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Don't know why you are downvoted, your ideas are very good and insightful. Thanks for bringing up the idea of the separation of public and private spheres, it was something I couldn't articulate for a long time as to why somehow the suburbs always felt better and healthier for me. I still don't understand my peers obsession with living in downtowns (you can always drive downtown if you want to go there). I do find issue with your need to re-envision our social fabric. This stream of thought is very old, beginning with Plato, the gnostics of early Christianity, the enlightenment and going through some pretty unsavory moments of the past two centuries. Underlying the tension this kind of ideas always have is the nature vs nurture debate; and certain disatisfaction/disapproval of human nature. The way society evolves is much more a consequence of how human nature is realized and expressed in modernity. I would say as I grow older that I've come to realize that accepting our humanity rather than trying to change it (speaking of certain artificious ways in which we try to "correct" our nature), would save the world a lot of pain. When you mention the example of both parents working, though it is as much a consequence of both parents in many families working (leading to higher income, which means families where only one works get squeezed), as it is of women seeking to work and be more independent than they previously were. Even then, many women I've met, still have this natural longing for living in this nuclear family. I do see that further increases in population density will only aggravate this situation. As the economy becomes increasingly centralized in cities, people need to work there to get a good income ---> however rents and prices just keep rising benefiting the people who already have significant assets in the city. If families were willing to forgo some degree of comfort/convenience/modernity, maybe a return to rural living could restore some of this fabric. However such a reversal in urbanification, seems unlikely given the current materialistic obsession practically everyone lives in. For a long time now, possibly earlier than the industrial revolution, the main focus of individuals is not who they are, but what do they have. To this last bit in some perspective, what would people think of Socrates if his death happened today, someone willing to die for his convictions? To a very big percent of people (and I myself recognize the bias to think this way. Something of how I was raised in this world?) it would seem meaningless, why couldn't he just compromise and keep on living? What was important for him was in some sense his soul/beliefs, for us it seems to have a comfortable life. C'est la vie moderne |
My feeling is that there is a failure to communicate somewhere here. At the risk of just digging my grave deeper, if only because I'm horrendously short of sleep, let me try a second time to explain what I mean.
Our demographics have simply changed a great deal. It's not unlike saying "We can't weave what you want us to weave. We don't have the right material for it. That's why attempts to recreate the fabric you love have big holes in it."
When I was growing up, there were lots of kids out and about to play with in my neighborhood because most families had more than one child. You mostly don't see that anymore. The suburbs are ghost towns, with no children playing in the streets. Now, one child is quite common and parents have no choice but to join clubs or similar to intentionally create social connections for their child when that would have happened organically a few decades ago.
I was a homemaker for many years. I'm not against the nuclear family. It's just reality that our demographics have diversified, yet our architecture hasn't kept up and it's creating problems.
What I'm saying is the single family detached house was designed for a certain type of lifestyle and it's a lifestyle that relatively few people can arrange anymore. It's a cog in a machine and it no longer works for current demographic realities and we aren't changing it out for something that does work.
I'm sorry that I don't know how to say that more clearly. These are not really points I see made very often, so I'm not aware of well-developed language and standard protocols or mental models for conveying what I'm trying to say.