In Alexander's A Pattern Language pattern 68 contains a brave attempt to estimate the minimum community size for children age 0 to 5 to be able to make friends

In Alexander's A Pattern Language pattern 68 contains a brave attempt to estimate the minimum community size for children age 0 to 5 to be able to make friends face2face. He makes the critical number around 64 households that need access to a green space and suggests a linear layout of houses along a green corridor. When I was a kid we just used the road (less cars then, over half a century ago in the North in the UK). Pattern 84 looks at the transition from child to teenager in a qualitative way and suggests that teenagers '...should be encouraged to form a miniature society, in which they are as differentiated, and as responsible mutually, as the adults in the full scale society'. He sees the teenagers ranging more widely across a town or city. I'm wondering to what extent distributed network tech can support that for sparse populations...