Growth in Kyle

March 15, 2007, 3:50 p.m.

In praise of third places

The Myth of Jones:
A Column

It's remarkable how one can bring an idea to mind, then completely forget about it when writing about a related topic. Case in point: A blog entry some time ago about planning for Kyle.

Indeed, there is much more to a city than simply building the infrastructure to support the residences. And here's where the new planning director in Kyle, Don Q. Reynolds, might be able to lend a hand, though this isn't normally the kind of task city administration is likely to push. We might not even be talking here about a planning issue so much as an economic development issue, and it may not be an economic development issue so much as a civic and cultural issue.

Kyle needs places. Not just public events, which the city is quite keen about funding. The city needs places so it can have a life. The city needs places that aren’t bedrooms, boardrooms, meeting rooms, schoolrooms or living rooms. Places that split the difference between the privacy of the family home and the structured publicity of the work place. Third places where you can grab a drink without buying a lobster to go with it.

Kyle used to be a small town with small town ways of sociability. The old folks in Kyle, who hang around the morning liar's table at Fonzie's, understand the dynamic very well, which is one reason, among many, why the old folks in Kyle are such fine citizens and democrats. But the old folks who have lived in Kyle for virtually all of their lives have become a very tiny minority. And young people fighting traffic on their way into Austin every morning don't have time to stop for breakfast.

Now that Kyle approaches 30,000 residents, the city is dead for its size. The homely institutions of small town society can’t produce useful civic outcomes in a larger town that has become, as former Hays County Commissioner Susie Carter once described the changing landscape, “a cancer of houses.” The population in Kyle is simply too large, too young and not close enough to the land.

Carter, being no friend of urbanity, lamented the lost countryside of the small community in which she grew up. But friends of urbanity are no more excited by cancers of houses that isolate citizens and degrade the common life essential to democracy. The common enemy of ruralists and urbanists is suburbia, which is the future so many fear for Kyle.

What makes a city truly different than a suburb? Cities are self-sustaining, with their own economies, each with its own sense of location and each with its own milieu of people who truly live together. Kyle isn't like that, in large part because Kyle is a young city that doesn't serve the socializing interests of young people.

Kyle now is substantially populated by young homeowners who work and play elsewhere. For these people, Kyle is an abstraction, the general area where their houses are located. They tend to work and play in Austin. They tend to sleep and raise school children in Kyle. But few of these people really live in Kyle, which is surely a threat to social cohesion and civic virtue.

"Civic life requires settings in which people meet as equals, without regard to race, class, or national origin," Christopher Lasch wrote in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites. " . . . Even the pub and the coffee shop, which at first appear to have nothing to do with politics or the civic arts, make their contribution to the kind of wide-ranging, free-wheeling conversation on which democracy thrives, and now even they are threatened with extinction as neighborhood hangouts give way to shopping malls, fast-food chains, and takeouts."

As opposed to the garden variety of reactionary market fundamentalist who poses as a conservative in today's schtick-laden political discourse, the late, great Lasch was a true conservative. That is, Lasch believed there really is such an entity as human excellence and that it can be achieved in a democracy, so long as we make the right kinds of demands on ourselves and each other.

That means, in part, that we don't simply accept half-baked views in the name of "open-mindedness." It means also, in part, that we earn esteem for ourselves and from others by the utility of our acts and the probity of our opinions, which is different from merely conditioning people to think highly of themselves.

It may be surprising to hear that a conservative places a certain amount of value on places like nightclubs and coffeehouses. Again, though, Lasch is the real deal. Third places create settings of informal sociability where decency is the highest value. In third places, people learn to share their views and get along with them. They learn a bit about understanding each other and negotiating points of view, which is the lingua franca of a democracy.

People have fun together in third places and learn to appreciate each other for absolutely no other reason than that they're human beings. Third places erode hostility towards the "other." On Lasch's view, which is hereby endorsed, third places are the breath of a city. They are what make cities special, exciting and functionally democratic. Cities don't develop culture just because people lock themselves in their houses and work on creative projects. It's necessary for people to assemble spontaneously and informally, spin their ideas around and take them back to work.

There is, of course, plenty of opportunity in Kyle today for people who have received civic acculturation to exercise it. But without third places, there is precious little chance that those who are so acculturated will mix informally with those who aren’t.

“You can expect to find a core of regulars at the third place, but you also meet casual acquaintances and complete strangers,” Lasch writes. “Like the larger neighborhood it serves, the third place brings together people involuntarily united by the mere fact of physical proximity … It is this admixture of involuntary association that gives the third place a quasi-political character. In this milieu, recognition has to be achieved through force of character instead of being conferred by your achievements, let alone the size of your bank account.”

Planning won’t bring fast food, big boxes and shopping centers to Kyle. They’ll show up without being asked, and Kyle certainly needs the economic development. But Kyle also needs a civic aesthetic if the city is to become anything more than a house farm. Arms opened to third places might be worth the plans.

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