THE WORLD UNDER CONTROL
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together, and not very soundproof, as is the case in many parts of the world, and when significant life functions happen outside anyway, then our selves are more public too—we are better known and our stories are familiar to all around us. Under such circumstances the illusion of the discrete and separate self is less persuasive. When our traumas and our triumphs happen in an insulated box, it is easy to feel we are alone in the universe. But when we are not so socially isolated—when the whole village can hear us argue or make love, see that a child is ill, watch the baby’s first steps—then we see our words, emotions, actions and states of being ripple out into the community and bounce back to affect ourselves. It becomes so much more obvious that we are not discrete subjects alone in an objective universe but rather intimately connected with the world that environs us. New trends in urban design toward denser development thus have a significance far beyond their ecological and community-building benefits. Just as the isolated suburban box corresponds to an isolated self inside a fortress of security and faux-independence, a community of shared public spaces corresponds to a shared self, for whom the private realm of me and mine is limited. I am not advocating the abolition of that realm, neither in its external manifestation as a private space, nor its interior manifestation as the ego. It’s just that today, that realm has expanded like a tumor to consume nearly the whole of life. By bringing too much of life into the realm of the private, the separate self, the indoors, we end up with less life, not more: less security, less independence, less safety, and an ever-increasing need for more and more control. A recent innovation in traffic engineering gives us a glimpse of another way. Known as “second-generation” traffic engineering, it borrows from Dutch woonerf design principles that blur the boundary between street and sidewalk. 35 In many ways it is actually the antithesis of “engineering”, which seeks the optimum control of vehicular and pedestrian traffic through the “triple E” paradigm of traffic control: engineering, enforcement, and education. Instead, it foregoes control, dispensing with all traffic lights, stop signs, crosswalks, and lane markings, and inserting trees and other objects right in the middle of roads and intersections. Children can play in the street again! “What the early woonerf principles realized,” says [urban designer] Hamilton-Baillie, “was that there was a two-way interaction between people and traffic. It was a vicious or, rather, a virtuous circle: The busier the streets are, the safer they become. So once you drive people off the