Anonymity and Urbanism

I, for one, wish every neighborhood had the essentials of life within walking distance. Even so, there is a countervailing impulse just within my individual values system: the desire to be anonymous. Density of services – i.e. walkability – tends to create limits to choice. This results in repeat visits to the same streets and establishments over and over; it’s the “regular” phenomenon. Beyond the additional costs of personnel to staff all of these neighborhood retail, (or service, or whatever,) establishments; the structure (smaller catchment areas) seems to dictate a smaller number of clientele, and an increased relationship between the person and the business.

This reduced choice is a variant of the church problem. It has two effects that need to be considered. First, if your choices are limited to the walking radius, you have a very limited number of options, but you know each of them quite well. While fine from a customer service / relationship standpoint, it puts one in a situation where you can’t leave a bad option without radically altering your lifestyle. The neighborhood deli is a wonderful thing – unless it happens to be horrid. (Those of you who’ve worked in a large office building with ground-floor food service will understand.) This gets back to what our friend Jim said about abundance and choice allowing better individual decisions.

The second issue is, without the vast increases in available area allowed by high-speed individual transportation, one has to frequent the limited number of businesses within your walking circle. This means that you become known. While many people love to be recognized and recorded, I’ve always been of the opinion that half of the reason for living in city of any size is the privacy of being a face in the crowd. In our data-mining society, it’s a rare luxury of being truly independent and unknown. The Cash Nexus decried by Marx is sometimes the best protection you have in your individual liberties. No one can control what they can’t track. Besides, who wants to have to develop awkward relationships with basically random people? (This is where I part ways with the Bowling Alone people.)

While the idea of the tight-knit neighborhood has many things to recommend it, there are still structural considerations to take into account before we declare it the ultimate ideal.