Why Dogs are Good for the Neighborhood

Leonard, the dog we adopted from Atlanta Lab Rescue last summer, is doing better.  Tom says he's now "doggier" than he used to be, and I think that's right.  Even though he still doesn't ask to go into the backyard regularly, he does occasionally, and we can now get him to go outside with the promise of a treat (he's not big on dog biscuits, but he'll do anything for Pupperoni).  So we end up walking him at least twice a day and sometimes more frequently. 

Although I still have one child living at home, somehow it works out that I end up doing the preponderance of the dog walking, at least when I am home.  Tom certainly helps out -- often walking him while I'm at work or sometimes while I'm making dinner -- but when I'm around I do most of it.  And being out on the street with the dog once or twice a day, I've seen the changes day by day in the new house that's being built and the one that's being renovated, and the lack of anything at all happening at the corner, when the apartments used to be.  I've seen babysitters arrive early in the morning and leave at the end of the workday, and I've met neighbors I'd never met before, even though I've lived here a really long time.  And there are other neighbors -- almost all neighbors with dogs -- that I now see regularly enough that I know them better than I did.  If you see the same people enough times, you know them well enough to talk to them, and if you know them well enough to talk to them you might get to know them better.

Caroline gave me a copy of  "Life Between Buildings:  Using Public Space" for Christmas.  In about two hundred pages of text and photographs, Danish architect Jan Gehl picks up where Jane Jacobs left off to identify specific features of the built environment that create places where people want to be.  There are things we have to do -- go to work, go to the grocery store, go home -- that we will do whether they are fun or not.  But if there is something interesting along the way-- if on the way home, you walk by a neighborhood bar or coffee shop and spot friends -- you might linger or take a detour,  Then there are things that you do just for fun, that you don't have to do at all.  And if we are making a choice, we prefer lively streets to dead ones, a shopping district with interesting, unpredictable things to see and lots of people and musicians on the street corners rather than a mall, and places that are pleasant to be rather than, say, walking along Buford Highway.  A common denominator here is there being other people around who might be doing something interesting, or with whom we might strike up a conversation, or we might already know and could catch up on what they've been doing since the last time we saw them.  This is what the book is about,  It sounds obvious, but it's not, or at least it wasn't to me.

"Low-intensity contact is also a situation from which other forms of contact can grow," according to Gehl.  

"Contacts that develop spontaneously in connection with merely being where there are others are usually very fleeting -- a short exchange of words, a brief discussion with the next man on the bench, chatting with a child in a bus, watching someone working and asking a few questions,and so forth.  From this simple level, contacts can grow to other levels, as the participants wish.  Meeting, being present in the same space, is in each of these circumstances the prime prerequisite."

If "being in the same space" is the prerequisite, getting out of your house and not being sealed up in your car is really important.  He continues,

"The possibility of meeting neighbors and co-workers often in connection with daily comings and goings implies a valuable opportunity to establish and later maintain acquaintances in a relaxed and undemanding way....Frequent meetings in connection with daily activities increase chances of developing contacts with neighbors, a fact noted in many surveys.  With frequent meetings friendships and the contact network are maintained in a far simpler and less demanding way than if friendship must be kept up by telephone and invitation.  If this is the case, it is often rather difficult to maintain contact, because more is always demanded of the participants when meetings must be arranged in advance."

Every once in a while, someone goes crazy on one of the neighborhood message boards or email lists about dog waste left in their yards, or in plastic bags in their trash cans.  (Trash cans?  Really?)  (My favorite recent one included a long post about what a health hazard dog poop was, full of coliform bateria and other microbial agents, followed by a response to the effect of "I can see why people don't pick it up after their dog - they are afraid.")  Dogs are good for the neighborhood because neighborhoods with people who walk their dogs are going to have closer social connections with their neighbors.

I have to stop writing now. I have to go walk my dog.