Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves To Rebuild Our Social Fabric

Prospect Lefferts, Brooklyn, New York. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

Before moving to Waco, Texas, I lived in the Prospect Lefferts neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where I was fortunate to experience many ideal features of urban life. Several restaurants, bars, bodegas, and ordinary shops like dry cleaners and barber shops were walking distance from the small Tudor duplex I shared with three women. Prospect Park was a six-minute walk away and with just two trains coming to that part of town, it wasn’t overrun by tourists or commuters transferring to different lines. Most of the people getting off on my stop lived there, allowing it to feel like an actual neighborhood. 

Yet during my two years living there and despite close proximity to many fellow residents, I had very few opportunities to connect with my neighbors. I tried to meet them when I could, but it just wasn't the same as participating in shared social practices designed to connect neighbors to each other. Despite the neighborhood's many wonderful attributes, they didn’t add up to a sense that I was participating in a community. 

Proximity Without Connection

This paradox of proximity without community is a timeless, global challenge. But in the American context, it’s a unique problem precisely because we once figured out how to solve it. During his tour of the states in 1831, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed: “America is, among the countries of the world, the one where they have taken most advantage of association and where they have applied that powerful mode of action to a greater diversity of objects,” he wrote. “There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.” 

During the decades after the Civil War, Americans of their own accord and initiative established hundreds of mutual aid societies, fraternal associations, and benevolent groups. In their Forbes column, Yaron Brook and  Don Walkins provide some helpful numbers: 

“In 1910, in New York State, for instance, 151 private benevolent groups provided care for children, and 216 provided care for adults or adults with children. If you were homeless in Chicago in 1933, for example, you could find shelter at one of the city’s 614 YMCAs, or one of its 89 Salvation Army barracks, or one of its 75 Goodwill Industries dormitories.

After the Great Depression, this fraternal culture began to unravel and since then, most American neighborhoods have been afflicted by the puzzling paradox of being alone together. In his widely-acclaimed 2000 book Bowling Alone (based on this essay), Harvard Sociologist Robert Putnam investigates how this happened, eventually settling on four main causes: generational differences, television, “sprawl,” and the pressures of time and money. 

14 years later, in his book, Vanishing Neighbor, Marc Dunkleman suggests that we haven’t really recovered from this unweaving. Referring to neighborhood-based relationships as second-ring relationships between the first ring (personal/intimate relationships) and third ring (impersonal relationships like social media), he writes: “What limited time and energy Americans have today is devoted to our most intimate relationships and a set of much more one-dimensional connections. Along the way, the middle rings have become the missing rings.” 

And in Happy City, Charles Montgomery beats a similar drum, establishing trust as a “bedrock” for a thriving city and neighborhood, but one that requires frequent and positive social interactions. Without them, “we are unlikely to build those bonds of trust.” He criticizes the suburban development pattern because of how intensely it reduces the frequency of organic, positive encounters between neighbors. Put simply, it’s hard to get to know your neighbors when you’re all shuttling between cars to garages and back doors to private homes, and back to cars. 

Taken together, these insights reveal the extent to which the social fabric woven around neighborhoods and cities during the “fraternal era” has become alarmingly frayed. When it comes to building resilient neighborhoods, reweaving this fabric is just as important as rewriting zoning laws, allowing for bike lanes, and embracing infill development. Civic, associative culture needs just as much innovating as these other aspects of city-building, but what exactly does that look like? 

(Source: Flickr.)

What Sorts of Contexts Bring People Together?

I think the key to answering this question is thinking about social context: What kind of social context brings diverse people together in a casual way on a regular basis to work towards a shared goal? In today’s culture, shopping, dining, entertainment, and (for some) religious observance are our main social contexts. While legitimate, some might argue that these are not the kinds of context that build ties between strangers in neighborhoods—not even going to religious observances, because most people don’t do so within their own neighborhoods.  

To understand why, we have to go back to Marc Dunkleman’s three rings of relationships. Most of these contexts involve activities best suited for our first-ring (personal) relationships. They are not really designed to sustain second-ring (civic) relationships on a regular basis. In other words, the way most of us spend our free time involves activities most suited to friends and family. Perhaps we enjoy them alongside neighbors (think of a neighborhood movie night), but that often isn’t enough to build a sense of community with them. 

So what can? Let’s go back to Brooklyn. I did branch out a few times to find this sense of community. My efforts were short lived because of COVID-19, but in the weeks leading up to the lockdowns, I started volunteering at a community garden. Over the course of a few workdays, I realized the virtues of work as a social context. 

Working with people who aren’t part of your first ring can present a valuable opportunity for personal growth and social betterment. Shared work harmonizes participants’ personalities, skills, and opinions by organizing them around a shared goal. It creates an opportunity for us to contribute our special talents, curb our own interests (and sometimes our attitudes), compromise to solve problems, humbly learn from others, and take on tasks we might normally avoid.  

If you think about it, these are the same exact practices you would observe between people relating in a more personal context, like family or friendship. In other words, work puts us in a position of imitating the rhythms of friendship without friendship itself being the goal. And this is the genius of shared work. Because our attention is on achieving the goal, it takes the pressure off of having to think about the relational obligations between the people involved, allowing those dynamics to work themselves out organically. Shared work often functions as a gentle on-ramp to shared lives. 

(Source: Flickr.)

Opportunities for Meaningful Connection

What would it look like to bring more work to our neighborhoods? I saw a glimmer of this in a YouTube video I discovered about an unconventional community in Copenhagen called Christiania. In this community, shared work is baked into the community’s rhythm of life by default. In order to live there, one must apply and commit to contributing to the community through labor. Everyone who lives there contributes through work to the town’s maintenance. For example, they maintain their own garbage collection and yard work. 

This is quite different from the States, where we have a city department to take care of everything. On one hand, this means more free time for citizens to work or do things they enjoy—and you can argue that tasks like garbage collection are what tax dollars are supposed to go toward. But on the other hand, it means we’ve outsourced opportunities for collaboration that could help us build connections with each other. What if what our neighborhoods and cities need, alongside better zoning codes and infill development, are more opportunities for citizens to work together on meaningful projects on a regular basis? 

For example, what if cities could hand off some of their maintenance tasks to willing members of the public? What if instead of a public employee cleaning the neighborhood playground, that fell to the five families enrolled on the Park Cleaning Team? What if instead of the city clearing all of the snow, there was a Snow Clearing Team that took care of the sidewalks? What if neighbors were more empowered to solve their own problems together with support from the city, rather than the city doing everything by default? 

Yes, resilient neighborhoods and cities need infill development, missing-middle housing, and bike lanes. Yes, we need more small businesses within neighborhoods and reliable bus routes. But we also need to reweave the social fabrics that help us feel safe, welcomed, and grounded in this vast universe. Civic culture needs innovating and I think it might just take some hard work. Literally. 

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