Suburban Privacy and Its Nuances, Essay 1b, Emma Twine

To what extent does suburbia have a specific character of privacy?

Emma Twine

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Privacy?: An Introduction 10

Boundaries 12

Layer One: The Family Home 22

Layer Two: The Cul de Sac 32

Layer Three: The Neighbourhood 34

Layers Four and Five: The Town to the Outside World 36

Suburban Privacy: A Conclusion 38

List of Figures 40

Bibliography

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privacy noun

a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other

people. the state of being free from public attention.

(Oxford Dictionary, 2017) “The right to privacy ... means the right to be left alone.â€? (p.7, RĂśssler, 2005) In The Rise of Suburbia, Thompson described suburbia as an urban form almost exclusively obsessed with privacy (p. 8, 1982). In the minds of both the first suburbanites leaving 18th century London and Manchester at the genesis of suburban neighbourhoods, and the 21st century suburban mentality, an obsession with privacy is evident. Understanding privacy is therefore central to understanding the suburban experience both in its evolution and in its contemporary form.

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Privacy can be understood as concerning access and control (p.78, Rössler, 2005), such as in Ruth Gavison’s definition that “an individual enjoys perfect privacy when he is completely inaccessible to others” (as cited p.7, Rössler, 2005) and Sisela Bok’s assertion that privacy is “the condition of being protected from unwanted access by others … claims to privacy are claims to control access” (as cited p.8, Rössler, 2005). However, Thompson’s definition of suburbia as “characterised by the collective attempt to lead a private life” contrasts with these black-and-white definitions (p.82, Thompson, 1982). This suggests further specificity to suburban privacy, proposing that it is shaped by this tension between the urge for privacy, seeking to protect and enclose the family, and to be part of a broader, like-minded community. This promise of a similar community, though one as Fishman attests “built [on a] vision of the primacy of private property and the individual family” is another prominent factor in the decisions of families moving to suburbia (p.x, Fishman, 1989). Considering these definitions, it can be argued that suburbia has created for itself a novel privacy.

This suburban privacy is defined by a particular permeability, characterised by the combination of dual aspirations of the suburban lifestyle: community and privacy.

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Suburban privacy has a specificity in the role it plays within the suburban aspiration and suburban life. Its importance is twofold: first, the privacy of the suburban home is a feature of its role as a refuge and a place of safety; second, the suburban home is often referred to as the site of freedom and choice, both of which are seen as enabled through the autonomy and independence gained through privacy (p.1, Rössler, 2005). Both of these theories have continued relevance within modern suburbia. Leadbeater’s suggestion that modern globalisation “forces people out into the market, but as a compensation offers them a retreat into a secure, private world” sets up the complexity and uncertainty of the modern world as a parallel of the perceived urban immorality and danger that resulted in the Evangelist rejection of cities which sparked suburbia’s birth (p.15, Leadbeater 1989). Suburbia continues to represent a place of safety in the modern imagination: somewhere to raise a family, somewhere quiet or even boring where change, danger and the constant uncertainties and the flux of the outside world are far away. The suburban home as a space of exclusion and “retreat”, enabling the isolation of the family unit and the enforcing of the home as a space of refuge, therefore reinforces the privacy of suburbia as a defining feature of the suburban promise.

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In exploring “the boundary between the private and the public”, Beate Rössler used the metaphor of “the onion of privacy” (p. 2, 2005), an structure similar to Chermayeff’s dissembling of the transition of privacy to public into four stages: private, groupprivate, group-public, urban-public (p.121, 1966). Considering the importance of the wider community to the suburban experience, suburban privacy replicates these four stages across four layers: the family home; the cul de sac, avenue or road; the neighbourhood; and the town or locality. Each change in scale creates boundaries, which are expressed and policed, violated and defended, in an attempt to negotiate the contradictions inherent within a privacy defined by the duality of family seclusion and community participation.

These boundaries, which seek to exclude that which is seen as dangerous or polluting to the family unit, are negotiated or demarcated by obstruction, as in the decorative wooden fence or massive Leylandii hedge; by physical distance, as in the detached

house with surrounding garden or as in South Woodham Ferrers as the distancing of the entire settlement from nearby urbanity; or by a psychological wall, in which the boundary is drawn within the suburbanite’s own head, such as the avoidance of peeking through windows into a neighbour’s territory.

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“Suburban neighbourhoods provide an opportunity for nuclear families to find privacy and intimacy in a detached home.” (p. 70, Coon, 2003) The importance of the role that the family plays in understanding of suburbia cannot be underestimated. Suburbia has its origins in the development of Evangelist thought in the 18th century, with the evolution of the “bourgeois family” in which the family was celebrated as the centre of its followers moral lives (p.143, Rössler, 2005). This rise in the importance of the family unit lead to the home gaining a new role, as the protector and safe refuge from the dangers of the urban environment. In this “new form of family” (ibid.), children and women were perceived as morally vulnerable, thus it became increasingly important to physically distance the family from the urban world in order to protect them from the perceived dangers. In suburbia, where families are physically distanced from both other families and urban life, the “closed domesticated nuclear family became reality” (p. 56, Fishman, 1989).

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What exists in suburbia therefore is a form of privacy with ”‘an emphasis on the boundary surrounding the nuclear unit’” (p. 9, Fishman, 1989). Suburbia had two advantages: the benefits of both town and country, carrying the legacy of the upper-class country seat while still within commuting distance of business and income for those outside the landed gentry; and a new physical buffer, protecting suburbia’s moral and respectable inhabitants from the vulgar masses of the city. Suburban areas therefore emerged formed by layers of privacy based on exclusion. At the centre is the family unit, with outside influences kept at a physical distance in order to shield the moral lives of the family members. It is worth noting that even within the family unit suburban privacy is contested, as has been noted by Coon in his exploration of the film American Beauty.

The family imposes a clear power structure, delineated by gender and age. The experience of true individual privacy, autonomy and freedom is an experience typically reserved for the man of the house, with the wife and children are subjected to limitations, ranging from domestic labour, to enforced ‘family time’, to Coon’s example of Ricky Fitts’ father’s prohibition of locked doors. This observation is useful within the broader discussion of suburbia as the gender and family norms that Fitts’ experience is built on are losing relevance in contemporary society, but also because it sheds light on the complexities of suburban privacy, which though it is a central thread of suburban identity is by no means definite, and rather than being black-and-white is instead dependent on and shaped by many different forces.

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This pressure for family retreat, experienced within the duality of suburban life, creates a need for the ring-fencing of the family unit. This is expressed within suburbia through the hegemony of the single family dwelling, to the extent that “detached and semidetached houses of single family occupation are of the suburban essence� (p.8, Thompson, 1982). In South Woodham Ferrers, the private zone of the family is particularly visible through physical distance between the unusually high number of detached houses, in contrast to the dominance of semis in much of British suburbia.

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A detached house can be seen as the strongest physical expression of the suburban ideology of family privacy. The detached home creates about itself a physical buffer between the private domain of the family and the wider world, the private family territory standing apart from anything that would seek to disturb the lives of its inhabitants; a realm in which the family is free to “create their own world of family centred values� (p. 51, Fishman, 1989).

However, considering the community aspect of the suburban lifestyle, the detached home can perhaps be understood as physically compensating for the overlapping and permeable nature of the suburban privacy, enforcing a physical boundary where no clear social separation exists.

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Suburbia cannot however be understood solely through the single family home, as despite the rural ambitions of the suburban detached home, suburbia’s nature as “collective attempt” (p.82, Thompson, 1982) creates its character as a “new landscape [formed] out of the concentration of villas” (p. 54, Fishman, 1989). The crowding of detached homes in close proximity in SWF exemplifies suburban privacy: whereas rural properties’ “charm and seclusion came in large part from their relative isolation” (p. 54, Fishman, 1989), the suburban landscape is characterised by seclusion in spite of a lack of isolation: privacy and community in balance.

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Within SWF this was a predictable consequence of the unusually high density championed by the 1973 Essex Design Guide (Essex County Council, 1973). The determinedly isolated, stood-alone character of the houses, coupled with the purposefully “irregular, spontaneous, and irrational quality” (p.124, Fishman, 1989) of the picturesque tradition, gives a awkward and confrontational nature to the manner in which neighbouring houses relate to each other, as each simultaneously attempts to ignore its context and assert its dominance over its neighbours. At this scale, though the individual suburban experience might follow Rössler’s “onion” metaphor, garlic might better suit the neighbourhood structure: a core of clustered individual private family territories, together surrounded by further layers, and clustered with similar agglomerations.

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The boundaries between the crowded privacies can illuminate the way in which the conflicts or tensions around this proximity have been navigated. Enabled by the crowding together of the oddly juxtaposed detached homes, windows steal views into neighbouring homes or gardens, passers-by stare into would-beprivate living rooms, and neighbours peek over fences into the gardens beyond. The role of sight and of overlooking distorts and interrupts the territory of the private, silently invading the different worlds that each family creates. Within SWF, the front and back of the house can be seen to express the dual faces of within & without in suburban privacy. On cul-de-sacs such as Troubridge Close, not even front gardens buffer the living room windows of the dwellings from the street, the windows “fram[ing] both the outside and the inside” of the house (p.21, Silverstone, 1997), resulting in “the goldfish bowl effect” of “active visual inspection” (p. 75, Coon, 2003). At the rear and the side, the garden mediates: a space of leisure and seclusion, but also a physical distancing that also creates a divide between the different privacies. This again presents a quality of acceptability within suburban privacy, where the expression of privacy is expected within certain areas, and a level of openness to the community expected within others.

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The wider neighbourhood is defined by never-ending houses: in Collingwood, 1013 houses and 16 buildings of flats are punctuated by one corner shop, one hairdressers and one primary school.

Karl Chin contends that in suburbia “we have abandoned the communal space”, that “in an understandable search for privacy, we have become too private” (as cited p.14 Clapson, 1998). The exclusion of non-domesticity from the suburban neighbourhood can however be seen as a further expression of the primacy of the family sphere, physically distanced from what the Evangelists would have identified as urban dangers, and instead unifying the streets and cul-de-sacs in their single dimension of domestic bliss.

Zooming out to the wider area of the town, the quarantining of the ‘public’ functions becomes clear.

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The suburban environment plays a further role in reinforcing the privacy of the family homes within it. Fishman suggests that the suburb can be defined by middle-class homogeneity (p.6, Fishman, 1989), positing nuclear family units within a wider external place of safety, surrounded by the a community of the same class of more-or-less equally respectable suburbanites. In this way it can be argued that suburbia acts as a double buffer from the outside world, not only as the site of almost exclusively self-contained, single-family home-fortresses, but also as a sterilised, artificial environment of homogeneous respectability, where residents are protected first from each other, then through the similarities of each other from the variety of the urban world outside. This again exposes an element of exclusion within suburban privacy, in the definition of what or who is ‘acceptable’. The dual motivations of familial privacy and like-minded community offer a definition of suburban experience characterised as a “private retreat within the community of neighbours” (p.75, Coon, 2003). The specificity of suburban privacy can therefore be seen as shaped by this constant negotiation between the primacy of the immediate family unit and the community beyond.

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Though there are valid arguments to suggest that other influences such as lower house prices also play a role in attracting people to the suburbs, Barker’s assertion that 84% of the British population living in suburban areas suggests that there is a specific appeal to suburbia: a lifestyle, vision of domestic life or aspiration that has proved tremendously popular.

This suburban lifestyle is shaped by idiosyncrasies: of the pursuit of privacy and of community and neighbourliness at the same time.

In a way the real success of suburban areas lies in how they allow “people to enjoy privacy while being able to be neighbours with others” (Smith, 2007). This “new vulnerability and permeability of the private sphere” (p.11, Silverstone, 1997), shaped by the desire for seclusion but compromised by sociality, creates an experience of privacy as a conflict: the archetypal goal of suburbia, constantly violated by equally archetypal suburban goals. To Silverstone this conflict surrounding privacy has in some way degraded it: he asserts that ”suburban architecture and planning … have facilitated the shift both to a new kind of privacy and at the same time to its weakening” (p.11, Silverstone, 1997). But in excavating the specifics of suburbia, in attempting to define the suburban experience, this novel form of privacy is central and crucial, not undermining the suburban lifestyle but instead defining it and being defined by it in return.

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fig. 1:

Illustration from the cover of Design Guide For Residential Areas by Essex County Council (1973) fig. 2:

Still from own video (2017) fig. 3:

Own photographs (2017) fig. 4:

Own illustration exploring the four layers of privacy in the suburban setting of South Woodham Ferrers (2017) fig. 5:

Vintage illustration of a hand and magnifying glass highlighting a typical suburban nuclear family, found by Roger Wilkerson.

Available from: http://rogerwilkerson.tumblr.com/post/ 116859902951/the-typical-sububan-nuclear-family-or-giant-guy

fig. 6:

Vintage illustration of a glowing suburban home superimposted in front of a horizon of skyscrapers, found by James Vaughan.

Available from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/5063313703/

fig. 7:

Illustration from p. 102 of the Design Guide For Residential Areas by Essex County Council (1973) fig. 8:

Still from own video (2017)

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fig. 9:

Own map showing the distribution of housing typologies in Collingwood, South Woodham Ferrers (2016) fig. 10:

Illustration from p.8 of The Essex Design Guide by Essex County Council (2005) fig. 11:

Still from own video (2017) fig. 12:

Own map exploring the ‘garlic’ metaphor of the clustering of the different layers of privacy (2017) fig. 13:

Illustration from p. 29 of the Design Guide For Residential Areas by Essex County Council (1973) fig. 14:

Own photographs (2017) fig. 15:

Aerial photograph of the junction of Ferrers and Inchbonnie Roads, Collingwood, South Woodham Ferrers by Terry Joyce (2015) fig. 16:

Map of the original scheme from the South Woodham Ferrers : the Essex design guide in practice by C. Neale (1984) fig. 17:

Still from own video (2017) 39

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Emma Twine Newnham College Essay 1b 17th January 2017 2,425 words MPhil Architecture and Urban Design University of Cambridge

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