2001 study of neighborhoods in Boston and Atlanta found that neighborhood social ties could be predicted simply by counting how many people depend on cars to get around. The more neighbors drove to work, the less likely they were to be friends with one another.
    Wait a minute, you might say: these days, most of us have friends all over town. Mobility has liberated us from geography, just as urban freeways enable us to travel sixty miles across a metropolitan region to work. This is only partly true. Distance raises the cost of every friendly encounter. Let’s say that you and I want to meet for an ice-cream cone at the end of our workday before heading home for dinner. First we both must chart the geographic area each of us can reach in that time. Then we must see if our territories intersect. Then we need to figure out if the journey to and from a rendezvous point in that zone leaves enough time to make the meeting worthwhile. Each of us has an envelope of possibility on the space-time continuum. The more our envelopes intersect, the easier it is for us to actually see each other in person.
    Using this model, the geographer Steven Farber and his colleagues at the University of Utah set out to calculate how easy it is for people living in America’s biggest cities to meet in a hypothetical 1.5-hour window after work. They used a supercomputer to crunch the numbers on city size, population, geography, form, and land use to come up with hundreds of millions of possible space-time meet-up envelopes. The result: a rating of what Farber calls the social interaction potential of each city.
    The most powerful drag on Farber’s social interaction potential should now come as no surprise. It’s decentralization: the more thinly a city spreads out, the less access citizens have to one another. “As we continue to sprawl our cities, we are actually making it harder for social interactions to occur,” Farber told me. “If you live in a big city, unless you are living and working in the core, you are paying a huge social cost.”
    But urban distance does more than just limit face-to-face time. It actually changes the shape and quality of our social networks. This was borne out by a 2009 study of commuters in Switzerland, where many people drive to international centers such as Geneva and Zurich. Not surprisingly, the study found that