Making Space for Community
Quick Summary
Ross Chapin talks with Peter and John about the way he is using his skills as an architect to create communities and spaces that create conversation. He explains how ‘pocket neighborhoods’ can create a better security for its inhabitants, which are based on neighborly relationships rather than amount of police protection.
Source: talkshoe.com
For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work. All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.
Making Space for Community:
Conversation with Ross Chapin
June 5, 2013
Peter Block: I would like to welcome Ross to our conversation. Ross, you and I were on a phone call in another effort like this. And I’m just stunned at what you are committed to. You are an architect and you have a book called Pocket Neighborhoods, which shows houses, and yet there is something much larger and deeper that you are interested in. Could you just give people a summary of how you think about the work you do and why it matters to you?
Ross Chapin: Sure. And thank you for inviting me into this call to talk about what is so important in my world. I’ve been an architect all my adult life, and while I focus in on the details of buildings and spaces and gardens, my attention is really on how they affect our personal well-being and relationships with those around us, including our nearby neighbors.
I grew up in Minnesota in a wonderful house that was built by my great-uncle in 1903. With a wrap-around porch, it related to the street and the lake out in front and the people walking by. And in the 60’s and 70’s the tsunami of sprawl came through, not only in our community, but also across the country. And these waves of garage-fronted houses sprouted up everywhere. They did not make sense to me, and I just felt like they were an affront. After I got out of school and settled in on Whidbey Island north of Seattle, I spent a number of years working and designing some wonderful custom, smaller houses that fit the land and the people. Meanwhile this same sprawl continued and I thought, I know we can shift the direction here. I teamed up with a developer and we built an example of something I thought would work. It sold out immediately and the media picked it up. It spread across the country and beyond very quickly.
It’s based on the idea that humans are social. We are gregarious. We come together in small groups, and we can’t help but chat and have a conversation. In much of the world that is being developed, houses are commodities. Houses are addresses. Houses are investments rather than being a place of belonging and a place of engagements with others. And in a bigger sense an engagement in democracy. We are essentially isolated, and we tie to the world through the car and through the Internet now. I think we can do something about that. We’re pretty isolated and I think we can come together again.
Peter: If we looked at what you are designing, what could we see? Tell us about the way you can design houses in relation to each other and the common space.
Ross: First of all, I think it’s important to acknowledge that while we are really going for community, privacy is critical as well. So, we’ve got a sense of privacy, but we engage the street or the shared space; in our case a number of neighborhoods that we have created have a small group of houses around a shared garden. So instead of having parking out front you have a little park. It’s a mini-park shared by about a half dozen to a dozen neighbors. And there are layers between the street and the garden and between the sidewalk around the garden and your front door. These layers of personal space create the boundaries from public and private. So that when you come out to your porch you are not exposed with edges, with no clothes on––that’s a metaphor. You’ve got layers of a hedge, low fence, a little private yard, a livable size porch. And inside the house you’ve got active areas looking forward to the shared space. Private areas are farther back, maybe opening up to a private garden, bedrooms farther back or up above.
So that’s a classic courtyard Pocket Neighborhood. There are also other kinds of Pocket Neighborhoods that I think are important.
Peter: Is the street behind the house or in front of the house?
Ross: Well, the street might be perpendicular to the court. Or sometimes there would be a little access lane in back. In the Midwest where there is snow and ice, certainly people can enter their houses through the back, but the active area of the house faces forward toward the shared space. Really turning the houses back again to what they were in a traditional approach, where you have porches facing a pedestrian oriented street, a pedestrian scaled street. And that’s important.
Peter: I think it’s interesting you first focused on privacy because there is a dark side to community, which is that it’s too public and over-exposed. All communities don’t work that well and so you start by saying you have to protect people’s privacy.
Do people move into these neighborhoods and sometimes not like it or think it’s not what they had in mind?
Ross: Well, I think the people that move into the communities self-filter. There are people that do want to live in a situation where they get to know their neighbors. If they are more private, that’s fine. But there are many, many conventional locations that can solve that. But there are fewer community-oriented locations available.
Peter: Also, I thought the layering is like creating thresholds, so you are very thoughtful about creating my private space and then a porch and then a little fence. Say a little more about how you think about some of the design things that you are doing when you create these neighborhoods?
Ross: Everybody has their own sense of personal space, and it varies from culture to culture. It varies from region to region. In some areas porches may have no railings or yards have no fences. In other areas there is a lot more buffering and the railings are a certain height. Personally, I like a railing that is perchable. So maybe a neighbor gets an invite to come up and chat for a few minutes, and when the porch railing is just the right height to perch on, to sit on for a few minutes to chat, that’s great. Or you can sit there and put your coffee cup or a book on the railing. If the railing is too high it becomes a barrier like you are behind a guarded wall or something. So , it’s really about the amount of exposure that you are comfortable with. It’s important to have enough layering to be protected and at the same time the space needs to be open and to be available. That’s the in-between place.
The porch belongs to both the public realm and the private realm. And it is a really important thing to get right. It needs to be big enough. You drive along and you look at one and it’s a faux porch. It’s a “key-fumbling porch,” the architects or the builders call it. You want to modulate the façade or whatever with it. It’s just a lot of physical gymnastics that amounts to nothing. It’s not a place.
We are creating places, and a porch is an in-between place. It needs to be big enough so you have not only a place for yourself, but a couple of others to be there. It might be a whole room. It’s also important where it is located. If it is around the side of the house, it really doesn’t have much exposure to the street –– that’s a different animal. It’s fine to have that, but what I’m talking about is having a place that engages the street while providing a layer of privacy.
John McKnight: Ross, you are talking about the courtyard that you created? I think in a lot of what we’ve seen, we have relatively isolated communities and the one magnet that pulls people together is schools, because children are there. And so, children often become the connective tissue in communities.
I was just wondering whether you’ve noticed that if you had a courtyard it might also be the kind of place that would draw children together rather than keeping them isolated in fenced yards. Have you seen that to be the case and is that a valuable community building aspect of this?
Ross: I’m so glad that you brought this up because a lot of times children are forgotten. Even in the new urbanist world where they are creating walkable, livable communities, they often forget about the children, young children from three to ten, who end up isolated. They are not going to be enjoying the walkable sidewalks without an adult.
You may know Clare Cooper Marcus, a scholar a practitioner who wrote Housing As If People Mattered, among other things. She described to me something that she calls the home zone. She grew up in London during the bombing raids and they talked about places for children. Her studies said that children need increasingly larger zones of play as they grow up. So, a baby might explore the room that the parent is in while an older sibling is free to play in the next room or in the backyard. But at some point, maybe at three or four years old, their desire to explore the world beyond the front gate is blocked by real and perceived stranger danger as well as danger from traffic. Children are then put under lock down as if they are under house arrest. They are chauffeured to and from friends’ houses and organized activities until they can drive on their own. And then they are given their driver’s license, and they are shot out into the world; they get into trouble and we blame them. Too often children feel painfully isolated, and they lack access to safe and unplanned play. The Pocket Neighborhoods provide a protected, intermediate zone that is both public and private, a traffic-free environment for their widening horizons. And that is so critical because it matches their growing curiosity, their need for increased responsibility for maturing social skills, plus it gives them other adults beyond their parents to engage with as well as other children to play with in an unplanned way.
John: In your designs have you experimented with swings, teeter-totters, and sandboxes in the middle of a courtyard?
Ross: I think that can work and it partly it depends on who lives around the courtyard. If you’ve got a real mix of ages, it may be that giving that much of the courtyard to play for a certain age group either works or it doesn’t work. I think it is important for children to have a playground, but it may not be the courtyard. It’s just a few years of one’s life and we are looking at courtyards for everyone, including children.
John: One other thought about opening up a public space for children and the rest of us in a courtyard: For a few years back, maybe 20-25 years ago, I remember a lot of architects were engaged in creating designs that they called defensible space. Do you remember that little sub-movement? Very much related to public housing at the time. I wonder how you think about the defensibility in neighborhood space?
Ross: One of the key design patterns that we enter and engage in the design for a Pocket Neighborhood is what I call “eyes on public space.” Jane Jacobs, Arthur Newman, and Clare Cooper Marcus all worked with this early on. And that is where you’ve got an active living space looking out into the public space.
In our case we are creating an intermediate zone so that the public space directly out front has a sense of territory and ownership. So, if you or I were to walk into a Pocket Neighborhood that we didn’t live in, someone around the shared space may come out and say, “Can I help you?” or “Are you looking for someone?” They can do that because they see someone walking in and a stranger is going to feel like they have entered someone’s room.
The shared space has a territorial sense to it. It’s not a gated, locked community; it has a permeability and yet there is a sense of ownership and territory, whereas the public space up the street belongs to everyone. What often happens is that we leave it up to the city to manage it or we leave it up to the police to have the surveillance.
The first defense of the community space should be good neighbors rather than locks and gates. And guns? When these awful events happen where somebody shoots somebody on the street, every now and again I will ask, “Where is this?” and look at Google maps. Well, it’s on a street lined with garage doors. Nobody there. We are so concerned about safety, and safety is first about having neighbors, neighbors that you know and neighbors that you have a relationship with and you care for. These are neighborships. They are not your best friends necessarily –– they could be –– but they are your neighbors.
So, in a Pocket Neighborhood where we are on a first-name basis with one another, maybe there is an elderly neighbor across the way and you know their patterns well enough to see that it’s 10 o’clock and their blinds aren’t up. You think, Let’s check it out. Let’s walk over there and see. Whereas in a standard neighborhood we want to have privacy from everyone, so you don’t know what’s happening. Or let’s say you are a single mom and your kid finally got down to sleep and thinks, Oh, I forgot something at the grocery store. What are you going to do? Wake the kid up and take it with you? No, you’ve got a relationship with your near-by neighbor, and you ask them either to come over or take that listening device that the parents have. These are the kind of things that happen in a neighborhood that’s organized around near-by neighbors.
John: There is some important research that supports exactly what you just observed. There is a professor at Harvard whose name is Robert J. Sampson who’s worked here in Chicago. He ends up taking two factors as being the major determents as to how secure you are in a block from burglary or theft. First, how many names of people on the block does each household know? Second is how much time out in front of the house in public space do the people in the houses spend? So, it’s knowledge of neighbors and use of public space that predicts more about security than the amount of police. Your design is one that probably could do away with police forces if we really got after it.
Ross: It’s the first defense. Because what we are talking about here is not an end all or perfect solution for people, and we run into problems; there are people who are mentally ill or whatever. We need the whole spectrum. We need more options in housing. We are all not the same age and family composition and we need alternatives.
When people say “not in my backyard, I don’t want anything like that” you know that in my backyard you have an aging parent or a sibling who is going through a divorce or you’ve got the twenty somethings who are trying to get launched and can’t afford good housing and they need more options than Ozzie and Harriet had, than we had. When you think about it, when the realtors say we need three bedrooms, three baths, two, or three-car garage, we need a family room, a dining room, a media room, and da, da, da, da, it’s as if we are all the same. We are not. For people who oppose small houses, small means cheap, so they don’t want any of that.
Well, them is us. It’s our families, it’s our friends, it’s our siblings, and we need options, and this is part of what I’m trying to get out into the world. No, this is not for everybody, but there are many people that want another kind of option. We don’t need the oversized houses with large yards or high fences all around.
Peter: One of the questions people ask is what about existing neighborhoods? What do you think about that? And then there is a flavor of middle class to this. What about lower economic status people?
Ross: Love it. Let me see if I can address these questions. I think that they are really important.
Most of us are not developers or builders or architects, but the good news is that vibrant communities can grow from existing neighborhoods through the actions of people who live there without much money being spent.
For example, move your picnic table to the front yard and see what happens if you eat supper out there. It’s likely you will strike up a conversation with a neighbor or you might invite them to bring a dish to share and kids will come like magnets. Or what about the median strip between the sidewalk and the street? If that’s the kind of street you live on, plant a garden. You are probably going to grow more friends with nearby neighbors to match your food harvest.
Peter: More friends than tomatoes.
Ross: Lots of friends. Friends and tomatoes. There’s a name for a blog! So, if you’ve got some money to spend, build a real porch like we spoke about. Take down a backyard fence.
In Davis, California, 20 years, ago a group of neighbors on N Street did just that. Three or four neighbors who liked one another took their fences down. Then, one of the next-door neighbors wanted to join in and now virtually the entire block, the core of the block, is a shared commons. The property lines still go through there, but there is a pathway that connects everyone and as a new neighbor comes in they are asked to offer something for the community benefit. It might be a garden or it might be a barbecue or it might be a picnic table or a play area or beehives like some folks at the end of the block put in.
These are community-minded gestures. It’s an attitude. It’s saying we are part of a community. This is who we are as humans and we can have space to do that. There are so many ideas like this, I could go on and on. Partly in answer to your questions, Peter. It’s really a shift in attitude –– that’s what tit is.
Peter: About distressed neighborhoods. Any thoughts or exchanges?
Ross: It’s related to the question about it seems middle-class and so forth. There are in the book that I wrote, Pocket Neighborhoods, a number of examples in urban settings.
In Baltimore, Kate Harrod had worked to try to take back an alley that was very dangerous and she and others ended up having to change the state law. What they did was create a way for people to have neighbors come together to claim an alley as common space. So, they now had a place that is not for drug runners and service trucks, but a place for people, a place for children. It’s so important.
In urban settings Pocket Neighborhoods don’t have to have a shared commons that’s a garden; that’s more typical in a suburban setting or a rural setting. But there are places where old factories have been reclaimed and they have a lot of hardscape. Well, the hardscape can also be playscape and a place with awnings and potted trees, and they can reclaim gutted urban areas. When you’ve got people living in that kind of an urban, fairly harsh neighborhood, you’ve got people who begin to care for the neighborhood, and they begin to push back the violence and the drugs that happen. I’ve got some examples in the book that tell that kind of story.
So, I think that it is important to realize that Pocket Neighborhoods are not just for suburban settings, and they are not just cute cottages around a courtyard. Style doesn’t matter. What it is, is an organization of how we live together, and it’s based on the fact that when a few people are together conversation happens –– it’s spontaneous. If you are in a large room with 200 people, you need to organize; nobody is going to talk or everybody is going to talk, and there is not going to be quality conversation. But in a small groups, we can’t help but chat. And that fact about our human nature is what Pocket Neighborhoods are built around. Whether they are in urban settings, or suburban or rural ones.
Peter: Well, that is wonderful: the way you think about us. Before we open this up to questions, there are some great ones on the chat, and I have one: What’s the response of your profession? I know that Christopher Alexander has heavily influenced me, and yet the profession has taught about his work, but they do not act on his insights. What’s it like in the architectural world in response to your thinking and commitment to community and social fabric and things like that?
Ross: I will be able to tell you a little bit more in about a week and half. Sarah Susanka has written The Not So Big House Book series, and she and I are presenting to the AIA Convention about Pocket Neighborhoods and Not So Big House communities. So, we will have a direct answer to that question in about a week and half.
I don’t know how many architects are on board, but a lot. Many of them get it, and many of them continue to be focused on building as object,. these wonderful aesthetic objects. Many architects are trained in design and design can also be around the unmeasurable, the human spirit and social dimension. Many architects are that way, but then many of them are focused on details. So, it’s not that I’m getting resistance, it’s just that I’m trying to get the word out, to bring another dimension into the conversation.
This is not new. These are not new ideas, but what I’m doing is bringing things up about our human nature and trying to bring that into the design process. Into the community making process. Into the living process.
Peter: Do you have any calls to bring your design thinking or sensibility into commercial space? In our work, John and I, if you want a room where people can really be together in this kind of spirit, it’s kind of hard to find it. Have you done much in the commercial world?
Ross: You know, when I first thought it out in my career years ago, I worked with an architect who designed shopping malls. I was not interested in the idea that I could take part in designing a mall to glaze people over and have them reach for their wallet. I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning. I was depressed and I realized that I had to do work that I loved doing and that I was passionate about.
Now in recent years my work has focused on housing. The concepts that we are talking about can apply to public space, commercial space, hospitals, and anywhere there is an opportunity. What we are talking about is place making. We are talking about places for the human soul and for human community. And that’s not just where we live, it’s where we work, it’s where we go to school, it’s where we go out and share with others in the third space, the community space. It’s about where we live and that’s universal.
Peter: It’s also re-establishing the commons and caring about that again.
Ross: We are naming the commons as something to be cherished. The problem is that we have been marketed out of this whole thing because houses have become commodities and so we are being sold that idea. It has been part of the morphing of the American Dream. The American Dream really needs to be about being human and about being together, and I think that there are so many different modes. We need to take back the commons as something to be held that we live in and thrive in.
John: You know, about one other thing that you mentioned, space and a place that expresses the human soul: There is an organization that has as part of its name Sacred Places. One of the things I’m wondering about is if you were thinking about a neighborhood, and not thinking the sacred places were in buildings called churches, is there a way of bringing that kind of presence and value into your design? I know I spent some time in Japan and most Japanese houses have a space where you could put a statue of Buddha or a flower arrangement. There was a sacred place in each home. I was wondering if you had thoughts about that?
Ross: I think you are saying that sacred is not just for churches and synagogues. It’s about seeing ourselves in context. Seeing ourselves in the bigger picture. We are not just isolated in our little, tiny lives. We exist in a continuum of thousands of generations, and we exist in a universe that is so huge. We exist in an interior dimension, as well. And if there are places that can help remind us of this. I think that is important.
I live in a 900 square foot, 1951 post-war box, you can imagine it. We ended up creating a pool in front of our house, a little reflecting pool. I grew up next to a lake and I remember lying on the living room floor and looking at the light on the ceiling dancing off the water and it moved me as a child. Now I don’t live near the water and so what I did was to create a pool that, if I were home, the sun right now would be up on the ceiling, dancing. And in the pool what I did was to find in a garden shop about a two-foot diameter concrete sphere, a garden element. I ended up finding a way to have it appear to float on the water and I put a little fountain out there. And so, it brings in an almost mystical garden that changes all the time. And that’s just in our home and with nothing but a few weekends of work, digging out the pool and planting. It’s very, very simple.
We can have small reminders like that. It doesn’t have to be much. Might be a niche in a wall.
Peter: One of the chat questions, Ross, I think you have responded to it, but let me read it to you. “Much brick-and-mortar reality is structured already. Can you point to applying Pocket Neighborhood design and alternatives, like association networks, churches, gatherings, etc.” Does that trigger any thoughts?
Ross: Yes. If you go there are a number of publications, organizations, and online resources to connect with. There is a whole movement to try to engage the tools around the Internet to work for.
There are many things to help tap into the resources right around you. So, use the Internet to engage in a closer, more fulfilling neighborhood. That’s one approach, but there are a lot more.
Dan: We have chat comments asking Ross if you can talk about how Pocket Neighborhoods help create relative affordability in existing neighborhoods?
Ross: Sure. Take a look at the overall density of a community and you’ve got relativity large houses that by code have no limit except for the extent of the setbacks and the height limitations. And so, the builder world builds and values square footage.
What we are trying to do is to build in value and livability and community as well as privacy. So we have been working with cities to develop zoning codes to allow for up to twice the density in any residential area if the houses are limited in size, oriented around a shared space, and parking is protected and shielded from the street and from neighbors. It acknowledges that smaller homes in community settings have less actual intensity than standard homes. That way we begin to increase the housing options on the lots. We have more households on a piece of land without necessarily increasing the impact in a surrounding neighborhood. I think that is an important piece. It also acknowledges the importance of making way for smaller homes rather than just standard bigger and bigger homes.
Peter: Do you have a measure for livability?
Ross: I call it the livability quotient. When people come in and say, How big is this house? I ask them to walk about and come back and give me their guess. How many beans are in the jar? When they do they always get it wrong because with a high livability quotient it will live larger, it will feel larger. You’ve got things that Sarah Susanka talks about. You’ve got light at the end of the hallway. You’ve got diagonal views. You’ve got windows that are oriented to bring light in from different directions. You basically take out the unusable or the very seldom used formal rooms, like the formal dining room and living room, when in fact everybody is hanging out in the kitchen. So, make the kitchen a living space and put soft chairs in there and have it open up to a larger covered porch in the garden. Bedrooms don’t have to be kingdoms. You know, you sleep in the bedroom so make it a wonderful magical space. Maybe separate it from the closet so the bed doesn’t get layered with clothes.
There are so many ideas around how a small house lives large. I think that is an important piece. Take out all the extraneous functions. Enlarge a wall; instead of single wall maybe make the wall 12” deep and line it with bookshelves. Make it a foot wider, two feet wider, and the hallway becomes a little home office. There are things like that to make a small house live large.
Peter: Another topic in the chat is the relationship between the thinking world you are creating and local public schools, wondering if you have had any conversation with public schools. There are schools that want to be centers, community learning centers, and they want to be used around the clock and on weekends. It seems to me that the spirit of what you are doing would be very aligned with ways of supporting the public schools and their intention to be more available to neighborhood. Any thoughts or experiences along that line?
Ross: Let me talk about that in a couple of different ways. One is that when we live neighborhoods where we are in conversation with surrounding neighbors, we engage in conversation about the issues of the neighborhood and the community. We can talk about the school board. We can talk about the kids’ issues. We can talk about improving the street or public safety. And as I mentioned before. this is the spirit of democracy. If we don’t have a public forum to meet, we don’t have democracy. So that’s critical.
Now another way to answer the question is to look at the school as a public commons. It serves children, yet it is a public commons for the whole community. And so there might be after hours or other times in which the school can engage the community. Our little community here has a school and there has been a big movement to close the middle school down to save money and to make it more accountable. What they ended up doing is letting the dance community and the yoga and exercise communities take over one of the buildings. And now it has become a mecca of community by using the facilities that belong to the community. And it may be in another ten years there will be a whole new influx of young children and they will need the building back; that’s fine and then it can expand again.
The point is, we need to have flexible approaches. We need to honor the commons. We need to engage the community in the spaces that we have. That is a portion of the answer to that one.
Peter: Thank you. A wonderful way to frame it. Any final thoughts, John, that you have for Ross or that you would like to share with? Any comments or thoughts about the conversation?
John: I would like to ask Ross for us and the listeners if you had to pick a few books both visually and in terms of text that would help us better understand the particulars of this kind of discussion, what books would you recommend?
Ross: Well, of course, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, by John McKnight and Peter Block. I’ve enjoyed that. A Pattern Language is my go-to book, of course. Co-Housing –– that’s a whole world we haven’t spoken about. Chuck Durrett and Katie McCamant have written the Co-Housing books. And those are excellent nitty-gritty details around how to design for community. If people want to look up The Congress for New Urbanism, there are a lot of great books that are on their resource section.
Peter: You know that you are part of a large movement here and you mentioned co-housing. There is the co-operative movement. I think if there is a movement taking place in the culture it starts with the word “co-.” In your case, Pocket Neighborhoods, it’s fascinating to see it grow and have you all be connected. Any final thoughts, Ross, you would like to mention or share with us or a final reflection before we go?
Ross: There is a metaphor that to me speaks to me about what this about.
Say it’s summertime and you are imagining a party together and are thinking about arranging the furnishings and where the food is. To have this party really be lively and engaging, and for it to be a deeply satisfying party, you think about how you’ve got small groups of chairs together with an outlook and they come together with a little shared table. You’ve got a couple of chairs in the corner; there are others that you want move into the center of the space where you’ve got a big table almost like a community table. So, you can bet that there are going to be some great conversations.
This is the scale of sociability. Whereas if you had chairs lined up in an auditorium, all facing one direction, that is going to be your standard suburban neighborhood where houses are lined up on the street and they are all facing in one direction. It’s an interior life that people live rather than a community. So, I’m talking about the scale of sociability to have organized space around how we as humans naturally engage with conversation and with each other. Make it easy. Provide privacy, engage with community. I think that is the key message right there.
John: Wonderful.
Peter: I think that your language is as explicit and clear, both spiritual and practical, as the places that you are designing. We appreciate that about you, Ross. And when you said that if you look at violence that is occurring generally it’s on the street in front of a line of garage doors, that is just as vivid an image as the alternative or the opposite thing we talk about when we talk about creating community and social fabric. And so, I thank you for that image.
