The Lonely City & Its Discontents (Part 3)

Photo by Blake Wheeler on Unsplash

This is the third and final instalment of our series on the lonely city. Part 1 introduced the topic and provided the basic resources, while part 2 was an exploration by Kamila Soh on her experience of city life. In part 3, Tom Gourlay looks at urban loneliness from the standpoint of a young father living in suburbia. Tom Gourlay is a PhD candidate in the School of Philosophy & Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia where he works as the Manager of Campus Ministry. He is the President of the Dawson Society for Philosophy & Culture Inc. and the managing editor for Macrina Magazine. Follow Tom on Twitter: @TomGourlay

I read with enthusiasm the very interesting article by Tanzil Shafique, which popped up on a social media news feed. Having quickly skimmed the article, I in turn posted the article on my facebook wall, hoping that it would stimulate some kind of discussion – and I was particularly grateful to read Kamila’s response, which she has wonderfully developed for this blog.

I have no expertise in architecture or town planning, but in recent years I have found myself increasingly thinking about the issues that animate the article. This has become even more close to my heart since having become a father, as I started to think more about how my family and I shape and are shaped by the culture surrounding us.

In reading the article, I was encouraged, right from the get-go, to see what I found to be some excellent suggestions from Shafique about how our cities could be designed to eliminate, or at least combat the epidemic of loneliness that is something of a scourge on our society. Shafique points to some wonderful initiatives that look to be genuinely contributing towards the common good and assisting people in opening themselves to interpersonal interaction whilst they are within these shared spaces. All of this, at first read seemed to be a no-brainer. Why are we not designing cities and urban spaces like this?

I am glad that there are people like Shafique asking it and proposing potential solutions, but as Kamila pointed out, human interactions can be difficult to predict – and, as I reflect on things, there can be some really bad outcomes when things are planned centrally in that way.

As mentioned above, my burgeoning interest in this area has grown over the past few years, and I have stumbled across some wonderful literature that has awoken something in me, which on one level could be dismiss as an imagined nostalgia, but which on another level seems to be pointing to a real truth. In reading both the stories and essays of Wendell Berry, the excellent community forums and blogs hosted by Strong Towns, Solidarity Hall and the Front Porch Republic, and one particularly exciting issue of the Communio Journal, I have become convinced that that there is not only a need to consider the way we design cities and urban spaces so as to counter widely experienced negative phenomena like loneliness, but also, that we need to give serious consideration to something more primary – namely the family and then by extension, the local community.

My interest in these kinds of questions really began to develop when I became a father. At that point in my life, a whole lot changed for my wife and I. We became a lot less mobile. Previously we had both commuted (by car) to our places of work, travelled considerable distance on Sundays to a parish where we had many friends and where we’d found a liturgy that we felt was most suitable to our sensitivities. We therefore spent little time investing in our immediate neighbourhood.

Now, while we still have our car, we have found that my wife (who has decided to be home with the kids) is often isolated during the day in a mid-70s built suburb that is an uninhabited wasteland during the day, and that things such as the long commute to Sunday Mass are really no longer desirable (we have learned to deal with local parish liturgical quirks). What we found was that we did not have the community around us that we needed – in fact, we realised that we had unwittingly been formed in such a way that led us to avoid making connections with those around us whom we considered to be strangers. (Perhaps it’s best that I speak only for myself, because my wife is infinitely better at this than I am).

It seems to me that a lifetime of living in suburbs built in the 70s or 80s, with easy access to private transport by means of a family, and then a personal car, meant that I had little need to know my neighbours, or develop the kind of community that would have been impossible to live without not more than a generation ago.

My experience of 70s and 80s built suburbia is not an uncommon one – and it is one that many of my friends are survivors of. The treeless streets of these suburbs are lined by houses characterised by relatively large front lawns that distance the house from the street, large inside living spaces centred on the television or indoor theatre, and a patio out back where family outside time is spent.

Contrast this with an all too brief experience I had of living in a share house in a much more well-established, inner city suburb, where the streets were lined with trees and every house had a front porch (this phenomenon is beautifully captured in the essay by Richard H. Thomas, From Porch to Patio.). My former housemates and I spent the majority of our time on the porch – where we met neighbours and passers-by, and while we did not involve ourselves in any real community activities, we felt much more a part of a membership. Sadly young families on single incomes (at least in Perth, WA, where I am from) cannot afford to live in suburbs established in the pre-television era, and so it seems that we will have to work much harder to combat a hyper-individualised culture that is the breeding ground of the loneliness which Shafique is attempting to combat.

Now, sure enough, those houses and the suburbs built in a pre-television world are certainly not enough to save us from the tediousness of loneliness. In fact, even Chesterton could see way back in 1905 that ‘it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives.’ Regardless, I think that those established suburbs, just like the examples cited by Shafique, provide an impetus for us to think about our built environments (starting with the places where we live) as we look to habituate ourselves into being a bit more community minded, and less lonely.

This is where the real work is to be done. It is not enough to bemoan the current situation, or to wait until we can move into a ready-made community that we can be comfortable in, but we really do need to look critically at the practices which we have adopted, whether they be specifically chosen or unwittingly imbibed in the atmosphere in which we live and breathe and have our being.

It seems to me that places designed to contrive social interaction will likely be avoided by people who are habituated into a certain type of comfort in the loneliness that is so rampant in our individualistic and narcissistic culture. The mere possibility of social interaction with ‘strangers’ will make such places feel decidedly uncomfortable for people who have not learned at a visceral level that such encounters, which might in fact be somewhat messy socially, are the stuff in which a full human life is made of.

The difficulty we have then, is the same difficulty that we have in living out the horizontal dimension of the Christian proposal, namely that of loving one’s neighbour. The very fact of our neighbour, as a flesh and blood person, is an opportunity to be drawn out of my self and into a real community. We have the means before us to escape loneliness by giving up the thin comfort of our hyper-individualistic and increasingly lonely every-day, and to give ourselves away in an exchange that paradoxically will help us find ourselves (cf. Lk 17:33; Gaudium et Spes, 24). Are we up to that challenge?

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