Chris Vognar

Dean Terry grew up in the funky East Dallas enclave of Little Forest Hills, a neighborhood populated by artists, musicians and others who place a premium on the eclectic. "I couldn't wait to get out," he recalls in his new documentary, Subdivided, which airs at 8 p.m. Wednesday on KERA-TV (Channel 13).

As Joni Mitchell once sang, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.Little Forest Hills is still alive and proudly different. But Mr. Terry, a professor in the Art and Technology program at the University of Texas at Dallas, took flight: first to the University of North Texas in 1988, then outside Pasadena, Calif., for work, and then to a North Dallas subdivision near Frankford and the Dallas North Tollway in 2003.

There he found neighbors who didn't talk to each other, a mishmash of massive McMansions, and a general disinterest in community and public space.

"One of the things I really wanted at this stage of my life was some kind of community," he says. "And there it was, where I left."

The need to understand his jarring new sense of isolation inspired Mr. Terry to make Subdivided, a 48-minute rumination on the decline of public life and community in suburban America.

"The film is about hopefully trying to illuminate the question of why," says Mr. Terry by phone. "Why does it feel this way? Why doesn't anybody talk to anybody? Why do I feel alone? And what can we do about it? I made the film to share those questions, and also to visually identify them by holding your attention to certain kinds of images."

Those images include chairs and benches carefully placed in a community where no one ever sits in them. And cars as far as the eye can see. With the images come statistics: Since 1990, the number of people with a daily commute of more than 90 minutes each way has shot up 95 percent.

Mr. Terry isn't interested in a blithe dismissal of all suburbs. He since moved to Richardson, where he can walk to campus, and where he's gotten to know just about all of his neighbors. He's more concerned about the effects of increasing sameness and development that disregard the sense of community engendered by neighborhood continuity and integrity of design.

So, as you might expect, he has issues with the McMansioning of America. "It changes the nature of the community," he says. "It creates a lot of turnover. It creates a lot of anger and division. People identify their community with a sense of place. When you change the sense of place, which you do through dramatic visual changes, you've changed the city."

The film's comparison of Little Forest Hills, in all its boho glory, and his impersonal subdivision would seem to leave a lot of room for middle ground. After all, plenty of suburbs are inhabited by people who talk to each other. The places in the film are chosen because the filmmaker called both home, and Subdivided is as much personal essay as documentary study.

But the film does a fine job of bringing in experts who expand the circumstances beyond Texas borders. Among the most eloquent is Robert Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard and author of the acclaimed 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. For Mr. Putnam, community is a matter of face-to-face connection, or taking the time to escape your bubble and participate in a group activity.

And if it all sounds like pie-in-the-sky idealism, Mr. Terry and others in the film, including a Dallas police officer, point out that the neighborhoods least susceptible to crime are those where residents know each other.

Mr. Terry recalls an increase in car thefts and car break-ins during his three years in subdivided no man's land. "If I were a criminal, I would say, hey, here's a neighborhood where no one talks to each other, people have really high fences, no one will notice if I come in and out of this place, no one's looking," he says. "The leadership of the community needs to think about strengthening the bonds of the community itself."

And if that doesn't work, there's always Little Forest Hills.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com

Subdivided
8 p.m. Wednesday and 11 p.m. Jan. 9, KERA-TV (Channel 13)