West Village: The Neighborhood That Lets You Live Near Your Friends
“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods, certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’” - C.S. Lewis
Soooo West Village was featured in a Vox article titled “It shouldn’t be so hard to live near your friends” . A shoutout in Vox is incredibly cool, but what’s even better is that this idea of “living near friends” seems to be gaining pretty widespread acceptance.
Why do so many People want to live near their Friends?
The people referenced in the Vox article are on to something. A study found that the quantity and quality of a person’s social relationships are an even better predictor of how long they will live than their diet and exercise habits. On the flip side, loneliness can be nearly as deadly as smoking:
Studies have found that loneliness can increase the odds of early death by 26 percent — which is an influence comparable to smoking and greater than that of obesity. Social isolation is also associated with cognitive dysfunction and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a 50 percent greater risk of dementia.
Leaving the research aside, I think most people just intuitively feels that spending time around other people is a good thing. Very few would argue that we should aim to design our world to make us all less social and more isolated.
How Design Makes Social Life Possible
It turns out that the way a neighborhood is built has a massive impact on what the people who live in it experience on a day to day basis - including their social life.
This shouldn’t be surprising at all. After all, if you designed a mini-van to comfortably carry a family of 7, would it be surprising if it didn’t perform well on a racetrack?1
But that is what we do with American neighborhoods. They are built to make one thing - driving in and out of them by car - very easy to the exclusion of everything else.
The bad news is that the vast majority of American neighborhoods are built in this mono-functional way. The good news is that through a fairly simple set of design choices we can build a different type of neighborhood. Giving people the superpower of being able to live near friends is a subset of the larger purpose of West Village: to give people the superpower of being around other people.
To provide an example of one such choice, here’s the Courtyard Home, the main housing type at West Village:
In many ways it is the opposite of the typical suburban neighborhood:
It shares a courtyard, rather than having an isolated back yard
It is easy to walk from this home to a friends house because the site’s street network allows you to get there without walking on a street designed for cars
It is a small footprint home, reducing maintenance burden and wasted space
The outdoor areas are maintained by the site, so the owner doesn’t have to spend their weekends mowing a big yard or pulling weeds
It’s easy to walk from this home to a restaurant, the site’s main plaza to see a movie or music show, or to the coffee shop or grocery store
Above all, it makes social interaction with other residents and visitors easy and effortless rather than a chore that must be scheduled weeks in advance
They say that Americans know how to work and Europeans know how to live. I don’t buy it. I don’t think Americans have this perverse need to work at the expense of other areas of life because of some inherent cultural difference.
I know that millions of Americans would love to spend their evenings and weekends chatting up folks on plazas like the one at West Village. The problem is just that those spaces hardly exist at all here whereas they’re everywhere in Europe.
American social lives don’t suffer because that’s just a national trait. They suffer because the design of American neighborhoods means most people have no choice but to live inadequate social lives. That’s the role of West Village and new neighborhoods like it: to give people in the United States the opportunity to live a better, more social life.
Joel
One of my greatest pleasures in life is using automotive analogies to explain why an entirely automotive-based lifestyle is bad 🙂
This is corroborated by trends in coliving, cohousing, ans the village movement. My work is all about designing village-scale communities that allow us to live sustainably, self-sufficiently, and meaningfully with others. What you say about Americans and the way we "lork" (live through our work) echoes one of my favorite quotes about architecture: "The spaces we design design us back".
Keep writing about projects like this!
Joel what you guys are doing with West Village is fantastic. I love that reframe at the end, it's not that American's don't want to socialize, it's that they don't get the opportunity because the built environment sucks so much.
I moved to Spain 5 years ago and when I go back to visit my parents in the U.S I'm reminded of the fact that I need to get into a car for EVERYTHING. This has so many ripple effects. It makes me want to leave the house less simply because of how much activation energy it takes.
If you've lived in a place your whole life where cars are mandatory and then move to a place where cars are optional it's like discovering Narnia, highly recommend.