Scientific American has an article covering recent research about neighborly relations. The conclusion: people living in desert climates get along better with neighbors when they have nice, shady green lawns, as opposed to natural desert landscaping.
From the SciAm article:
The 60 or so individual subjects have been living within the various landscapes since 2005 and already have shown a strong preference for lush conditions. In surveys done before the landscaping took place, the residents, particularly those with children, rated mesic and oasis conditions more highly than their desert counterparts, with women most highly critical of desert yards. And those families who found themselves living with lawns and shade trees socialized more often with their neighbors than families whose yards hosted plants native to the Sonoran desert.
I wonder if this is why desert homes tend to have high stone walls between their yards: otherwise neighbors would be at each other's throats.
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Dave,
I think that the conclusion of the study, as you describe it, may be a bit premature. Yabiku, the researcher conductng the study, claims that "There are ways to design desert landscapes with shade and other features to promote sociability."
As a denizen of the Sonoran, this seems intuitively right to me. One reason it's difficult for neighbors to socialize in a native desert landscape is that it's quite simply HOT out there. One way to solve this problem is to install non-native plants like shade trees and lush grass. However, there are most certainly other ways of cooling things down. If sociability is linked to shade and temperature, then promoting sociability could be as easy as installing a nice porch or gazebo.