In the first part of this story, last week, I divided existing neighborhoods into several broad types. Within them, there are some places that promote neighborliness, and some that don’t. While there are many causes, not least among them the nature of the individuals residing there, the shape of the buildings and how they relate to the street is a key factor. We need to build friendly neighborhoods.

A key factor is usable front space. I think pre-1945 neighbourhoods have this by virtue of their front verandahs. In that pre-central-air-conditioning era, hot humid weather encouraged moving outdoors. My house has both a front door verandah running across the house, and a smaller one upstairs off the main bedroom. It’s easy to sit out.

We used to use it more often than we do now. We find it gets dirtier, faster, than it used to. And we have an ever-expanding collection of blue bins and black bins fighting for space amongst the bin of road hockey sticks, the basketballs box, and the rocker. Back when the kids were younger we used it more often.  Eating spaghetti dinner out front on rainy days. Bedtime reading in ‘jammies. But the main reason we use it less is central air makes it easy to stay indoors.

At Seaside, one of the early New Urban Towns built in the US, all the houses have front verandahs but they are conspicuously unused in the humid Florida heat. I have friends in a “Victorian-style” home here in Stittsville; they have chairs on their narrow front verandah, and confess they just can’t see what is supposed to be so attractive about sitting there. Honestly, I don’t either, unless one is constructing a taxonomy of vehicles. Right idea, poorly executed, in the wrong place.

The contemporary-style townhouses across the street from me have front verandahs in a raised-deck format, above the carports. But they are high above the street and it is difficult to talk to anyone there. The main street level view is the automobile derrieres. Their back yards are a maze of unpleasant private spaces fenced in tightly — the fences are up to 15 feet high (!!). So much potential, so little realized.

In the other direction, townhouses have front garden spaces between their garages or sheds and the house entrance. Many are dead space; some are gardens. A very very few have been turned into usable sitting out spaces. The six foot privacy fences between the gardens and the shared driveway might be a reason. After 30 years, some of these fences are rotting out; owners are taking them down and leaving them down. Some parallel private walkways previously separated by fences are being combined into tiny courtyard entries that are shared between two neighbors. Most people know a dozen neighbours by name, occupation, or habits, and a dozen more are recognized as living “over there”. There’s even a resident lunatic to greet warily.

These newly opened spaces  reveal formal gardens for show, and open  sight lines from the front windows to the shared space, but as yet no one has put out a proper front patio or deck where they can sit and read or have a coffee and chose to interact with people walking by.

And walking by is a key. You can’t have a conversation with a car scooting by on its way to being parked in its box. By time you see the car, recognize who is driving, the opportunity to greet has passed by. Once beyond the fences that separate the private from the common space,  the shared courtyard/driveway, everyone but everyone keeps an apprehensive eye for cars since two of the kids out there are autistic (as is their therapy dog) and no one wants them pancaked. Shared purpose unites…

Conclusion:  for those areas of the city where walking is still common, and car ownership less than universal (let alone multiple car ownership), there can be steps taken to design in friendliness (viz WestVillage Private) or modify existing street-focussed places to promote friendly neighbourhoods.

Further out from the core, and further set back from traditional main streets, the residential areas remain car-focussed. The sheer volume of traffic deters social interaction, unless the street is unusually intimate.

That of course is the appeal of the cul de sac. But when visiting friends in Centrepointe, the cul de sac still generates huge amounts of traffic, amounts that astound me as I watch the sidewalk-free street. Every house has two to five parking spaces (garage, often double; two cars in driveway, driveways always widened to intrude on side or front yards). The volume of traffic, coupled with the rear-facing houses, kills human interaction. Pedestrians are left to walk the street dodging parked cars and vehicles backing out of driveways. It doesn’t feel safe; and it isn’t. And it’s all within spitting distance of the Baseline Station.

In these suburban areas it will take a lot of effort to transform the built environment to be more friendly. For now, we may have to start from scratch. Some local builders are experimenting with neighbourhoods, where houses face a shared space. Minto built one such cluster in Orleans:

Mintoland, Orleans

Cobourg, along the 401 to Toronto has another one worth “driving through”. But both of these separate the houses from the shared space by a local road, adding a strong sense of remove or barrier to accessing the space. I felt sceptical that Cobourg’s new urban neighbourhood would work. In contrast, this one in Ottawa does:

Harrold Place, just off Carling Avenue is a fairly intimate, shared space

In Toronto, a very attractive higher-density infill project built in this format called Woodbine is a delight to walk through. The residents seem to be into competitive gardening. The back lanes, though, are ugly and any air photo reveals the huge spaces devoted to car movement and storage. I wonder if the combination of laneway garages and formal streets really promotes social interaction.

Particularly on the West Coast, some developers are working on pocket neighbourhoods wherein a small number of houses — 16-20 — share a common “front lawn”. Here the focus is on a non-street, that is a green space. Houses have parking clustered around the perimeter. Especially if there are large porches at the front, there becomes a hierarchy of social spaces: private indoor space, semi-private flexible verandah space, some private garden buffer, the sidewalk, then the shared space. 

photo from Chapin, Pocket Neighborhoods

The most significant precedent for  pocket neighborhoods was in Southern California. Called Bungalow Courts, they became popular in the early 1900’s. They had two “normal” houses facing the street, and eight or ten small bungalows behind. See pic. This made the courts inoffensive intensification projects that blended into the neighborhood. I can picture something similar being done on large lot neighborhoods like Alta Vista but alas, our zoning forbids it. I can’t imagine the nearby residents jumping for joy either.

Street runs across the bottom of the 1920's cluster, two larger houses face the street, the smaller ones are tucked behind (Chapin)

Some in SCal were done in Spanish style:

from Chapin, Pocket Neighborhoods

 A variation on the bungalow courts were “walk streets”, whereby a large lot between two vehicular streets was developed with a 15’ wide pedestrian street running from one vehicular street to the other; the houses were close to this street; a vehicle lane and garages was in the back. This gives fire and emergency access to every house but eliminates wide road allowances and makes for intimate safe spaces.

Contemporary pocket neighborhoods are spring up from their base on the west coast. Tested in Seattle, Portland, Victoria and other cities.  Some still give up too much land for garages and parking, an unfortunate reality in NA life. But at least they corral the cars.

Ross Chapin, in his book Pocket Neighorhoods, identifies the key design features for making a street into a neighborhood commons:

• Close connection of each house to the common space, but with some sort of gateway feature to each private space and to the common space as a whole
• Each house must have its own active space facing the common space – a living room, kitchen, or at least a porch; there must be “eyes on the common space” at all times
• Layers of personal and public space transition from private areas to open areas to shared public areas
• The common space must have a sense of enclosure, of intimacy. Most suburban and planned spaces in NA are too big. Need a sense of entry, or separateness
• Think of streets as rooms with different purposes, same way as we now design outdoor spaces around our homes

Next: remediating urban streets to promote neighbourhood friendliness.

This will be a series of posts on how we design our neighborhoods and whether this design is friendly to urban life. It is inspired by a book recently read: Pocket Neighborhoods, by Ross Chapin. You can get it from your bookmonger or reserve it at the OPL.

Three neighborhood styles

From 1900 to the 1950′s most agglomerations of housing in Ottawa were built in rows along public streets. As time went on, the set back of the house from the street grew larger, oft as a City requirement. In 1900-1940 neighborhoods such as the west side neighborhood I live in, the set backs are shallow, six to ten feet. Commonly built on 30′x100′ lots, these houses are typically narrow-front to the street with a side driveway for parking, and maybe a backyard garage. Singles and row houses are intermixed in a fine pattern, and occasional apartment buildings sit comfortably along the block.

By the 40′s, these narrow lot homes are found intermixed with wider lot “square” homes that look more substantial. Still, the garages are subservient, the principle windows face the public street, which take on an element of shared space (“our street”) with concern about what goes on. Unfortunately arranged in a grid pattern, the through streets are easily abused by maze-running commuters, too often directed to do so by our own city traffic engineers.

My grandmother moved from her Bronson Avenue home in ’59 because of the road widenings, dirt, and noise. The City fathers were clearly favouring suburban commuters over city residents. The neighbours were moving away, fleeing really. They moved to Champlain Park, then mostly small houses and converted cottages,  where the streets were quieter and houses still had gardens.

Post World War II the lots got even wider, the set backs deeper. But many of the same features remain from the first half of the century, just at a lower density. Concomitantly, streets got busier with faster vehicles; and playing on the street becomes less safe, less acceptable. We see street life atrophying. When streets are repaved, they tend to look wider, flatter, overlit … with a further decay in street life.

Since the 70’s, North American neighborhood planning focuses on privacy: houses have garages (often protruding) at the front, and maybe a formal parlor/living room window, but seldom principle spaces. There is nothing to see out front as the street is large, the driveways frequent, and all asphalt spaces have an abundance of vehicles. Living areas and windows face the rear, usually fenced yard. Privacy is ensured, just as informal interaction with neighbours is inadvertently discouraged by the design. Basement or ground floor rec rooms become the focus of family life. The street is merely for coming and going by car, as there is usually no place within walking distance, and sidewalks are rare. All activity is focussed on coming and going by car.

Streets take up a lot of space, which raises house prices. Developers more and more often now favour private streets. Usually townhouses are arranged in cul-de-sac clusters.  Their fronts, along a private shared street, are all garage doors. People can come and go for years and never know anyone, even though they “share” space and have a condo corporation as an interaction mechanism.

I have a gregarious friend that lives at Centrepoint in such a cluster, for 25 years, and knows only one person, by the first name only. She doesn’t even know anyone well enough to take in her paper if she is away. She wouldn’t recognize a neighbor, they come and go from house to garage via internal doors, then in cars and minivans with tinted windows. While there are some kids around, she doesn’t know their names, which houses they belong to, or anything else about them. The townhouse cluster abuts Centrepoint park, but is separated from it by a chain link fence, no gate, to prevent “others” from cutting through their private street to get to the park, and incidentally closing it off the residents too. It is totally anonymous living. The “public” side of the house is a garage door, a solid front door, a frosted bathroom window facing onto a shallow, useless-except-as-decoration “front porch”. A stoop, really.

While scads of contemporary housing follows the basic model of street / service side of house / house facing to the rear yard, there are exceptions. West Village off Lanark is higher density cluster mostly of semi’s and towns, tightly arranged on a private street, but with house exteriors well detailed and attractive to buyers that could easily have afforded to live elsewhere. I cycle through it often, as it has a path connection to Loblaws. There are always kids out playing on the street; it doesn’t feel weird if I stop to compliment someone on their front garden. Making eye contact is easy.

west village, narow streets plus detailed exteriors makes for an intimate space

I am aware of a very similar development in a much more western suburb. It also produced houses at a much lower price point. Gone are all the exterior details, replaced by uniform facades of white siding. It looks bleak and crowded. Householders feel free to creep their driveways wider and wider to squeeze in that extra car. Gardens are non-existant; there is only grass between the driveways because the builder sodded the space. There were kids playing in their street, but it felt more like playing in a parking lot. When a jacked-up pickup truck with black windows went by it didn’t slow down.

It’s not my intent to provide a comprehensive catalogue of neighborhood types. And there are always exceptional spots. In the next few stories I intend to wander my way through some self-reflection on how these basic housing types influence the degree of interaction, the “friendliness” of a neighborhood. Come along for the tour.

guest parking is clustered rather than along the street

w