"Burbs not so bad after all
"Shannon Proudfoot, CanWest News Service Published: Saturday, November 11, 2006
"A new study says that people who live in sprawling suburban areas have more friends, better community involvement and more frequent contact with their neighbours than urbanites who are wedged in side-by-side. ...
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These sorts of news items - whether you're pleased or displeased with the details - are almost always annoyingly structured.
Here, for example, there's a surface skimming of the UC Irvine study's conclusions and then we're quickly off to enjoy a parade of supporting quotes from people who seem to be typical examples of what's being discussed.
Consider Fayrouz Costa, interviewed for the CanWest News Service piece, on why she loves the burbs:
"You couldn't give me a free house in the city and say, `Move here.' Honestly, I could never do it," she says. "There's just too many people, people are too close to each other and people are not friendly. I'm a chatterer and people don't chat in the city."
Well that's certainly nice but I'm not sure what I've learned since, of course it's no surprise there are plenty of people enjoying themselves in their suburban locales.
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Listen, we all know how this game is played; someone will darkly reply that this study notwithstanding, the burbs are soul-free vortices of ennui. Next, Heartfield will respond that people, happy people, want to live outside of cities and point to this study as evidence. A giant wheel will spin with greater and greater speed until it loses momentum.
Before starting the paint ball battle it would, I think, be better to entirely forget about the news item and examine the source material, Largey and Brueckner's paper:
Social Interaction and Urban Sprawl
<http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/socinteract.pdf>
To get a sense of Brueckner's work over time, here's a page listing all his working papers -
<http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/papers.htm>
.d.