As the Vancouver Foundation starts to dig deeper into its Connections and Engagement survey results, it is finding plenty to worry about in our increasingly dense, hybrid city.
The latest statistical dispatch has this disquieting salvo for Vancouverism:
People living in high rise towers were about half as likely to say they had done a favour for a neighbour as were people living in detached homes.
They were much less likely to know their neighbour’s names. They were much less likely to trust their neighbours.They were less likely to believe that their neighbours would return a lost wallet or purse. They felt alone more often. They had difficulty making friends.
Considering that social trust and relationships are the most powerful ingredient of human wellbeing, this is, at least on the surface, a condemnation of the residential tower as a veritable loneliness machine.
But we should not jump to conclusions just yet. UBC Economist John Helliwell reminded me a couple of years ago that these correlations might be less causal than, say, residential tenure. IE: people tend to be more trusting and connected if they have lived somewhere for a long time. Could the low trust scores for high rise dwellers have more to do with the fact that they are more transient? Perhaps further Vancouver Foundation analysis will tell…
One Comment
Maybe this is an opportunity for social entrepreneurship. Most people want to be connected to other people, but this instinct gets overridden by some acculturation into individualism– I should be able to put that more simply but I can’t at the moment– basically we have a pioneer need to not need anyone, and an aversion to showing anyone we need them. Disaster sociology shows that in scenarios that impose mutual need (earthquakes in particular) people act selflessly, relationally and with great compassion, and recollect those experiences vividly later. This could lead to a punchline about a business based on destroying cities to build community, but maybe rather than write off condo towers as bastions of loneliness, we should see them as stacks of people longing for community— and ask how we can get them to act like a community. So how about a company that specializes in creating community in such buildings, and pitches strata councils on the benefits of such an undertaking (greater cooperation, safety, input, possibly increased real estate values) … such a company could run “progressive” floor to floor parties, essentially open houses of apartments like a Culture Crawl… a building-based food/wine crawl. Or any number of affairs to at least a portion of the building to meet each other. Even if only 10–20% of tenants participated it would be a step towards greater community interaction, happiness and resiliency.