As our cities grow, our ability to communicate with those around us seems to be diminishing. Why is this?

A new report from Cooperatives UK looks at the demise of neighbourliness.  When I was born  in 1982, the majority of people in the UK spoke to their neighbours every day. Now, the majority of us speak to our neighbours less than once a week.

Pubs and parties are described as the best places for meeting strangers, pubs however are  losing their effectiveness – only 40% of us feel comfortable talking to strangers in pubs these days – in 1982 72% did.

The formats for our social interaction seem to be failing; our pubs and post offices (as mentioned previously on this blog), once the core of informal local social interation are failing us for various reasons.  For romantic interaction the  rise of the social acceptability and usage of dating sites seems to have addressed the failure of contemporary urban societies to find us boyfriends and girlfriends, but what are the new socially acceptable formats for friendships and neighbourly relationships?

Play is perhaps one format for interaction that we lack (if we’re not children) and which can break down barriers in neighbourhoods, but I think there are others that are equally undeveloped for adults.  The  enormous health and well-being benefits of sustained social interaction are under severe threat if the downward trend towards isolation and distrust continues in our cities.  We need to design more and better ways of incorporating friendly, caring social itneraction into what we do everyday.  The Good Gym is one attempt but we will need many more, on a much larger scale, in order to rebuild even the level  of community cohesion that we had in 1982.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.