The fact that I hadn't met my next-door neighbors until I bumped into them at an outdoor mall perhaps says more about me than it does about the neighborhood I live in, but still, the friendly conversation I'd never put effort into having in the driveway seemed to be made all the easier during a concert at The District at Green Valley Ranch.
My lack of neighborliness, UNLV sociologist Ron Smith tells me, is due in part to the way communities are designed, or rather, not designed. Lately, he says, communities ¡V with an abundance of strip malls and homes where the garage is the most prominent feature ¡V haven't been designed to bring people together.
"More often than not, familiarity will encourage people to start breaking down stereotypes and begin building human relationships," Smith says. "Over time, increased interaction leads to a greater sense of neighborliness and community because people start looking out for each other."
But in a city with a population constantly in flux, familiarity doesn't come easily. That's where the design professions come in, Smith says. They can actually plan chance encounters, like my concert experience, by creating environments that encourage people to get out of their homes and cars and back into public spaces. But accomplishing that, he says, will require reaching out to other fields.
"If you want to see what's wrong with architecture today, pick up the latest issue of almost any architectural design magazine," says Smith. "They're filled with pictures of interesting architecture, but you rarely see any people actually using those buildings."
Oddly enough, people have largely been absent from the design process, says Valerie Bugni, a Ph.D. student and organizational and social researcher with the consulting firm of Lucchesi, Galati Architects Inc.
"Many architects are entering the field with a philosophy that architecture is strictly about art," she says, "and some of them have lost sight of the very reason that architecture exists at all, and that's for people to use."
Smith and Bugni are quietly advancing research in the emerging field of architectural sociology, which examines the seemingly nebulous sociocultural factors that both influence and are influenced by the very tangible buildings around us. They hope to bring social scientists ¡V the people who study cultural patterns, human relationships, and organizational and community life ¡V to the drafting table so architects and planners can create spaces that better address the needs, interests, and ideals of the people who dwell within.
"Ultimately, this results in a higher quality of life," says Smith. "It results in communities where my neighbor isn't a stranger."
Smith and Bugni's work has its roots in the social design movement of the 1960s, which grew out of the dissatisfaction among citizens with the direction their communities were growing. Unfortunately, Bugni says, the movement's success was tempered in the subsequent decades by a lack of buy-in from architects and a limited focus on up-front costs. The result, social scientists lament, has lead to the idea that socially responsive design and corporate interests are usually mutually exclusive.
"By simply using the findings and tools that social scientists use every day ¡V public surveys, interviews, focus groups, field observation, even conflict resolution ¡V architects can better create buildings that are aesthetically pleasing and address the needs of their clients, be it an organization or a community," Smith says. "For a fraction of the total cost of a project, social research conducted prior to design can help architects avoid problems that they might later have to go back and fix. A lot of headaches could be avoided with a relatively small investment up front."
The return on that investment can appear in places other than a construction job's ledger sheet. The Las Vegas advertising firm R&R Partners experienced a 20 percent drop in its employee turnover rate after using social research to design its new headquarters. The building encourages collaboration and nurtures both creativity and a sense of community among the employees, says R&R Chief Financial Officer Jim King. "It was clear that we needed to invest in something that was designed specifically around our culture, our needs, and our projections for future growth," he says. "Lucchesi, Galati helped us stitch our community together, express our brand, and create a flexible space that inspires creative thinking and problem solving."
So, if the social architecture can inspire workers to stay at a company, could it also inspire residents to invest more time in their communities?
Absolutely, says Smith. Public participation in the design process builds more than just functional and cost-effective structures. It also helps to build greater community pride and sense of belonging, things that Las Vegas is sometimes accused of lacking. Half our population, after all, has been here less than a decade.
"Public participation during the design process builds trust between city officials and residents," says Bugni, who for the past two years has worked with a local municipality to help staff and residents understand how planning and capital improvement decisions can affect its residents' quality of life. "There is a growing need for architects and planners to understand a community as an organization and to design and develop in a way that preserves or increases the social, community, and civic capital that exist there. They need to know how each project fits into the social and cultural context of the surrounding community."
While the practice of social design in the private sector has been scattershot, at best, in the halls of academe it's been essentially nonexistent. Smith and Bugni have begun laying the foundation for change in design circles. They have co-authored articles for academic journals and are frequent contributors to the newsletter of the American Institute of Architects. They've presented their work to Harvard School of Design, the Urban Land Institute, the American Sociological Association, and the Environmental Design Research Association.
And this summer they co-taught Architectural Sociology, one of the first courses in the country to bridge the two disciplines. Filled primarily with architecture students, the course traced the evolution of social design and examined how socio-cultural phenomena and architecture have influenced each other.
"Many of the students in the class already know how to draw; they know all about construction techniques and about materials," explains Smith. "But in the matter of just a few short weeks, they also discovered that to become truly great architects they also have to be great social psychologists, community sociologists, and organizational theorists."
Bugni added, "Most architects will argue that they already bring a social perspective to each project. But while that's probably true, it's more than likely on an intuitive level ¡V and there's a big difference between intuition and scientific rigor."
According to Michael Kroelinger, director of the School of Architecture, many universities offer courses on environmental behavior, but Architectural Sociology is the first course he has seen taught from a sociological perspective. While the course is not yet part of the school's core curriculum, Kroelinger says the class is a wonderful resource for students.
"A paramount issue in the field of architecture is understanding the needs of the user," say Kroelinger. "Architectural sociology underscores the importance of understanding people's values, needs, and attitudes, from an individual level to an organizational one. Most important, though, students need to know how to integrate what they learn in this class to the studio setting, where they can then apply it to real-world problems in the community."
That message got through to Jason Jorjorian, a sixth-year graduate student in UNLV's architecture program. "I always knew there was a connection between sociology and architecture, but this class helped me understand the depth of that relationship. As architects we need to be accountable for what we create, which means being able to prove that the work that we do will accomplish certain goals. Intuition alone just won't cut it anymore."
Jorjorian, who was hired by Lucchesi, Galati Architects Inc. shortly after earning his bachelor's degree from UNLV in 1998, is already applying much of what he learned in the course to his work.
Using field observation, user needs analysis, and demographic studies, Jorjorian is helping to design a multigenerational recreation center in Centennial Hills. While he hopes the end result will help foster a greater sense of community by providing spaces that encourages public interaction, he recognizes that architecture can only enable such behavior, not dictate it.
"Architecture by itself is not the determinant of any certain human behavior, but it can, if done correctly, play an important role toward encouraging it," Jorjorian says. "We hope the facility will help bring generations together by giving them the opportunity to interact, but we are also mindful of each generation's need to be among people from their own age group. It's about finding a balance between design and what the community wants."
A native Las Vegan, Jorjorian hopes to focus his career on improving Las Vegas through design. His thesis project, which examines five urban housing models, for example, is aimed at creating a sustainable community in downtown Las Vegas.
Such projects, Kroelinger says, illustrate how intimately involved architects are in the development and evolution of our city. "The fact that so many of our graduate students are pursuing projects that are responsive to the problems in our community seems to underscore the importance of a class like Architectural Sociology."
As with any groundbreaking change, Smith and Bugni expect lasting results to be hard won and likely slow to transpire. But conditions in Southern Nevada do seem ripe for success. Public participation at Clark County Planning Commission meetings is up dramatically. Communities that previously had no formal structure, like the Huntridge area, are creating vision statements that declare, in no uncertain terms, what they want and don't want in their neighborhoods. And the recently appointed Clark County Growth Task Force is examining the very issues that Smith and Bugni are promoting.
"If we could be instrumental in shifting how architects and contractors look at growth and development ¡V not to mention the built environment's connection to the social and natural world ¡V then we'll have really accomplished something," says Bugni. "I think we're at the beginning of what could be a meaningful contribution to the future of our valley."
While Smith and Bugni both acknowledge that social design is by no means a panacea for the challenges that our valley faces, they do consider the partnerships UNLV is building a step in the right direction. "I am a strong believer in building connections between the community and the university, and I can't think of how I can do this any better than through this project," says Smith. "It brings together our community, the university, and private industry ¡V all to make Las Vegas a better place to live."
