Driving through conditions for community

Just been prompted by a comment by mas on Jonathan's blog, namely that community connectedness nowadays is often undermined "by among others people not walking the streets where they live (just to the car & back), not working where they live and in too many cases being fearful (rightly or wrongly) of where they live."

Just been prompted by a comment by mas on Jonathan's blog, namely that community connectedness nowadays is often undermined "by among others people not walking the streets where they live (just to the car & back), not working where they live and in too many cases being fearful (rightly or wrongly) of where they live."

I would certainly concur with these arguments (in particular when we're thinking about Jonathan's first, community-cum-neighbourhood, community typology) but there's much more to it the contribution of car use to diminishing social networks.  Specifically, I am thinking here of Donald Appleyard's classic 'Liveable Streets' study of the effects of vehicle throughput on different streets in San Francisco on neighbourliness in those streets.  This study was re-created by Josh Hart in Bristol in 2008 - see www.driventoexcess.org - and came to the same striking conclusions.  Of particular relevance to Connected Communities, this more recent study found that:

• Residents of the heavily-trafficked (>20k motor vehicles/day) street studied were found to have less than a quarter the number of local friends than those on the lightly-trafficked (140 vehicles/day) street and under half the number of local acquaintances.
• Residents on the heavily-trafficked street had a much smaller 'home territory' (the area over which they felt 'a sense of stewardship or personal responsibility') than those on the less-trafficked streets.

That is, studies both in the US and the UK demonstrate convincingly that car-use not only reduces the number of opportunities that the driver might have to develop social networks in his or her local neighbourhood - through chance encounters etc. - but also drastically erodes the conditions in which fellow residents might feel comfortable connecting with their neighbours.

Getting motorists walking, that is, not only increases their own chances of socialising in their local neighbourhood, but also increases the likelihood of other residents doing so.  Choosing not to drive becomes a civic, 'other-regarding' decision in a very immediate sense.

With this in mind, might local community-based digitally-networked work spaces (such as the hub in King's Cross or Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol) not only foster digital inclusion, therefore, but also - by reducing commuting distances - indirectly enable the conditions in which more traditional forms of social inclusion take place?