You fear what you dont know. So, get to know me.

"A good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people's determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around. This balance is largely made up of small, sensitively managed details, practiced and accepted so casually that they are normally taken for granted," (Jacobs 59).

I have come back to Florida to live with my parents for only a short while, but during that time I have made a few observations about the city and neighborhood designs and the apparent social consequences. I am writing under the assumption that the social codes I have ignored here in Central Florida are phenomena of documented social theories (so I have intellectual basis). The theory espoused by Jane Jacobs copied above deals with the intricate social system that must balance itself if social harmony is to exist. Unfortunately, without long-term experience in my current environment I cannot appropriately appraise it, but I did get to thinking. Is it possible for a negative or disadvantageous harmony to form in an environment? Could social roles be filled, that while are necessary for the society to continue to function as it has been, do not positively contribute to the members of said society? I think such a set up would be called disfunctional. And I think that what I have been overlooking is the inevitability of harmony. I suppose then that what our communities need are harmonies that enrich and satisfy the members. Harmonies that are self-correcting and based on the true needs and desires of the members. Well, whether you are here in Central Florida or California or Nebraska, such cohesive communities are difficult to plan for and even harder to formally and informally maintain. Not only that but the difficulty to garner a well-rounded city neighborhood can only be outdone by the ease by which an imbalanced neighborhood becomes a reality. After all, a balance will be struck.

Furthermore, Jacobs goes on to address an underlying assumption made about the "ideal" neighborhood "turned inward on itself":

In a town of 5,000 or 10,000 population, if you go to Main street (analogous to the consolidated commercial facilities or community center for a planned neighborhood), you run into people you also know at work, or went to school with, or see at church... Within the limits of a town or village, the connections among its people keep crossing and recrossing and this can make workable and essentially cohesive communities. (115)

The fact that a rational person could become so entangled and confused because of the people influencing them is such a terrifyingly sobering thought. But at the same time those entanglements and endless webs of people can provide the social contact we all crave and rightfully need to disprove popular convictions that the public cannot be trusted, but instead must be feared.

'Togetherness' is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared... The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart.
When an area of a city lacks a sidewalk life, the people of the place must enlarge their private lives if they are to have anything approaching equivalent contact with their neighbors. They must settle for some form of 'togetherness,' in which more is shared with one another than in the life of the sidewalks, or else they must settle for lack of contact. (Jacobs 62)

This passage from The Death and Life of Great American Cities accurately describes the reality that balance must also exist between the members of a society and the systemic nature of the environment. Another phenomena of modern city populations Jacobs points out is one directly related to the creation or bearing of a local culture of