The Dwelling Complex: I. The Ancillary Unit: C. The Live-Work Unit: Background

The American Dream is ending. Or, more accurately, the version of it that dominated the continent since the end of World War II is now in its baroque final phase. Demographic trends and changes in the prevailing kinds of work are bringing on the now-inevitable finish. It is time to recognize the situation and grasp the opportunity to shape a new American Dream better fitted to social and economic reality. The next few Technical Pages will widen earlier discussion of the Ancillary Unit to consider the issues raised not only by having two or more residential units on a single home lot, but also by including one or more work places on the same residential lot. The fundamental aspect of the American Dream — owning a home on its own piece of ground — will certainly abide. What is changing are the connections of the home to the workplace that pays for it, and the relationships among the people living, working and visiting within the boundaries of that plot of land. The emerging conditions are complex, but in fact the shape of a new American Dream is describable. Inventing the suburbs The suburban version of the ideal home, prevalent from the 1950s to the 1990s, was a late, logical reaction to the conditions produced by the Industrial Revolution. It was a response to two centuries of increasing concentration of work and workers in cities. That concentration was necessitated by the centralized nature of power sources — water, then steam — for running machinery. The mechanized production process was often noxious, so the cities of the Industrial Revolution increasingly exhibited a basic paradox: they attracted and concentrated workers, but simultaneously repelled the workers’ dwellings to a tolerable distance. The 1910s invention of going to separate uses — most critically, work from living — was a late, legal formalization of the need to work to survive, and the need to be away from work to survive. It had taken several generations to invent the building types, transportation methods, and social and legal institutions to make working and living in the centralized industrial city tolerable, sometimes even enjoyable. Ironically, by the time these were achieved, the decentralized electric power grid had already shifted the underlying conditions of cities so fundamentally as to make them seem not only dated but disposable. The habit, and legal practice, of segregating living from work carried over from the Industrial Revolution "smokestack cities" into the latter half of the twentieth century. This habit prevailed even as smokestack-type work either moved overseas or was increasingly (if imperfectly) filtered by environmental regulation. Thus, today's situation in which the zoning practices in most places on the continent are vestigial devices for regulating a vanished world. They are the heritage of the ancien regime. The early twenty-first century world is one of hyper-zoning, with noxious production separated — for better and certainly for worse — not merely by zones but by oceans. This may or may not be a stable situation. But the task at hand must begin with the recognition that the kind of work, and the scale of working, have changed across the continent. New building types, and new methods of classing and regulating them, must be laid out. Flexible in their ways of understanding and containing living and working together, these new types and practices will be the subject of the next Technical Pages.