Designing for Integrated Lives

(Source: Unsplash/Mikey Harris.)

Ever since I was young, I’ve been a sucker for a good skyline. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I recently spent a few weeks in Austin, Texas, and one of the perks was the view of the downtown skyline from the living room window. Watching the sun rise and set against the backdrop of the dozen or so sparkly skyscrapers was a special treat.  

Staring at the cranes in the distance, indicators of more construction to come, it seems like Austin is thriving as one of the leading destinations for the post-COVID population dispersal, made possible partly by the rise of working from home. Between 2020 and 2021, Texas was the number one state for domestic migration.  

This trend, of course, is a mixed bag for housing prices but also for the office real estate landscape. Many of these folks coming to town don’t plan on commuting to an office every day. According to Bloomberg, return-to-office rates are down to 57% from 68% in March. Meanwhile, The Real Deal reports that Facebook’s Meta plans to spend billions downsizing their real estate footprint, a plan that includes leasing out more than 600,000 square feet of office space in Austin across two properties. Why such a trend is unfolding is not rocket science: working from home is more convenient and people prefer to avoid the daily commute.   

But I Wonder if Something Deeper Is at Play

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, workers have had an unprecedented chance to express their preferences about their work-life arrangements. Up until now, employers have mostly had the upper hand: If you want the job, you must move to the city and come to a specific place every day for a specific set of hours. Workers have not had any leverage with which to counter-offer these kinds of logistical expectations. Now they do, and we’re getting a rare glimpse into the pattern of life that people actually want. 

For decades, Americans were sold a life pattern in which home and worksites were separated from each other, traversed only by automobile. While at work, all other aspects of life were expected to be put on hold. Perhaps what we’re learning from these trends is that such a pattern in which “work” and “life” are artificially separated from each other no longer fits what people want. Perhaps such siloization of life is not something we’re designed to sustain? Perhaps work and life are meant to be more integrated?  

The Case for “Scattered Work”

This is a topic explored in concise yet profound depth in Pattern #9 of The Pattern Language, which I’ve been revisiting this summer. In the chapter, titled, “Scattered Work,” the authors make the case that cities ought to use zoning rules to allow places of work to exist closer to neighborhoods rather than concentrating them primarily in downtowns, which ultimately mandates car-based commuting. Basically, the authors are suggesting a return to historical patterns of neighborhood design, wherein various types of buildings holding various types of uses existed side by side: homes were situated close to shops, churches, recreational spaces, and places of work. 

On the surface, it’s easy to see why they might suggest such a shift, considering the implications for land use and reduced dependence on cars…but not so fast! Surprisingly (as is often the case in this book), the authors base their argument less on the economics of land use and more on a humble observation of the psychological interconnectedness between our work, our relationships, and the built environment. Putting home and work close to each other, they argue, is a good idea not just for these more economic reasons, but because such a design more closely mirrors how humans inhabit the world psychologically and relationally. 

Real Life Is Interconnected

For most of us, life is very much interconnected. Our home life, personal lives, and professional lives all happen alongside each other. No matter how focused we try to be, we are all guilty of multitasking at work. We write a grocery list, text friends, pay bills and make doctor’s appointments in between meetings and Slack messages. Even if we don’t do those things, we think about doing them. This is because, for human beings, life happens all at once. It can’t be broken up. We can’t silo different parts of life away from the others for several hours a day, every day.  

Before the modern era, work, family, and leisure were more intertwined. Work was usually right in the home or close to it. Work, family, and leisure all flowed around each other at once with everyone in the family filling various roles in an organic rhythm. With the Industrial Age, this all changed and work became something to “go to” outside of the home and then something to “leave” at a certain time. Everything else had to fit around that schedule. Instead of being governed by the rhythms of nature and relationships, life became governed by the demands of the employer and the time card. 

This framework remains even though we’re now in the “Cloud Era,” with remote work becoming more popular. There’s still this idea that work is something you “leave life” to go do; when you’re done with work you go back to “real life.” A Pattern Language authors suggest that this is an artificial and problematic separation with implications for our personal lives: 

...this separation creates enormous rifts in people’s emotional lives. Children grow up in areas where there are no men, except on weekends; women are trapped in an atmosphere where they are expected to be pretty, unintelligent housekeepers; men are forced to accept a schism in which they spend the greater part of their waking lives “at work, and away from their families” and then the other part of their lives “with their families, away from work.”

Throughout, this separation reinforces the idea that work is a toil, while only family life is “living”—a schizophrenic view which creates tremendous problems for all the members of a family.” 

Granted, society, in terms of gender and family roles, looks a bit different today, but the central point remains: by concentrating places of work into “office areas” or administrative zones far away from residential areas, the design of our cities suggests that work and home life should be separated from each other, and this simply does not fit how life unfolds for us, emotionally or psychologically.  

Many Parts, Many Roles

At the time when A Pattern Language authors were writing, it was largely the norm that men were expected to go to work and make money. Women were expected to stay home and keep the house. Children were expected to go to school. But this is just not how people see themselves. We perceive ourselves as filling many important roles at once. The authors suggest neighborhoods ought to be arranged such that people can more easily see and move between the various roles and relationships of life that matter to them: 

In order to overcome this schism and re-establish the connection between love and work, central to a sane society, there needs to be a redistribution of all workplaces through the areas where people live, in such a way that children are near both men and women during the day, women are able to see themselves both as loving mothers and wives and still capable of creative work, and men too are able to experience the hourly connection of their lives as workmen and their lives as loving husbands and fathers.

In other words, neighborhoods should be designed to facilitate continuity between how we perceive ourselves and how we inhabit the built environment. We don’t see ourselves as siloed, splintered, and spread apart, but this is what many cities, with their current patterns of design, seem to suggest.  

An Opportunity for Neighborhoods

I have no doubt that the convenience of working from home and avoiding commutes are major forces driving the declining return-to-office rates. But I think part of what’s at play is a desire to lead more integrated lives.  

If this is indeed part of why folks are choosing to stay home, it means troubling times for downtowns that have large office real estate. But it’s also an opportunity for us to rethink the role neighborhoods can play in our vision of the good life. How can we leverage this increased demand for working from home to invest in our neighborhoods, to make them the vibrant, interconnected ecosystems that can allow people to lead more integrated lives?

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