The common good: the politics of happiness and aesthetics of American spaces

I am greatly fascinated by spaces: the built environment and the influence it has on the social and cultural practices. I am deeply in awe of the aesthetics of beautiful places, of great designs and functions. For a while, therefore, I have been thinking of how to streamline my research interests into the aesthetics of spaces, behavior, design and décor and the overall wellbeing of the individual and wellness. I also discovered that there is a whole field of study called Happiness Studies!

Away from heavy theory and philosophizing, I want to venture into the glamor and intrigue of space and social practices. Talk about the aesthetics of landscape architecture and design: the wholesomeness that results from the combination of land policies and planning.  Coming to the US, I was intrigued by the politics of affordance factor of the built environment. So, I decided to audit a course in the Department of Landscape Architecture last spring.

The class helps me find expression to some of my deepest feelings about the environment. I came to have a clearer understanding of my own city. To be sure, most of us would regard Kano as a modern city, but it’s a premodern city like most African cities. First off, Kano has warren and narrow streets designed for communication rather than the free highways and wide streets meant for movement and transportation of a typical modern city.

I don’t even know how we can confront and tackle challenges in our cities. But American cities were once like ours, premodern and chaotic, with streets as giant sewers. The streets in Kano are still the giant sewers, collecting dirt and rubbish and washing them away at the rainstorm.

Industrialization presented new challenges to the modern city, which most African cities currently face. Those challenges give birth to the rise of regulatory state and laws such as pollution regulations, building codes, public health and sanitary codes, for what is called the “common good.” The common good would ensure quality of life, air quality and increased life span. The connection is clear between design, environmental planning and good life. Simple environmental policies such as vaccine, antibiotics and water treatment can help double life span.

Beyond the common good, America puts important values on her housing. In the eyes of the government, Americans are not free-floating subjects confined in her territory. From the design of the houses and neighborhoods, America sees a house as a foundation of all virtues and morality.

Cities become ugly and crowded if architects and planners are not in control. Architects and planners are not in control in Kano. The striking difference between modern city and pre-modern city is that modern city grows up, pre-modern city grows out from the affliction of urban sprawl. The criterion for modernity is not on bridges and electricity but on nuances of space that make life easier and more efficient. It’s about control and resource allocation, planning and implementing policies that move people and goods across spaces unhindered.

If you reform the physical environment in which people live, you’ll also change the underlining factor of social relations for good. With careful and efficient planning and social services, people become polite and less susceptible to crime, cooperative and willing to help authorities. Planning also means being security-conscious on how you build the physical environment. High rise buildings are designed in concepts of panopticon surveillance. Therefore, you can tackle social vices by the design of the city. By designing of the city, you can attract business and provide jobs for the people.  The American public policy realized early on that the cause of crime is social dislocation, the solution is building communities.

As our phones are no longer just machines for making phone calls, the idea of modern architecture goes way beyond building a house for shelter against the elements. A modern house is a machine for living, fitted with dwelling requirements and modern conveniences: heating system, internet and landscape greenery. Building a good, habitable housing is not just about expensive taste, it’s about our humanity and the common good.

But pause to answer this question before we proceed, whether as an individual or a policy maker:  When you are building a city, what problems are you trying to solve? I cannot mention one policy for sure that housing department is solving in Kano. So, at individual level, what problems are you solving when you are building a house?

Does where you live look like somewhere you wish to raise your kids? Fire in my mind, I am intentional of where I should raise my kids. I should be able to choose where I live and not be dictated upon me by choicelessness. I work hard in everything to maximize my options.

When talking about African cities in after-class discussion with the Professor, Lagos regularly came up in our discussion. Most of the things he mentioned about modern cities are relatable to African cities. There are crimes in big cities because too much people want to live in the city. Too much population enables anonymity. Because too many people want to live in the city, modern architecture requires that you need to find ways to effectively manage your resources. Build open spaces for people to walk, build spaces for business so people can work, provide a high-capacity transportation system to take them there and public gardens to unwind. The intersection of landscape architecture, social behavior and housing policies manifests in how people interact with each other and with their environment.

City living has some rules. The smaller the people, the cleaner the environment. Crowded living is not in agreement with the convenience of modern city. As everyone wants to live in the city, the city becomes crowded and dense. High-density can usually mean poverty and easy spread of disease.  Density decline is a function of the distance. That’s why American houses are detached, separate entities, unfenced but private with a specified number of people to live in.

Another great engineering feat is water treatment and supply. How to categorize waters - waste water, rainstorm – treat them and recycle them to the society, effectively making the environment more sustainable. We all want comfortable life in an efficient environment, but efficiency is sometimes ruthlessness. Robert Moses comes to mind in the US history of public works. During this discussion I could only think of the resistance Kwankwaso faced in my state for trying to sanitize the environment. Engineers work in the dilemma of the desire to save the public and the hatred for people, but the benefit of urban renewal is worth the price of dislocation since you can’t build anything without disturbing something. The problem is that city planners only see the problems, not the humans in those buildings. I wish for a more humane approach to dealing with some of these problems in African cities.

As an African newly in the US, I can feel the effects of design and lifestyle in my life. I am sure people in GRAs can relate to the bad side of a highly organized living. The advantage of slums is that they brought people together in a very important human way. They created values of care and solidarity among the residents. This is an important factor in measuring the gross happiness index of the people. The metrics nowadays are no longer about the GDP.

Finally, if Kano city is still a premodern city, American cities in the premodern age were once ugly, infectious and criminal. Where there is a will, there is a way.