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Cramped Condos and the Rise of Unfriendly Neighbours

We are building denser housing but no longer remember how to look out for each other

In 2012, a survey from the nonprofit Vancouver Foundation identified a perplexing trend: as the city was densifying in response to its housing crisis, people—especially those who lived in high-density housing—reported feeling less connected to their neighbours. A growing body of research since then has found a correlation between living in high-density urban environments and increased rates of social isolation, due to factors including a lack of secure tenure in rental buildings, poor architectural design, a dearth of green space and limited access to nature, and stigma related to cultural values that equate high-density housing with lower social status.

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All this is leading to what researchers have termed the “emerging asocial society”—that is, a society in which people aren’t just lonely but have actually lost the motivation or skill necessary to engage in healthy social connections. This has profound implications for individual health and well-being and for the health and well-being of our cities.

“As things stand, this will bring increased trends of urban alienation, asocial and antisocial behaviours, loneliness and social isolation, marginalization, nuisance and exacerbated vulnerabilities,” warns one 2022 knowledge synthesis on the topic.

For most of human history, maintaining relationships with the people around us—our neighbours—was not exactly optional. We depended on our neighbours for survival in times of war, famine, drought, or other periods of strife and scarcity. We relied on a community effort to keep roofs over our heads, to build houses and raise barns, to raise children, and develop the infrastructure needed to support our livelihoods.

Most cities began not by virtue of some grand centrally planned strategy but by neighbours organically riffing on what the person next door did. Not everyone got along all of the time, but this interdependency forced people to work through conflict in a way that isn’t required of us today. And we are poorer for it despite being richer than we’ve ever been.

The introduction of modern creature comforts and an exponential increase in personal and collective wealth in the latter half of the twentieth century saw our homes—as in our houses, our neighbourhoods, and our cities—redesigned in a way that encouraged self-sufficiency and individualism rather than community.

Close quarters in tenement buildings or boarding houses with shared kitchens and bathrooms gave way to single-family houses set far back from the street behind expansive private lawns. Private automobiles replaced public transit or even walking as a primary mode of transportation. Streetcar tracks got ripped out in favour of smoothly paved roads engineered for cars. Sidewalks got much narrower or disappeared entirely. Eventually, front-drive garages replaced front porches as the most prominent design detail of the new houses in ever-expanding subdivisions. We could now come and go from our dwellings without ever encountering our neighbours, save, perhaps, for a cursory wave from behind a shield of glass and steel.

Along the way, we began to place immense cultural value on the qualities enabled by this shift in built form. Privacy, seclusion, and separation from those around us became defining characteristics of a “good” home, thus recasting the role of the neighbour in our culture. We became less likely to see them as critical resources essential for survival and more as curious strangers, if not outright impediments to our peace, quiet, and privacy.

As the sociologist Robert D. Putnam wrote in his famous book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, the decline in church attendance, dwindling involvement in labour unions, and even the phasing out of neighbourhood bowling leagues and community dances throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s further eroded opportunities to get to know those around us. In this century, megaplex movie theatres and shopping malls have been stripped of their status as both commercial and community hubs as more of us opt to stream and chill at home while compulsively scrolling through things we can buy online. Even the reliable din of the dinner rush at many local restaurants has been muted as tables intended for people to gather around become platforms for takeout containers awaiting a silent parade of app-enabled couriers.

Inside our private abodes, space to accommodate our vast selection of screens now takes precedence over in-person human connection as a chief design consideration. The rise of the internet and mobile devices has changed our daily habits and how we move through our neighbourhoods as well. Many of us, myself included, purposefully plug into a podcast or browse........

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