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REAR WINDOW, reimagined
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Some of you have been kind enough, when I see you, to mention you wish I’d write more movie reviews – and it’s true I write many fewer than I used to. However, one of my recent blog posts deals extensively with an intriguing classic, Rear Window. The URL is http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/2009/02/cities-imply-optionality-and-that-requires-privacy-part-1-the-virtue-of-peeping.html, and it begins:
Cities are where total strangers live companionably in close proximity – literally on the other side of a wall, floor, or ceiling. Why do we do this, and what does it imply about how we create urban housing?
As housing is the linchpin of cities, all these tensions and choices manifest themselves in our housing configuration choices. Hence the continuing urban fascination with Alfred Hitchcock’s best movie, Rear Window.
Stella: We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change. Yes sir. How’s that for a bit of homespun philosophy?
Jeff: Readers Digest, April 1939.
Stella: Well, I only quote from the best.
People live in cities to be physically close to one another – for business, social, religious, political, or intellectual reasons. Draw a half-mile radius around a rural farm and you may touch only livestock. Draw it around a suburban house and you may encircle five thousand people. In a central city, you may englobe fifty thousand people. The physical dimensionality of cities – going up – couples with the densely packed infrastructure of cities – townhouses and apartment flats instead of acre lots – to create human-contact options.
Part 2 will be posted tomorrow. Let me know if you like it!