Space co-operation

The repetition of space plays a critical role in the founding of human relationships. Sharing time and experience founds our understanding of co-existence, the familitarity you feel to someone else who feels alive. Entering the same spaces (physically, in education- and always politically) provides a shared vocabulary for understanding other people, and the realization of common bonds you feel with other humans for the sake of their humanity. This explains why people identify with people who have lived in the same town, place, etc, identify with each other, even if they never knew each other when they lived there. It’s a feeling that you can find a common sense of humanity, grounded in something tangible.

The tragedy I feel for the world I see in the suburbs is the tragedy of isolation- the closing of common space and the demarcation of experience. Cars and technology by making information and movement more accessible simultaneously make understanding in immobility and regularity more difficult. It requires a re-orientation of space. Instead of traveling from point A to point B along a line of experience, space exists as a series of dots or bubbles. You wake up in the morning in the house bubble, move into the car bubble which, thanks to your power garage, allows you to never see the space beyond the house. Then, suddenly, you can emerge in the ‘work’ or ‘school’ dot, without having left the car dot. Geographically, the spaces are distant, but the time and experience between them makes them near and discrete. My senior year in high school, I had an assignment to describe in detain the steps it took to get from my school to my house. The difficulty I had surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. A car excludes the need to ever experience the places between two points. The other tragedy of loss of commonality is the loss of empathy.

There is a reason luxury living requires space- it’s not space for its own sake, but space for the sake of avoiding the face and spaces where suffering occurs. Without regular visibility and shared space of poverty, the people involved become walled out, and in the process, loose their meaning as humans. Luxury is also ignorance of your luxury- the ability to erase the flip-side to expense and excess. That’s why airlines put up a curtain between first class and coach, and why country clubs construct walls around themselves. People with domestic servants convince themselves of their own benevolence, and the gratitude their servants have. Those that work in houses become invisible by necessity – a guilty conscience destroys the feeling of service and luxury.

The importance of a degree of shared space and experience explains why children play so well together. The relative brevity of experience means their lives are structures primarily towards each other- or at least by percentage, more towards their fellow kids. Older people mix with more uncertainty, because the complexity of their experience makes development or discovery of commonality more difficult. Adults also like to live in suburbs for some reason. It’s like a puzzle piece: a pattern appears with greater ease if you use simple pieces; more complex pieces mesh or co-exist with more difficulty.

Duncan