I agree that Americans have vastly different sense of personal and usable space. My in-laws live in an identical apartment next-door to us, having moved from Tokyo to Osaka, whereas we moved from San Jose to Osaka. Their impression is that they've moved into a very large apartment, while I at first felt like Gulliver in a Lilliputian hive.
However I tend to think that America has only recently turned the outlying, non-urban spaces into discrete living and working areas. My crackpot theory is that this was largely due to lobbying by oil and car manufacturers, who wanted the government to create roads so that their product would be more widely consumed, but that could just be the mothership getting through the tinfoil again.
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Date: 2004-09-17 09:19 pm (UTC)However I tend to think that America has only recently turned the outlying, non-urban spaces into discrete living and working areas. My crackpot theory is that this was largely due to lobbying by oil and car manufacturers, who wanted the government to create roads so that their product would be more widely consumed, but that could just be the mothership getting through the tinfoil again.