The Containment Suburbs
Traffic calming does not require symmetry. Drainage does not require the figure to close. The new estates are doing a job nobody put on the planning application — and you can only read it from above.
You have felt it, and you have blamed yourself for feeling it: the new estate where every road loops gently back on itself, where the satnav hesitates, where you cannot quite leave by the way you came in. You were told it was "traffic calming," and you accepted it, because the alternative — that the shape of the place is deliberate, and not for your benefit — is not the sort of thought a reasonable person entertains before lunch. This paper entertains it. We have looked at these estates from above, and the view from above is a different thing entirely.
The feeling everyone has
From the ground, a modern estate is a series of pleasant, quiet closes. That is the experience by design. You cannot see the pattern from inside the pattern; you can only feel its effects — the mild disorientation, the sense of being gently, expensively herded, the way the roads seem to want you to stay. Residents learn the place not as a map but as a set of habits, and habits do not add up to a shape in the mind. They add up to a shape only on the page, and only when the page is photographed from the sky.
From the air
Photographed from the sky, the loops and crescents and roundabouts of a single estate resolve into one continuous figure — symmetrical where symmetry serves no traffic purpose, closed where closure serves no drainage purpose, repeating motifs that no highways engineer would specify and no cost-conscious developer would pay for unless the figure itself were the point. And at the centre of the figure, again and again, there is a thing that does not belong in a cost-conscious development: an old tree, mature and inconvenient, left standing exactly where the geometry comes to a focus. Developers do not leave such trees. Unless the tree is load-bearing, in a sense that has nothing to do with engineering.
What the geometry does
We are careful here, because we are not in the business of telling you your neighbourhood is evil. It is not the people. It is the geometry, and the geometry is doing work that was never on the application. The loops do not, in fact, ease the flow of traffic out of the estate; they are not very good at that, as anyone who has tried to leave at half past eight will confirm. What they are good at is not letting something out at all. Notice that the streetlights nearest the centre are always the ones that flicker. Notice how deeply quiet the closes go around three in the morning, and how the residents, without ever once discussing it, have all learned not to be out in them. The cul-de-sac is not a dead end for you. It is a dead end for the thing the close was drawn around.
What you can do
- Find your estate on any satellite map and look at the whole figure at once. Trust the feeling it gives you.
- Mark the dead-centre. Note what was left standing there, and which lights fail first.
- Watch the next phase break ground. The figure always wants to be completed.
Sleep well. We mean that sincerely. Phase 3 breaks ground in the spring.
Sources: publicly available satellite imagery; planning documents (where not withdrawn); resident accounts collected by this paper. We invite you to look down at your own street and disagree.