Hobbiton (my term) is a residential area designed to be... “Awww! So cute, so comfortable, so green!” The dark side is that irrationally winding roads, big and small cul de sacs, and poor signage make these neighborhoods stranger-unfriendly, disaster sensitive and, ironically, fuel wasters. “I’ve been circling for twenty minutes. My GPS can’t find the address.” “Where did you say the fire is? We can't find it!” Dig a trench across one road and hundreds of people are cut off. And the arterial roads that connect the various Hobbiton neighborhoods to work and shopping areas get routinely traffic jammed.
The deeply spooky part is the residents are oblivious to these problems. They love these places!
Why are they so popular? Hobbiton design is popular because it attracts people who get comfortable when their Us versus Them thinking is stroked. This warm and comfortable feeling created by these designs results in blind- spot-thinking when it comes to fuel waste and disaster risk. Hobbiton is not a good part of the American dream. And it is not just an American problem either. This 9 Nov 13 Economist article, “A New Kind of Ghetto”, talks about how isolation is becoming a problem in England as well.
Through most of the 20th century, cul de sacs existed to cope with landscape harsh realities - a river, a cliff, a railroad, or something similar that could not be crossed. The ideal road design was some variant on the Euclidean grid system, and this was for good reason: The grid system made navigation easy and logical, and it offered lots of redundancy when road repairs were needed. And it took care of an important social function; it made neighbors of everyone. This promoted tolerance, something that is very important to material and social progress in modern communities.
But there have always been detractors from this practical way of designing residential areas. Critics have been complaining about the monotony of “the burbs” ever since Levittown was prominently developed near New York City starting in 1947. In the 1990's, as both prosperity and green thinking grew in the US, the complaints about suburban monotony started gaining some serious teeth. The Hobbiton-style residential designs became a lot more popular as a way of combating homogeneity and blandness of suburbia. The developers shrugged - they could go either way - but starting in the 1990's those that offered Hobbiton began to sell first and faster to well-heeled customers, and suburbia started the big shift.
The biggest problem is the social one. Hobbiton is an exclusive theme not an egalitarian one - think of gated communities as the “logical end” version. Hobbiton promotes Us versus Them thinking, which slows prosperity and growth. This trend towards Hobbiton living is deeply mixed in with the trend towards higher income disparity and lower social mobility - “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”-type social problems. This is a living style that promotes prescriptive intolerance, not progress. If much of a community is behind gates and thinking mostly about protecting children from outsiders, progress isn't going to happen.
Dramatic progress is disruptive. Think railroads or freeways ripping across the landscape. Think Venice first building its canals. This means progress happens only when new styles of cooperation happen. New styles of cooperation happen when members of the community trust widely and tolerate new things. Because implementing a disruptive technology always involves a lot of experimenting, many of those new things being tried will look silly, wasteful, and scary, but if the experimenting doesn't happen, the new lifestyle changing gems won't be found and exploited. What will happen instead is status quo: “Things are comfortable the way they are. You know your place; I know mine; Don't be trying anything stupid”-style thinking.
A major problem is blind-spot-thinking. The residents are oblivious to the high costs of this living style. They see benefit, not cost. They see the design style as promoting neighborly and green. “We have lots of parks, jogging and bicycling here. And it's safe for the kids, too.” What is not said, but becomes more and more part of this thinking is, “Those barbarians outside the gate... we are now safe from them. We don't have to deal with them.”
The cost is: Those barbarians outside the gate are hard-working Americans, too. Ironically, many of them are looking upon those inside the gates of Hobbiton as barbarians, because they are looking from inside their own gated community just down the road. But as the Us versus Them instinct flowers, those outsiders get harder and harder to trust, and working with them in cooperative ways, particularly new and innovative cooperative ways, gets harder and harder to do. That’s the big cost. And instead of trust, cooperation, and innovation, the feeling becomes, “Meh... Let them eat cake.”
Hobbiton is clearly an attractive design theme these days. That attractiveness, however, is based on Us versus Them instinctive thinking, and it supports waste. The attraction is expensive because of extra traffic congestion, difficult disaster response, and because it is harder to promote cooperation of the sort that supports disruptive progress. It is another form of modern day goat sacrificing.