Beckey D. Sukovaty

(Published by State University of New York Press, Albany NY, 2000; 351 pages, including index and extensive bibliography.)

With a doctorate in Environment-Behavior Studies from the University of Wisconsin’s School of Architecture and Urban planning, Herb Childress brings an unusual approach to the questions that obsess him: How does our environment, and particularly the built environment, affect the way we behave? In Landscapes of Betrayal, Landscapes of Joy, Childress is particularly concerned about ways that a fairly typical medium-sized American exurb–in this case, an unincorporated community of 15,000, Curtisville in northern California during the mid-‘90s–empower and, based on Childress’s research, more often constrain teenage residents.

Childress’s method is to get to know the teens and other important people in their lives over a long period of time, following them around and quite literally hanging out with them–to the point where most readers may want to know how he handles the liability issues as an adult who is present as teens indulge in a fair amount of alcohol and drug use, and petty crime. As Childress gains their trust, they share with him their every day lives and responses to their environment, and many come to view him as a friend and mentor rather than simply a visiting researcher.

Part of this response is no doubt due to Childress’s approach to his work, which highlights ethical issues ranging from the most moral way to conduct research to the ethics of zoning decisions. However, Childress does not always address these central themes in straightforward language, so at times we are left guessing whether he is simply describing conflicting approaches that each raise ethical ambiguities, or advocating a particular approach as a policy recommendation, or just spouting off about personal preferences that apparently he does not necessarily believe should be implemented universally. Similarly, he shifts back and forth between narration rich in keen observations and important context related to environment and behavior, and simply telling factually what he is observing with minimal commentary. Although the very useful diagrams throughout the book illustrating Childress’s observations about streetscapes and building layouts do add clarity, these stylistic quirks in his always entertaining work mean that readers seeking Childress’s main narrative themes will experience varying levels of satisfaction as they proceed.

That said, Childress provides us with a unique and fascinating mix of original research and analysis. Like the title, reading his book is both depressing and joyful, since he amply demonstrates the ambivalence Curtisville residents–like most Americans–

have towards their lives and their teens. This overwhelming ambivalence is fed by both seemingly unplanned past land use decisions such as the five wide lanes with inadequate crossings that make Curtisville’s main street essentially unwalkable, and by quite deliberate current actions such as refusal to lower minimum commercial or residential lot sizes, that together translate directly into a built environment that embodies the betrayal Childress refers to in his title. As he points out, when adults choose to stay in or move to Curtisville primarily because it embodies a middle-class rural fantasy within a suburban context, they tend to be reluctant to welcome the kinds of planning scenarios that create the diverse, vibrant, walkable (since as Childress points out, all younger teens and most older ones have limited access to cars and most smaller communities have essentially no public transport to the areas and at the times teens wish to travel) environments the teens he observed crave and thrive on. Along with this fantasy often comes one of escaping into a rural idyll from the workaday world–almost a Walden-Pond-by-night scenario–that is not shared by most teens. As Childress points out, teens tend to find joy in meaningful contact and interaction, which is often physical, noisy, boisterous, while their parents and the rest of the community are trying to retreat and relax in a calm, quiet atmosphere. Add to this our society’s fear of legal liability and insurance industry demands, plus teenagers’ need to challenge authority as they construct for themselves who they want to and should be as soon-to-be adults, and the handwriting on the wall can be read easily if one is looking, as Childress is.

Like many American towns and cities, Curtisville has created itself in an image of a culture that believes teens are disruptive and difficult at best, delinquent at worst, and the answer is to shunt them off to large high school campuses separated by distance and design from the community for much of the time, and virtually ignore them the rest of the time as long as they are not getting into visible trouble. Childress’s research supports the common sense notion that for many teens this will have a perverse effect, since they often want the exact opposite, attention, and will seek it in negative ways if more positive options are not available. Being bored almost to stupefaction, another common response Childress observed, does not seem a reasonable alternative.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Childress’s report comes in the last chapter, when he analyzes the ambiguities and conflicts he found in Curtisville as a clash between thirteen key pairs of ideas that he classifies as modernist and existentialist. For example, Childress pairs the modernist ideal, "economies of scale are sensible in all areas of life," with a contrasting existential ideal, "small and many are beautiful." Clearly, each idea has great power and can be defended ethically in many circumstances, even though they are in opposition. Although one may well quibble here and there with his classifications–"social classes and their neighborhoods should be separate" does not seem a particularly modern idea and indeed one could argue the opposite, for example–the contrast is by-and-large illuminating and thought-provoking. It also tends to put in context the lack of a clear and powerful ethical prescription in much of the rest of the book, even though ethics is such a central theme throughout. For as Childress himself points out, even though he clearly prefers and endorses the existential joy that the teens he studied seem to almost instinctively seek, there have also been many benefits from modernism along with the problems. Thus Childress rightly does not gloss over the ambiguities and contradictions that abound as Americans, and their teenagers, continue to try to figure out what is right and what is good in our physical environments and how they influence our behavior.

1*The act of architecture, whether that act takes the form of a ranch house or a drive-through restaurant, is really the creation of stage sets for everyday drama and comedy. We are constantly surrounded by things that we have built, from interstate freeways to neighborhood sidewalks, from city parks to parking lots. We built them all on purpose, and the purpose is often more interesting than the object itself. The things are just things, but the ideas behind them are a commentary on the future. (10-11)

5*Of course, teenagers don’t have the same kind of access to cars that adults do, so places that depend on the car don’t work well for kids at all. But they don’t really work well for adults either…(15)

6*We have, for the most part, given up on the idea that place matters in our lives, that places can deeply affect us, that we can have enriching relationships with places. (15)

8*Leaving aside the question of who got to answer this questionnaire [by Curtisville’s community services district], or even who knew of its existence, the responses portray a view of the good life that is distinctly middle-aged and middle-class. For teenagers, dense urban places (even as small as downtown Union) are popular and convenient because they offer lot of interesting social things to do and look at and touch and smell and taste, numerous places to gather that don’t require a car to get to…Teenagers are defined out of existence in Curtisville, because their concerns and interests are counter to those of the people who matter. That there are teenagers in the community anyway is an awkward fact for everyone concerned. (18)

10*…[T]he car allows extraordinary privacy, more than any other place in teenagers’ lives. In the car, they’re sealed off from others who can no longer reach out to affect them…Their cars allow them to remove themselves from the places where people know them, to go to other cities where they will become anonymous, to leave behind the prying of neighbors and parents and teachers and spend an hour off campus or in the woods, or a day in a larger town.

Kids could also use the car for their secret hiding spot, a place to hold forbidden cigarettes and magazines. The car was really the only room in many of these kids’ lives that they had complete and total control over…

The car was the parlor, the seat of entertainment and visiting. Access to the car was by invitation only, a privilege extended only to their closest social group. The close personal distancing–you sit much closer together than you stand in public, much closer together than you ever sit in your house–lends an intimacy that often spurs intimate talk. (49-50)

12*The buildings of Curtisville High School represented the common-sense campus, the "educational program spaces," the ones we could inventory. For fifty minutes at a time, Curtisville High existed as a set of thirty-some divided, discrete spaces; thirty cells in a honeycomb, each inhabited by its allotted drones and queen. But for the five-minute periods between classes, both the schedule and the campus reversed form, turned inside out. The leftover spaces became a seamless, connected arcade filled with almost 800 active individuals; the sealed boxes disappeared, at least for a moment, replaced with the playing field of free will.

The unallocated time–the negative spaces between the positive blocks of class time–also became visible. A lot of living went on in the five minutes between classes: secrets shared, makeup refreshed, snacks consumed, books exchanged, loves renewed, pent-up energy and aggravation released. Just as the point of the shopping mall for teenagers is not contained in the stores but rather in the promenade, the point of the school for most students is not the classrooms but the halls. The entire human agenda of most of the kids at school found expression in this indeterminate place and time: owned by the school but occupied exclusively by students, half hallway and half sidewalk, places that were open and connective but still held away behind closed doors for most of the day. (103)

18*The classrooms that worked most completely at Curtisville High–the ones where I repeatedly say joy in the form of close attention, spontaneous exclamations of insight, fluid relationships aimed at learning, laughter and questioning–were also the ones that had been most completely personalized, the ones that looked least like they might have been someone else’s room. Even where there was extraordinary commonality in gross elements like construction materials and dimensions (and the ever-present desks), there was a layer of personal history that masked the institutional uniformity. (131)

20*Places have an experential meaning at their core. They have their programmatic function, of course, but there is far more along with it. In a handful of places, we are invited to leave behind the mundane to find the sublime. We are given entry into a new and artificially heightened world. If teaching is the transmission of joy from one person to another, then it’s no surprise that in the best classrooms, the manifestations of that joy took all sorts of forms–posture, tone of voice, creative exercises, and all of the physical surroundings of the cathedral of knowledge. (134-35)

23*Parent child relationships, like all human relationships, are carried out in a particular place…

…The teenage role at home is closer to the role they play in their own work environment, the classroom: subservient, provided for, given a space that is nominally their own but which is tightly bound to the wishes of their superiors. Thus home is a particularly favored environment among adults, the place where they go to regain some control over their lives, to live at their own pace with their own belongings about them. Teenagers in their homes are surrounded by things they didn’t buy, organized in a way they didn’t design, tied together by a schedule that they didn’t determine. It’s no surprise that for so many kids, home is an ambivalent place, a tangle of love and powerlessness, the intersection of the child they were and the adult they want to be…(157)

26*This sharp division of home and work is another modern ideal that doesn’t work well for kids. We recognize this, since we institute meager gestures like "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" to try to fill the void. Teenagers are trying to figure out exactly what their mission in the world should be–for parents to say to them that work, a potentially central aspect of life, can and should be left in some other building rather than be a consuming interest, suggests exactly what we often say in words to one another but would hate to communicate to our children: work is for money. We don’t like it much, we often find it absurd, but we do it begrudgingly because there are bills to be paid. Leaving work exclusively at work, hiding or escaping or denying our way of making a living, is an admission of defeat; one that teenagers can read and believe. (165)

27*All of these things–the cul-de-sac planing and the resulting disconnection, the direct and immediate linkage between kitchen and driver’s seat, the centralization of business and community functions miles away from most residents, and the degree to which Curtisville’s residents fought to maintain the isolation that increased their feelings of ruralness and class security–made pedestrian travel out of the question for both adults and teenagers. It kept the streets quiet. It kept potential neighbors apart. (182)

29*The community holds the school at a distance, both physically and socially, but the school holds the town away as well. The community-school interchange is minimal because that’s the way we’ve designed it. The local environment is a superb resource for teaching, especially in light of the immediacy and experential focus of teenagers, but it is entirely wasted. Curtisville didn’t just appear by the hand of God; it was built by developers and speculators in response to some of the great pressures of twentieth century economics and culture. To have these teaching tools–these roads and highways, neighborhoods and small towns, the bluffs, the creeks, and the ocean–literally right outside the window and then to ignore them in favor of a curriculum designed hundreds of miles away is an incredibly telling decision. (231)

33*I had built my study on three simple questions: How do teenagers use spaces? How do they apply meanings and values to any particular place? How do conflicts about those places arise between teens and adults and between particular subsets of teens, and how are those conflicts resolved? After a year, I think I know some of those answers, and the idea of joy is at the heart of all of them.

That sounds simple, perhaps naïve. But I came to Curtisville in July, and became more and more depressed the more I learned. Here I was, in this growing community of new homes and businesses; in a school with a multi-million dollar budget, mostly staffed with competent, concerned people. Both the kids and the adults were telling me that something was missing, and I could tell that something was missing, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I was more and more concerned about the lack of satisfaction and intensity and desire that I saw. I couldn’t put my finger on the problem.

And then, in the middle of November, I came to the short performances of the Advanced Theater Workshop. These kids did demanding work under difficult and tense conditions with a live audience, and they were absolutely great. And the difference was joy. The love for what they were doing was so clear, all over their faces and through their motions, it just burned off the stage. And joy was what I’d seen in those handful of classes that "worked." Joy was what I’d heard in the laughing, teasing conversations on the Quad and at the Arco station. Joy was the fuel that moved skateboards and horses and pickup trucks. And joy was what was missing from most of Curtisville, and from most of it’s high school as well. I just didn’t have the word before. (254-55)