How a Subdivision Saved My Life
I was thrilled to learn that the UC Davis Design Museum has opened an exhibition titled, Village Homes: A Radical Plan on view through April 26th. The show celebrates the 50th anniversary of this unique solar village in Davis, CA that turned all the assumptions of the typical subdivision planning upside down and became the most coveted neighborhood in the city.
The show brings me personal pride because I lived in Village Homes from ages 8-17. My mom used her miraculous powers of community-building to find a house there when my parents got divorced. My family had a lot of friends in the neighborhood because so many 1970’s “movement” people were involved in developing the neighborhood or later moved in there. My dad had designed several passive solar homes in the neighborhood with his then company Living Systems. His colleague from the company still lives in an earth sheltered house there that looks exactly like a real-life hobbit hill.
By the time I moved into Village Homes with my mom in 1989, there was a whole set of kids around my age that belonged to these families. To say that Village Homes saved my life at that time does not feel like an exaggeration. My childhood reality had been ruptured and my dad now lived all the way across the country. But in this neighborhood, I got to know all the kids because we were always outside – on bikes or on foot (later skateboards and rollerblades) – traversing the network of pedestrian paths that wind through the neighborhood’s “common areas.” During big winter rains, we would wade or launch milk carton boats in the bio swales that capture stormwater. Everything was alive and composting and regrowing, including all of us.
Instead of fenced backyards, houses in Village Homes face public footpaths, so the whole neighborhood is like a walkable greenbelt. There is a “big field” with a shared swimming pool and community gardens on the west side of the neighborhood, and several types of fruit and nut orchards as well as vineyards throughout that are shared.
As kids, we would play outside, eat fruit from the trees, and sometimes have battles, launching the rotten ones at the boys. Pomegranate stains were a constant problem during the late fall, and once on a rainy winter day my friends and I grossed ourselves out by collecting all the snails we could find in people’s organic gardens and stomping them with our bare feet, getting covered in slime up to our calves.
There is room for these shared gathering places because space for cars was kept at an minimum. Generally, houses in Village Homes have car ports instead of garages, and visitor parking is limited. There’s a famous story about how the developers had to bring in a fire truck to show the fire marshal that there was, indeed, enough room for the truck to turn around in the cul de sac.
I’m convinced that my most extensive childhood artwork, “Maple Town” – a miniature village that I developed, and continually redeveloped, with two friends over 5 years, was a microcosm of where we were living, populated by small felted animals instead of real people. Thank god for those 1970’s modern houses with bedroom lofts where kids can make their own worlds. I think we worked out a lot of emotional material by constantly negotiating the changing cultural mores and evolving material culture of the tiny town we were building.
Places and land use choices shape our lives. It’s not abstract. Any kid can see it and feel it. Acknowledging and learning how to communicate the power of place is a crucial task for anyone who works in land development, conservation, agriculture, climate adaptation, planning or urban design. I believe it is a skill our culture needs more of to get ourselves into right relationship with the systems of our life world.
If this message resonates with you, you should come to my next free workshop, “Does Your Land Need a Brand?”