Contact

Contrary to the expectations that a home is a private domain or a locus of domesticity cut off from the world, we found that residences are carefully designed to promote contact between neighbors and strangers. The windows, backyards, front lawns, fences and bordering trees are placed or designed in order to enhance or stymie contact between those inside the house and those outside. As Dana Cuff argues,” The construct of the figure of the neighbor is multifaceted. It not only implies material figures such as windows on the streets, but embodies conceptions of self, stranger, other, friend, enemy. Intrinsically, the neighbor is an intersubjective mediation between self and the other: one must be one to have one. …This is visible in the physical form of the neighborhood.”

The choice of location, design of façade, mailboxes and milk delivery boxes, views from the interior, conversations across the fence, conflict over garden boundaries and outside sounds penetrating into the interior were issues that emerged during our interviews. The actual siting of the homes and the physical character of the building edges are material evidence of contact, of the lack of it, in the built environment.

Dana Cuff, “The Figure of the Neighbor: Los Angeles Past and Future,” American Quarterly 56: 3 (September 2004): 559-582.