ABOVE: a home in Boca Pointe, Florida. BELOW: Townhomes in nearby Charleston Place
What is immediately apparent is the scarcity of informal socializing within many of the enclaves. On a mild evening I drove through one section after another of Boca Pointe, where some 2,000 houses and apartments have been sold, and saw hardly anyone out walking or in conversation with neighbors. The landscape's beauty felt embalmed. From Boca Pointe, I drove to Charleston Place, a nearby neo-traditional development that Duany and Plater-Zyberk, extrapolating from the development patterns of old sections of Charleston, South Carolina, had laid out with orderly rows of townhouses closely facing narrow, straight streets. In this suburban development people were out walking in twos, threes, and fours, many of them chatting with their neighbors. Some were strolling along narrow linear walkways of brick, which run behind the walled back yards and have rose trellises above them.
The well-defined, pedestrian-oriented outdoor space helps Charleston Place generate informal community activity, not simply a community image. A major defect of the shared outdoor space in planned-unit developments is that it is rarely defined tightly enough to invite people. The buildings, even when beautiful, are not arranged to create places that feel semi-enclosed and therefore special.
Philip Langdon, from the article "A Good Place to Live," The Atlantic, March 1988
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