Make Mobile Home Parks More Parklike

Half the battle fighting the stigma of mobile home parks would be won if only they were made to feel more like a garden oasis than a gloomy prison yard. I've reworked the grounds of the mobile home park I designed for the Quadplex / four tiny homes per chassis, using several of the patterns described by the late, great Christopher Alexander: Partitioning the parking lot into several connected segments rather than one long open space. Putting in footpaths which run at right angles to the parking lot 'roads'. Footpaths between buildings. Terminated vistas. Smaller spaces opening into larger ones in this case the small courtyard of each unit opening into the large segmented parking area. Touching tree canopies on either side of the street the better to make each sub parking lot feel like its own little 'square'.

The more typical mobile home park layout, as seen in this google streets view, has a bit of a chaotic parking arrangement and all too little in the way of trees and flowers. Already a century ago Louis Mumford showed that if there must be 'worker housing', let it at least make the effort to incorporate some of the charms of the natural realm. Let it lift the spirits of those doing the hard work required to make the county run. While this park seems reasonably pleasant at the street view, many parks with their drab, dull, environs would seem more to deflate the spirits of their residents. And a fair number of mobile

home parks are all too reminiscent of what is described by Dickens in his serial tale of Dombey and Son: 'Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcasses of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.'