153 replies to this topic

[NMP]

Can someone post the article from page A6 in today's TC titled Who says living in the suburbs is lonely? Interesting study there

[Mike K.]

Wow, those are some serious generalizations. You know, the busiest coffee shops and restaurants happen to be those frequented by folks living in dense areas (look at all the hung over people at downtown cafes on Saturday mornings! ) And don't we all come downtown to socialize and engage in cultural activities?

There are more opportunities for social activities in urban centres so the necessity to belong to clubs or organizations, that are oftentimes located in suburban areas as recreation for suburbanites, just isn't there.

In any case, it really comes down to who you are as an individual that dictates how you will interact in a given residential setting. Type of housing, at least in my experiences, doesn't mean much. And I'm not particularly won over by the "suburbanites have more friends" argument as I highly, highly doubt suburbanites frequently engage in social activities with their entire street on a regular basis. They most likely have a lose relationship with their neighbours, as would apartment dwellers, with their closest friends living elsewhere across the region or elsewhere in the neighbourhood. Same rings true for people in apartments. Did the suburbanites in this study have relationships with every individual in the 40 houses on their street? Are we expecting apartment dwellers to know every individual who lives in the 150 units within a building?

High-density living and suburban living both present obstacles to social activities and both present opportunities. Facing off one against the other is silly because the two are such different styles of living.

Well, for whatever it's worth:

Who says living in the suburbs is lonely?
Study finds folks are friendlier in the ’burbs
BY SHANNON PROUDFOOT CanWest News Service

If absence makes the heart grow fonder in far-flung romances, it seems a bit of elbow-room does the same for neighbours.
A new study says that people who live in sprawling suburban areas have more friends, better community involvement and more frequent contact with their neighbours than urbanites who are wedged in side-by-side. The results challenge the accepted idea that suburban life is socially alienating — a notion that’s inspired everything from the Academy Award-winning American Beauty to Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone.
The study, released by the University of California at Irvine, found that for every 10 per cent decrease in population density, the chances of people talking to their neighbours weekly increases by 10 per cent, and the likelihood they belong to hobby-based clubs jumps by 15 per cent.
“We found that interaction goes down as population density goes up. So, turning it around, it says that interaction is higher where densities are lower,” says Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at UC Irvine who led the study. “What that means is suburban living promotes more interaction than living in the central city.”
The results are no surprise to Fayrouz Costa, who has lived in — and loved — the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, Ont., for the last 20 years.
She has two young children and is constantly socializing with her neighbours, who take turns watching over each other’s children while they play outside and house-sitting for those on vacation.
“You couldn’t give me a free house in the city and say, ‘Move here.’ Honestly, I could never do it,” she says. “There’s just too many people, people are too close to each other and people are not friendly. I’m a chatterer and people don’t chat in the city.”
Costa is a member of her community centre, where she uses the fitness facilities five days a week and knows “almost everyone.” She contrasts her lifestyle with that of her sister, who lives and works in Toronto, and concludes that she “would never leave the suburbs.”
“People are always in a rush to get where they need to go and they work a lot more,” Costa says of life in the city. “A lot of the time in the suburbs, people have families and their life is a little more relaxed.”
That “social homogeneity” may partly explain the closeness of neighbours in the suburbs, says Pierre Filion, a professor of urban planning at the University of Waterloo. Young children often act as social catalysts for their parents, and people in the suburbs tend to have more common ground than the diverse lifestyles crammed into a given city block, he says.
“People [in the suburbs] are pretty much of the same social class, same social background and so on, which eases interaction between people,” Filion says. “At the other extreme, you can have a whole bunch of people living in a condo, but you’ve got old people, young people, people in between. You won’t have that much interaction because of the differences.”
Brueckner says the UC Irvine study accounted for differences in social class, family structure and other factors, and found that people are still friendlier in the suburbs. The results suggest society needs to re-think some received wisdom about the evils of suburbia, he says, but other criticisms about the loss of green space and the costs of commuting still stand.
“All the other arguments against urban sprawl are still there, it just removes this particular one from the list when you’re complaining,” he says.
Lyn Scott has lived in Steveston for the last three decades and watched as it grew from a sleepy village to “the ‘in’ place” for young families to live,” a 30-minute drive from downtown Vancouver.
She is now the block captain of a neighbourhood watch program that welcomes new residents, keeps tabs on crime and hosts an annual block party.
While most young families who move into her neighbourhood are surprised and delighted to find such quaint niceties, some have a hard time adjusting to the suburban scene, she says.
“Some of them are a little bit cynical and say, ‘Oh, that makes me feel really safe, having a block watch,”’ Scott says in a faux-sarcastic tone. “But they come around.”

[NMP]

This study results do fly in the face of many commonly acknowledged things... and we do know not all studies mean much, don't we. Plenty of things mentioned there have this feel to them, kind of pieces of much broader picture being used to generalize a lot of matters without considering other parts of that big picture. This “social homogeneity” thing sounds a bit questionably, too. I would agree though, just based on personal experience which may not mean much as well, that general level of friendliness and probability of talking to thy neighbours is somewhat higher in suburbs. Kind of average Toronto vs average smallish town thing.

[Mike K.]

I can't remember where I read this, but I came across some info that stated individuals in our society tend to maintain relatively close relations with approximately 100 people, give and take, throughout their lifetime. We can interact with many more but we tend to close the gates, so to speak, at a more manageable number. Seems logical, I guess.

With that being the case, it shouldn't come as a surprise that in high-density settings where we pass thousands of individuals at any given time we take on a form of anonymity which allows us to interact on a very high level with the community at-large -- just enough to get us what we need to give others what they need. In small towns and even suburban settings, smaller population densities allow individuals to interact differently, although I tend to think that the interaction is as superficial as it is with people in the city.

In the end sincere interaction is still limited to our closest friends who are not necessarily our nextdoor neighbours and/or do not necessarily live in close proximity to us.

[djp]

That's an interesting study because it really contrasts with my experience. Having lived in both the suburbs (actually a small town) and cities (Victoria and Vancouver), I found the friendliest of them all to be Vancouver.

I always thought it was because people living close together are just naturally more "open" and gregarious with one another. There's also a lot of people here who are looking to meet new people and network socially, versus the suburbs where it seems people have more closed social networks that don't really expand.

On the other hand, it could also be that I'm a fairly reserved person, and in a small town people take that for unfriendliness...in the city people don't notice if you are reserved, because most people are, and therefore people seem very friendly to me.

By the way, I talk to my neighbours pretty much every day..sometimes more than once. Take that, suburbanites!

[Ms. B. Havin]

@Derf, who wrote

...in high-density settings where we pass thousands of individuals at any given time we take on a form of anonymity which allows us to interact on a very high level with the community at-large -- just enough to get us what we need to give others what they need. In small towns and even suburban settings, smaller population densities allow individuals to interact differently, although I tend to think that the interaction is as superficial as it is with people in the city.

I think that's exactly right. In denser environments you need that anonymity (otherwise you'll go nuts trying to keep track of everyone/ everything), and your interactions aren't impoverished because of that, they're just different.

And what someone else said, too (I'm in the reply window now, and can't scroll up to see... sorry!) about homogeneity in the suburban setting: I think that's true, too. It's easier to fall into a conversation with people when your concerns are around, say, what's happening with the neighbourhood school because you all have kids. But let's not lose sight of how competitive the suburbs can be, too: it's not all sweetness and bake sales and block parties. A lot of the competitiveness is around kids, and whether or not your kid is doing as well as X's or Y's kid, etc.

[Ms. B. Havin]

Prof. Brueckner, quoted in the article as follows:

“We found that interaction goes down as population density goes up. So, turning it around, it says that interaction is higher where densities are lower,” says Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at UC Irvine who led the study. “What that means is suburban living promotes more interaction than living in the central city.”

That strikes me as pretty sloppy "academic" thinking -- syllogism comes to mind, but badly done. I can't believe she actually said that if things are such-and-such in situation A, we can "turn it around" and claim that things are so-and-so in situation B. Umm, where did that come from? And then to conclude that therefore situation B promotes interaction is just nuts.

It also completely ignores the quality of the interaction(s), and assumes that more must equal better.

[D.L.]

Just think of the multitude of social interactions possible in the most low density, remote, uninhabited places on earth!

[Ben Smith]

Hey - sorry but I'm not huge on whats going on...who are NIMBYS?

[Holden West]

Ben, a short primer on neighbourhood types:

NIMBY = Not In My Backyard

YIMBY = Yes In My Backyard

CAVE = Citizens Against Virtually Everything

BANANA = Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone

[Ben Smith]

Thats hilarious!

Thanks alot, Holden! :-D

[stargazer]

Prof. Brueckner, quoted in the article as follows:

“We found that interaction goes down as population density goes up. So, turning it around, it says that interaction is higher where densities are lower,” says Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at UC Irvine who led the study. “What that means is suburban living promotes more interaction than living in the central city.”

That strikes me as pretty sloppy "academic" thinking -- syllogism comes to mind, but badly done. I can't believe she actually said that if things are such-and-such in situation A, we can "turn it around" and claim that things are so-and-so in situation B. Umm, where did that come from? And then to conclude that therefore situation B promotes interaction is just nuts.

It also completely ignores the quality of the interaction(s), and assumes that more must equal better.

This looks to me as some real mumbo-jumbo research. It may be that the details have been lost in the news article. It is not clear what is meant by interaction and indeed how to quantify the quality of that interaction.

Clearly people in the suburbs interact more with their neighbours, as they are the only ones around! What is that for a stupid result. Furthermore the suburbs are more homogeneous. So the interaction are basically with people like you. The fact that comminity centres etc. are more development is in my opinion a sign that the interactions are not spontaneous, but need to be "enforced". The lack on anonymity can be quite stiffling, as one is required to "fit in" in smaller communities. A "forced" interaction is still an interaction, but not a preferable one...

It seems to me that this is one of those studies that aims to "prove" prejudices and does so by poor scientific standards. Not examining in detail cause and effect. The "turning this around" thing really made me cringe as it is logically incorrect! A classic example of "when it rains the street get wet" so turning this around: "when the street is wet, it rains".
I don't think so!

[aastra]

It is not clear what is meant by interaction and indeed how to quantify the quality of that interaction.

It always seems to come down to problems of definition like this.

I recall that the guidelines for Harris Green include a reference to Regents Park and the inviting way it meets the street. Many of us here feel the Regents Park complex is most uninviting indeed, but obviously the people who drafted those Harris Green guidelines would disagree.

Defining and assessing vibrancy is also controversial. Some people seem to think a vibrant street is one on which every building is set well back, lights out, with walls or hedges along the sidewalk (if there even is a sidewalk).

[Ben Smith]

Higher density, large buildings, can be easily crafted to be set in from the sidewalk, rendering the "tunneling" effect useless.

Victoria will probably never be the city to have wall to wall highrises up every street, and acheive the title of a windy-city.

Even in bloody New York, one of the largest cities in the world this "tunneling effect" doesn't happen. Nor Seattle, nor anywhere I've ever been!

People need to be clever about designs, and realise there could be two slim, glass towers where Orchard House or View Towers stand, twice the density, and there would be a better view then this eyesore of a fat scraper.

Ben