Community in suburbia: The effect of neighborhood design on sense of community and civic engagement

Recently, much attention has been focused on American civic life and its apparent decline. However, the scholarly literature examining this phenomenon has neglected a possible contributor to the loss of community: suburban sprawl and the neighborhoods it has created. This dissertation addresses the question: Is suburbia an environment less conducive to vibrant civic engagement and a sense of community? Drawing on the works the New Urbanist movement, I first articulate an “ecological” theory of the relationship between civic life and the physical structure of the typically suburban environment. Specifically, I hypothesize that certain privatizing and isolating features endemic to suburbs limit the space and opportunity for the informal, public, day-to-day interaction that is the bedrock of community. I then explore the concept of “community,” discuss its complexity and connotations, its importance to democracy, and specify its meaning with regard to this study. Finally, I undertake two empirical analyses of the hypothesis. The first synthesizes National Election Studies (NES) survey data on civic attitudes and behavior with information regarding certain structural characteristics of respondents\u27 census tracts. I employ a series of regression models to determine whether residents of more suburban neighborhoods exhibit less community than their urban counterparts, controlling for possible intervening demographic variables. The second analysis explores the results of an original survey of two Austin, Texas neighborhoods that are demographically similar but possess divergent design features. These analyses provide empirical evidence that those who live in more suburban neighborhoods do register lower levels of civic engagement and sense of community than those less exposed to such an environment. Although the analytical methods used cannot directly determine the causality of this relationship, the findings of this study are consistent with the New Urbanist ecological theory and undermine competing explanations. These results suggest that current land-use, development, transportation, and regional governance policies must be changed to allow for more compact, mixed-use, pedestrian-based neighborhood planning that features the public, social space necessary to a vibrant civic life