1. Some people value local business not for the network, but for the cool stuff you get when you go there. There’s more diversity and I hesitate to say quirk but maybe style in many local businesses. The local market, day spa, auto mechanic and deli can taylor themselves to their preferred customer communities – not just in product mix (like say helmart) but also in terms of presentation/merchandizing and customer service.

2. Low affinity customer communities are good for local businesses. If the people who shop there don’t know each other from elsewhere, but share similar styles and tastes, they’re going to want to come back for more. Also, they’re going to come to the store based on what it offers – call it the value in the venue, maybe – rather than on who they’re going to meet there. And they’re going to be responsive to recommendations from people who credibly share their values (say, people who love rockabilly and the derby) more than from people who they share strong affinity with (say, a mom and her son, or a teacher and his students, or soccer teammates).

Just thoughts. But I think this is why urban areas maybe do better with local business (that is, in keeping them around) – the costs of finding and bringing together low affinity/high value people who share a common sense of style are lower. So cities sponsor group-forming networks (see Reed’s law) easier than do new suburbia OR old suburbia.

Full disclosure: I grew up in old suburbia and the city both (Cambridge and Boston). My parents are both from old suburbia. And we all love local businesses.

In some ways, are we bringing back that intimacy; just online rather than off line; there’s just a generation or two in the middle who’re too young for the “old ways” & consider themselves too old for the “new ways”.

To return to Dan’s point, as petrol prices go up, interest in shopping locally etc., returns, I wonder if more and more people will start to walk (or bike!) to their local shops, rather than driving to a larger store, and thus get to know local shop holders.

Just a thought,
-Steve

I think online social networks thrive because we have weakened our physical space to being merely multi-lane roads and big box stores – places where nobody would ever care to pull up a chair and sip a latte. We all want to live in the world of Jane Jacobs – however the economies of scale killed the dream.

I am grateful that you take some time out from your studies to muse – it is some of the most refreshing reading I get online.

Cheers – Eric
P.S. – @Rob H – I live in “old suburbia” as well and I agree it is a wonderful place to be – a bit like Hotel California – when you first move in you plan to be here for a while before it cramps your style – and then you find yourself never wanting to move away.

Concerning new suburbia – I’ve seen that the overall communities don’t bond, but there are very intense groups that form per cul-de-sac. As you predicted, these groups are strictly bound by their roles as parents.

I can walk to stores, on an attractive main street, but the stores are also turning over rapidly, as one person has bought most of the buildings and charges very high rent. The kids in the coffee shops keep changing too.

I think even many of the “old” suburbs suffer from the malaise you describe, partially because of the workaholism you described in a previous post. As a long-time feminist, I hesitate to point this out, but the “housewives” were the glue that knit communities together, and outside of the temporary child-rearing communities you referred to, we just use our houses as maildrops, backdrops, and sleeping areas.

I could be biased, because I’m not gregarious by nature, but I doubt that anyone on our block even says “hi” to everyone else on the block, let alone knows their name. Makes me think of the line from a seventies song “Why doesn’t anyone stay in the same place anymore?”

Speaking as a survey of one middle-ager who’s lived in and out of suburbs, I found one constant: It didn’t really matter all that much. Workaholism meant no time for relationships outside of the office. Your decription of “busy” suburbanites made me relive that horror as I got just a little sick in my mouth.

Consider this, though. The rise of multi-use retail/housing developments over the last 5-7 years seems to be a direct outgrowth of a yearning to recover those neighborhood connections later in life (empty nester, early retirement years).

So maybe we’re destined to return to close-knit community. And to buy our adult diapers locally.

1. As living spaces become more crowded, humans tend to protect their privacy by *not* getting to know the neighbors encroaching on their yard. It’s easier to maintain the illusion that we have control over our personal space if we ignore the 40something guy grilling on the deck next door. This is why people buy tall shrubs or put up fences, except we now fence others off in our minds.

I’ve seen this dynamic in my own Connecticut community (and fall victim to it myself). In four years, I’ve made many close friends in my town — but all are a modest car ride away, and the neighbors next to me are people whom I speak with three times a year, usually in stumbling upon them. The neighbors are too close to be comfortable.

Lest urbanites find this amusing, think of how comfortable you are with striking up conversations with strangers on the subway. The woman sitting next to you could be a potential friend, but neither of you want to bridge that close privacy wall to find out. In fact, trying would be a breach of social etiquette.

2. The *other* possibility is that adults in suburbia connect with others primarily via phone, internet or car. Very few people walk anywhere anymore. So if the next “node” in our physical-world network is a car ride away, it is much easier to make friends at the soccer field or the church — one car leap — than in the house next door. In this sense, we suburbanites are connecting to others who are close by in our network. It’s just that the lines within our networks skip the nuanced, below-the-radar particles of neighbors next door.

In the rulers of our lives, we either skip over people between the tick-marks, or prefer not to think that those tiny tick-marks exist. It’s simply easier to connect with those at the end of a car ride, and to envision our home really isn’t surrounded by thousands of other humans, breathing in the dark so close nearby.