How Form Affords Function

After eight weeks of class, Social Issues in Urban and Regional Development has gotten me to think about how our social dynamics are influenced by the built environment. The choices that planners implement can improve or ruin a community, economy, or natural resource. This class has shown me that city planners have a responsibility to listen to various communities to understand what they have to offer. Something that I value about this class are the discussions, we acknowledge that we all have something different to bring to the table. It reminds me that even if I see my skills and viewpoint as unimportant, my perspective could be insightful to someone else. In other words, I have learned that communication is an indispensable aspect of problem solving. Effective planning requires the viewpoints and knowledge of people living in every type of economic, social, and physical environment.

With that being said, a concept that I identified with during this course is the idea that form affords function. This is derived from James J. Gibson’s theory of affordances. Basically the appearance of an object or landscape tells us intuitively how it should be used. A designed object, such as a coffee mug, tells the user how it should be approached and what it can be used for simply by offering a handle. Regardless of what environment, ability, or society we come from, this basic form of communication is received in an almost subliminal way. As people, we share intuition therefore this idea strikes me as something that should be highly considered when designing social and urban environments.

We can see how form equals function when we consider how American cities and cultures have adapted to cars. Our roads, bypasses, suburbs and large scale cities send the message that some places are only worth driving through. There are plenty of things in our built environment that would not exist without cars. Therefore, as we begin phasing this method of transportation out of our culture, we will notice a physical change. Businesses, parks, and public resources can become accessible at a smaller scale. If cities were made walkable in the same fashion of some small towns, then more connected and supportive communities could result. As someone who values aesthetics and appearance, it’s remarkable to think that a simple design choice can influence the way that people approach the world.

Why do we organize our communities the way we do and who we associate with because of that? This is what I think about when I consider how form equals function but it also relates to a similar concept: Community Based Asset Mapping. This is a decision making tool that allows people to decide where they want to live based on their ideal community. It is broken into three categories of assets: Human, environment, and community. For example if you have children and an income and job that allows you to move anywhere, you would probably want to live somewhere with a good school system, a lot of parks or recreation areas, and you would want your city and neighborhood to have a low crime rate. The reason this is interesting to me is because it can allow us to choose where we want to be from, who we want to associate with and therefore how others see us. It is unique to the 21st century and ties in with another phenomenon of our time: loss of community diversity due to exurbs. Exurbs are clustered developments within suburbs that share similar religious and political beliefs and often make the same lifestyle choices in terms of morals, ethics, goods, and services. If you can choose where you want to live based on asset mapping and are not limited by income or distance, you would naturally gravitate towards like minded communities. This is not a problem until you consider how exurbs would behave towards communities or individuals with diverging belief systems. Exclusion and discrimination are two behaviors that come to mind. Secondly, it would create social environments that are not receptive towards new cultures, ideologies, and ideas. I have observed this in my home town of Rio Rancho. In my experience, my city is predominantly conservative in both politics and religion. The lifestyle favored by the area excludes a large demographic of people for example, families without children, single adults, those without a car and people who are more oriented toward liberal ideologies. In the future I could see this type of community becoming more uniform and less accepting of outsiders.