Neighbours
Enduring Proximity: The Figure of the Neighbor in Suburban America by Dana Cuff
“The figure of the neighbor in contemporary culture is both spatial and social: neighbors begin as strangers necessarily inhabiting proximate space. When that closeness is intense in duration, distance, and circumstance, it gives rise to potent, if not perverse, reactions…
The figure of the neighbor as I am defining it here is an up-close construction of human otherness. Thus neighbor relations are proto-political, growing from imposed, inescapable, and open-ended confrontation between self and other. Sociality located beyond the household and before the city forms a grain of sand around which participatory democracy or civil society can begin to take shape. And if the neighbor can be associated with the political conceptually, it is also incumbent upon us to reckon with the concept empirically: neighborhoods are among the most forceful political entities in the U.S. today…
How did the figure of the neighbor implied by suburban housing evolve in the postwar era? I suggest that while there was one primary model of postwar suburbia–the collection of isolated houses exemplified by Levittown–a secondary model existed beside it: the modern neighborhood exemplified by the Mar Vista Tract in Los Angeles, designed by architect Gregory Ain. Of these two models, only Levittown has been reproduced, sometimes in easy replication, in other cases in perverse mutation. My comparison between Levittown and Mar Vista will be followed by two examples in which designers explicitly sought to have impact on the articulation of neighbor relations. Each case ultimately harks back to Levittown–to an extreme at Sagaponac on Long Island, New York, and as its figurative mythical twin at Celebration, Florida.
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