PRIVACY VS PROPRIETORSHIP

Anyone remember Bucky Fuller’s prediction about the future of urban housing?
I think it was around the time he was spending time in Toronto discussing urban renewal. It was the time of the tiny perfect mayor and of Jane Jacobs battling expressways. I remember him being asked if he was going to go the top of the CN Tower. His response: “Why?”

He did produce a vision of the future urban lifestyle. The father of the geodesic dome foresaw entire cities with huge domes housing tens of thousands of people. The new city, and I’m not promising that my memory is completely accurate, would consist of decent but small, almost dormitory sized accommodation for families. There would be a large, fully integrated community. The amenities one would expect in a private home or large condo would instead be shared. The apartment would be for sleeping and cooking perhaps, but everything else would happen in the larger structure of a city with publicly shared facilities.

It was his idea of utopia. I always hoped that I would live to see at least some of it fulfilled. Instead, as I “Look Ahead” I see less and less concern about public space. No, I don’t mean the politicians and environmentalists going on about public spaces like parkland. I mean what I would call “defensible Space,” borrowing from another forward-thinking architect, Oscar Newman – who wrote “Defensible Space.” His vision was that people would assume more proprietorship of public spaces. They would be communally owned of course, but everyone would share, enjoy, and protect them.

What we have today is a very sharp division between private and public space. People who litter the streets would not think of littering their own front lawns. People who crave “privacy” still have difficulty making eye contact with strangers. Fuller was, I’m afraid, either too far ahead of his time, or too far behind the realities of everyday life.

I’ve written about it before: the overpowering need for privacy evidenced by the people on that “House Hunters” TV show who seem to be obsessed with privacy.

We tried it with communal living, and aside from a few long haired hippies, it simply didn’t catch on. At least it didn’t catch on in Canada or the U.S,
all the way back to Thomas More's Utopia and Robert Owen's New Harmony, people keep trying to make it work. Some do. The Hutterites do. The people who created Amana did. The Shakers did.

One of my most entertaining home exchanges was with a couple who lived in a co-op town house development in The Hague. The town houses were row houses with all the private amenities, bedrooms, Bathrooms, kitchens. But more than that valued “privacy,” what made their community livable was that the “public space” really did belong to them. They all had a proprietary interest in it. It was public but no one would ever litter. It was public, but everyone shared in planting the flowers and watering the lawn. It was public, but it was where everyone and their children would meet. They had a communal dining room where they would gather from time to time simply to enjoy being together. I was lucky enough to be there for one of those parties. Everyone chipped in for Chinese take-out. At least twenty people were at the table jabbering happily in Dutch, or to make us feel at home, with whatever English they had. (The Dutch do speak English in most places.)

I think Buckminster Fuller would be happy to see how people can share a public space and make it their own. We are simply going to have to learn how. Maybe it starts with not littering just because the space (which we all own) appears to be public.