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Suburbs are structurally lonely (your own castle with as little reliance on others as possible), and only ‘work’ when paired with other sources of community. Th

• clarry 8y ago
  > Suburbs are structurally lonely My European perspective. I wouldn't blame it on suburbs in particular. I would blame most if not all forms of city living. Most people live in flats where nobody wants to have anything to do with their neighbor and there is no communality. People move in and move out, nobody cares. The less you have to hear of your neighbor, the better. FWIW I would rather have a 'burb castle than a flat where I have to smell and listen to idiots drink, smoke, fight and blast music. And I think I'd rather get to know the neighbors over at the adjoining castle than the scum in these neighboring flats. Now farms and other isolated & rural towns are a different deal. There you're no longer mass of people. You actually get to know the community around you, and people don't come & go nearly as much.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • tezka 8y ago
    Thats not particularly a European perspective. Sounds like its just yours.
    • clarry 8y ago
      It is just mine, and I am European. I believe it is informative to spell it out in a discussion that points fingers at the (American) suburb.
      • tezka 8y ago
        your statement sounds like this is a point of view taken by the majority of people who live in Europe. Simple facts about the number and density of cities through out the history of the continent point to the exact opposite.
        • GavinMcG 8y ago
          And they already told you they didn't mean it that way. Maybe listen to them, adjust your expectations, and move on?
  • npunt 8y ago
    Yeah I think it’s not just a suburb problem, they just so happen to be (I think) the most common living situation for Americans. And if not in actuality, certainly culturally we are indoctrinated in a suburb mindset (own a home, go to college, American dream yada yada). It’s one of the reasons moving to a city after college is so exciting for us- it’s usually the first experience we have that challenges that mindset.
  • madengr 8y ago
    You nailed it. I live in a ‘burb castle’. I was grateful to get out of my apartment. The woman in the adjacent unit would burn a dozen candles and stumble in drunk every night. The guy below would scream and break stuff during football games. Another would blast rap music at 4 AM. Screw apartments. Now I can put up ham radio antennas, have a nice lab, garage for bike, etc.. I could not fathom living in a dense city.
• solatic 8y ago
  I lived on a kibbutz after college. It has its own set of problems. The closer you live to people, the more politics enters the picture. The less money there is to go around, the more that politics revolves around the relatively financially trivial. You can't force people to like each other just because they live in close proximity. The problem isn't finding people with shared interests and values, it's in building real-world (not Internet-based) communities around them.
  • npunt 8y ago
    The kibbutz (or kibbutz inspired) idea my friends and I have discussed is more about finding people you like and then forming it. I can definitely see it having downsides if you’re not actively involved in its formation.
    • doitLP 8y ago
      That’s great, but then you’ll start backsliding on the “diversity and inclusion” scale. I think it’s a constant trade off. As individuals with preferences, humans can’t help but form in groups and out groups.
      • fjsolwmv 8y ago
        Making everyone miserable is not the kind of diversity and inclusion we want. It's only acceptable in the sense of "if I'm a miserable out group, the happy in group don't deserve to be happy", which is maybe fairness but not a good goal state. D&I means forming good relations across boundaries, not arbitrary relations.
    • rdl 8y ago
      I still have some hope for something like seasteading to do this in the next 10-20 years (before Mars/Luna are viable options). In the interim I'm trying something vaguely like it in PR.
  • rubidium 8y ago
    I live in a Christian community focused on in-common living. Community requires commitment to stick things through. Having a common vision is important. More important is having the commitment to sticking with it, and relationship tools to help keep friendships intact in tough times. Some key tools: -right speech: no gossip, slander, or negative humor -forgiveness: saying I’m sorry when offending or harming someone, and having real forgiveness -making agreements: specific commitments that, when times are tough or good, the group can rally around.
• tokyodude 8y ago
  Interesting that the my image is the exact opposite. Downtown no one talks to each other. They live in fancy apartment buildings and go out to their events. In the Suburbs, neighbors have BBQs, block parties. I knew all the people around the house when I lived in the suburbs. The Garys next door with their bull dog and their daughter Diane living in a detached apartment above the garage. The Alberas with a farm in their backyard. The Kumbs with their kids Gary and Janice and a pool. The Ryans who mister Ryan would always ask me to rub his back and his daughters Kim and Nannet were both my babysitter at one point or another. The Caldwells with their 5 kids Brian, John, Wendy and 2 too small for me to have played with. The Bargayos with Leah and Laura. I can name at least 7 more families. Since that time living in apartments in cities I've never made friends with a single neighbor. For most of my life that's been the stereotype. There are plenty of movies about people knowing each other in an ET/Spielberg movie style suburban neighborhood vs the cold hearted city.
  • ido 8y ago
    I think you may be confusing being a child/adult (or having kids/childless) vs suburb/urban. We live in an apartment in an urban but not central part of Berlin and we know plenty of neighbours, especially since having kids. How many childless adults do you remember taking part of these suburban activities/communities?
    • Baeocystin 8y ago
      Not the parent commenter, but in my experience, lots. When we had block parties, the whole block, non-children-having folks and kids alike, was involved. In fact, the parents in particular seemed to really enjoy these BBQ times because they got to have conversations with other adults while the collective kids of the neighborhood ran around doing their own thing. It was fun!
  • jeromegv 8y ago
    Opposite anecdata. Lived in the suburb until my 20s, never had a block BBQ party, my parents would sometimes have a chat with the neighbour but that's about it. Living now on the subway line in a major city, can hop in to get to see friends all the time, walk to the groceries, community center, etc. Don't talk to neighbour either, but I feel much more part of a community living in close proximity with people.
• baursak 8y ago
  > Suburbs are structurally lonely I think it's a factor, but not a major one. Look at Tokyo, for example, which is probably very close to an ideal urban living arrangement in terms of density/comfort. Yet Japan also has a huge problem with "loneliness epidemic", from hikikomori to kodokushi. I think the biggest factor is what grandpa Marx identified hundred and fifty years ago: human alienation is an intrinsic feature of capitalism itself. There's tons of literature on this, e.g. see links below, but many people seem to be afraid to even read the arguments, let alone engage. https://socialistworker.org/2003-2/467/467_09_Alienation.php https://socialistworker.org/2003-2/467/467_09_Alienation.php https://isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation https://isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation
• forrestthewoods 8y ago
  In my experience cities are vastly more lonely and isolating than suburbs and rural communities. In rural communities everyone knows everyone. People talk to each other. People help each other. This is especially true in Seattle. The Seattle Freeze is very real.
• ellius 8y ago
  My armchair opinion is that the middle ground / something missing is characterized by a few things that used to be somewhat fulfilled by the workplace: 1. Tribal feel: 100-200 individuals not your immediate family. 2. Pursuit of some shared goal. When we were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, this was probably as simple as shared survival. 3. Forced interaction and cooperation. If you can flee at the first sign of annoyance, you're never required to develop deeper bonds with the people from #1 if they are even remotely irritating to you and can just opt out of getting to know them. Work probably fulfilled a lot of these requirements when people stayed at one place for decades. Even if people came and went, there was some stable group of people that you were stuck with in pursuit of a common goal. I suspect this held even in the face of industrialization and the formation of massive corporations. Now, though, people move around so much that the workplace feels extremely impermanent and fleeting. In some ways I think that may be a good thing. The "community" you get from work has probably always been false. But I believe it did serve a psychological need, and as that's degraded I think you're seeing a lot of unhappiness result.
  • npunt 8y ago
    Good insight, I agree the workplace is that sort of extended tribe, and as people switch jobs more frequently its replaced with a more vague 'industry' concept that is too diffuse and large to fulfill that smaller tribal association.
• sgt101 8y ago
  The need for and convenience of cars. Public transport promotes community, but cars isolate - in particular children. I daren't let my daughter ride down the lane on her bike, so she's trapped.
  • closeparen 8y ago
    I’ve experienced a hell of a lot more community in the give and take of rides across suburbia than on transit, where 95% of interactions are someone asking for money.
• haloux 8y ago
  Blaming it on community planning might be pointing to the symptom rather than the problem. I’d hazard that the real problem is intolerance born from individualism. In the American context we have a society such that people both clutch and invent their own rights while insisting that all others respect and maintaining them. This would be fine if tolerance actually existed and the relationship were bidirectional. The relationship has proven to be unidirectional in a lot of cases which has led to the polarity that we are experiencing. Abstracting further, I’d say that these situations could largely be reduced to groups of people misunderstanding the significance of difference between tolerance and affirmation. Last words: yes it is simplistic and reductionist to boil it down like this. I’m comfortable with staging the problem like this because we aren’t considering an ultra specific case here that requires precision.
• derangedHorse 8y ago
  I don’t see how the rise of digital media and independence somehow lead to disassembled communities. A lot of people argue that the internet takes us away from human connection but I disagree. If anything it brings people closer by allowing individuals to join communities that they could never have assembled with their reach in the physical world. Furthermore if an individual prefers to be on their device over talking to people near them, it’s probably because they wouldn’t talk to those people to begin with. Or that they feel so comfortable in the community they’ve already built that they don’t care to expand (a problem that exists with or without technology).
• liberte82 8y ago
  I've recently been looking for a house cleaner and decorator as I have a hard time keeping up due to working busy hours at my job (and I really hate cleaning & decorating). I was chatting with a friend of mine who needs a web application for something he volunteers for. We came up with the bright idea that he would clean my place then do the interior design. At the same time he's working on that, I work on his app. We sort of organically discovered a business contract and so far it has been working great. He enjoys cleaning and design and I like programming and both of us either hate or can't do the other. In addition, it gets us both off our asses as we're generally working on these things at times that we would normally be watching TV or doing other useless things. So far it feels win-win-win and it gets to the heart of what you were talking about - how to fill in that community between hired help and your close family. The alternative was that both of us spent our own money for these services and probably end up not as happy with what we got.
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