Great stuff from New York’s Jennifer Senior:
“Every 20 or 30 years, we have a lament about the decline of community, and it’s usually due to cities and urbanization,” says Robert Sampson, the criminologist who chairs Harvard’s sociology department, when I visit him one sunny morning this fall. He mentions one of the classics of the genre, Louis Wirth’s Urbanism As a Way of Life. “It’s all about the impersonal way of life in the city—how it almost deranged people, led to this sort of schizoid personality, to psychosis and loneliness.”
Yet the picture of cities—and New York in particular—that has been emerging from the work of social scientists is that the people living in them are actually less lonely. Rather than driving people apart, large population centers pull them together, and as a rule tend to possess greater community virtues than smaller ones. This, even though cities are consistently, overwhelmingly, places where people are more likely to live on their own.
Via AL Daily.
Living as I do in NYC, I can attest to this: you have so many social networks! NYC is really a series of small towns, and you move from to another throughout the day.
My co-op is a small town, where a trusted neighbor has my keys. My local subway platform is a small town, I see the same people traveling at the same time and we chat & smile.
My gourmet food store is a small town, the guy at the deli counter knows I want Nova and prosciutto. My office is a larger town, where we all play catch & go out for steak at lunch. My yoga class is a small town; my tango class a small town, with gossip, intrigue, romance.
The metropolis is a series of villages in time, and the great architecture of New York is just a theater-set against which we stage our dramas and comedies as our villages overlap.
You are an extra in this set piece; and tomorrow I will be an extra in yours, until we discover my yoga teacher was your best friend’s college roommate, and our social networks fuse.
An enjoyable read, thanks Kerry…though I found it a bit pat here and there:
“James Moody, a network guru at Duke University, notes that there’s a time in the lives of young professionals when they retreat deep into their silos, trying to make partner, get tenure, write their books, complete their residencies, or whatever it is that they’re hoping to do.”
(For Senior ‘people’ = ‘upper middle class people’.)
‘It’s through these people that we find husbands, wives, life partners, better jobs.’ And might I add ‘assignation partners, bookies and ever-improved vendors in the exotic’. Every day in every way!
As we pretend to envy Webgrrl’s Norman Rockwell honeycomb…life here in suicideland consists of little other than work, Starbucks, blogging and the lash. But somehow–however provisionally–we resign ourselves to the existence of other people.
Gavin, dreamboat, you need to discover my NYC. Look, New York either conquers you or you conquer her. I keep my amazons and war elephants up by the Harlem Meer and call them if I need them, so I rule Noo Yawk with ease. The rest of my time – I kid you not – I parade around in Ferretti dresses and Marc Jacob shoes. You can ask anybody.
Also, if the best coffee you know is Starbucks, you are indeed desperate and certainly need the blonde to help you out! Let me make a recommendation. . .
[...] Howley point towards this excellent New Yorker article. Check it out. There’s also evidence to suggest that [...]