Re: Suburban alienation?
On Nov 22, 2006, at 5:35 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
“Burbs not so bad after all
“Shannon Proudfoot, CanWest News Service Published: Saturday, November 11, 2006
“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 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.” “
Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend, I’ve been hanging out with my uncle-
in-law, the sociologist Christopher Jencks. I asked him to take a
look at this paper (original at URL below). His conclusion: the
authors don’t prove what they set out to prove. That doesn’t mean
they’re wrong, but their model just isn’t finely specified enough to
draw the conclusions they want to draw.
Something that struck me was that it doesn’t say much that people who
live in cities don’t have their friends over as often as those who
live in dense areas. In New York we live in small spaces and meet in
public areas like bars and restaurants. But that’s a separate question.
Original paper: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/socinteract.pdf.
Doug