In the suburbs of America, at least when I was growing up, it’s standard practice that your next-door neighbors are default friends, granted automatic unspoken courtesies like the borrowing of tools/sugar/etc., are typically always included in events like cookouts/parties, and are the go-to people for baby-/pet-/house-sitting, all by virtue of simple proximity, even when you have little to nothing in common aside from that close proximity. I was told once that in Europe, this is not the case; people there are typically friends with people down the street, but not necessarily next door.
I’d have to disagree with your description of America. Of course, I’ve never lived in the suburbs, but I’ve always lived in middling-sized towns in flyover country.
When I was a kid (60s-70s), my family was generally on ‘nodding-acquaintance’ level with most of our neighbors, but neighbors weren’t generally included in our activities. There might have been some tool-borrowing, but that was rare. The only thing on your list that I remember was house-watching - not leaving a key, but letting neighbors know you’d be out of town so they could keep an eye out. (I had older siblings, so baby-sitting was already covered.)
My friends lived in more family-oriented neighborhoods than we did, but I didn’t see much difference there. The kids all played together and were often at neighbors’ houses, but the parents didn’t socialize.
Since I’ve had my own place, my experience has been much the same. I know most of my neighbors to wave and say ‘hi’, but we don’t socialize or lend/borrow as a rule. I have some great neighbors, but they’re not my friends.
You are aware that Europe is an arbitrary lumping together of 45 different countries, all with their own traditions and mentality, aren’t you?
In my experience (Sweden), judging from the place where my mother lives, it is very much as you put it. You might say hullo to your neighbours if you recognise them but that’s about it.
My experience in the suburbs of Washington D.C. in the 50’s and 60’s was as described by redtail23 rather than by DCnDC. This is also how it is now in my neighborhood in Kansas City, MO, and as far as I can tell in the suburban neighborhoods where my friends live.
Now, sometimes there’s an affinity for certain neighbors and a closer-to-friends relationship with them, but that’s not the case with all next-door neighbors.
Europe is a big place. I have lived in the Republic of Georgia, Czech Republic and (briefly) Germany. In CR we have friends in our building and know everybody on our floor… fairly similar to how you describe except sometimes we will go out to dinner together.
In Georgia we did not know our neighbors… language was a problem as we didn’t speak Georgian. We did get to meet our downstairs neighbors after a flood in our apartment (long story - city water had been off for 3 days)… and had to pay to repair their place. Mostly we kept our door shut as the threat of robbery, assassination etc. and civil war was very real.
Didn’t stay in Germany long enough make a difference (couple months)
Ok, obviously I made a lot of sweeping generalizations, but I suppose what interests me is the difference in mentality between Americans and Europeans regarding next-door neighbors. Of course everybody’s experience is going to differ; the American experience I’m describing is very sitcom-y: maybe you’re friends with the neighbors, maybe just “friendly,” but the close proximity still grants certain privileges that you wouldn’t grant, say, someone 2 streets over, that’s all I’m taking about.
I grew up in a small town in England and we knew everybody in our row of houses. Next door neighbours would look after our house and water plants/feed pets when we went away on holiday, and we’d do the same in return. As a child, my next door neighbour used to help me and my friends build go-karts with his power tools and paint.
Is it really about countries? I’d have thought it was more about the type of neighbourhood, or even the street, you live in, or the sort of person you are. Even within the UK, for instance, there are wildly different answers to your question.
For example, I was brought up in Manchester, in a very nice quiet suburb on the edge of the countryside and we were exactly as you described. However for most of my adult life I’ve lived in London or the South East and with one exception in almost 20 years I haven’t even known my neighbour’s names. But any conclusion you may draw from that data point would be blown away by my friend who currently lives 1.5 miles from me - so the same neighbourhood. She knows all her neighbours by name, they organise potluck suppers as a group, they have a babysitting collective etc etc. I know her, and I know me, and I’d say the main difference is our personalities - she’s a ‘joiner’ and very very sociable, whereas I’m more guarded. I suspect both of us would have the same neighbour experience wherever we were. But, and here’s where I bring it miraculously back to my point… both are completely normal here.
When I was a kid in the suburban 50s we knew all our neighbors. The kids played together and the adults were on friendly terms. Now, in those same suburbs, we’ll wave hello and that’s about it (well, except for one neighbor who happens to be my partner). And back when I lived in NYC, I had no idea who my neighbors were, except to occasionally pass them going in or out.
That’s an excellent point. I was just asking based on a conversation I had with someone a long time ago and was wondering if the difference was true. Clearly the concept of “neighbor” and “community” will vary greatly based on many variables. The person I had the discussion with was from Italy, and he gave me the impression that the American notion of a next-door neighbor was almost unknown throughout Europe.
I think part of the stereotypical suburb relationship is based on age.
In the 1950’s, suburbs were new and almost everyone moving in to them were young parents, often taking advantage of military benefits. They’d automatically have a lot in common with their neighbors. It’s like being in a dorm in university- being around a lot of people in the same place in life as you are leads to a lot of socializing. Having a whole slew of kids playing together in a neighborhood probably also cemented those relationships.
This second generation in the 1970s kept that dynamic up to some degree because the generation gap was pretty uniform- the children of that first wave pretty much started having kids around the same time maybe twenty to twenty five years later.
But family patterns have changed a lot, we’ve begun to move around a lot more, and our society in general has become more diverse. So we have a lot more different kinds of people at different points in their life becoming neighbors. Nowadays I think suburbs are often pretty isolated places.
In my limited experience of middle-class German neighbourhoods, physical proximity does not play a large part in who you socialize with. You exchange greetings over the fence but play/later hang out with the kids in the same form at school rather than the neighbours’ kids, and barbecue in the garden with colleagues, friends etc. rather than neighbours. In a single-family-home neighbourhood neighbours are mere acquaintances at best, strangers at worst.
Lived in France and Switzerland. In here, the ‘nodding-saying hi’ is granted. You may invite your neighbor for a tea and develop further relationship, but this is optional.
I also lived in two houses in Germany, where people where of the same age and interests than me. There, having barbecue/beers were a little more common.
I wonder too if there’s a climate effect. Here in Canada, it’s too cold to use your back yard by October sometime and doesn’t warm up enough until APril. Add in the effect of air conditioning, and I suspect a lot of the summer is “indoor weather” in more southern USA as well. Plus, we are more TV and video-game oriented - indoor private passtimes.
The big city is famous for its anonimity; especially in apartments, when do you see your neighbours? That 30 seconds out of 24 hours where you just might run into them in the corridor because you both came out of your apartment at the same time? Older buildings might have needed you to leave the door open for air circulation when it was hot out, but i modern buildings, air conditioning and security fears have changed that. Hardly a neighbourly atmosphere. In a big city, and especially drive-everywhere suburbs and big shopping malls, you are less likely to run across your neighbours while doing your daily business.
My impression of european “suburbs” is that they are more likely to have high private fences around the yard (especially older buildings).
Then there’s the permanency issue. The impression of those friendly, Leave-It-To-Beaver neigbourhoods is that everyone moved out tehre after the war and grew their families there together. Today, even people who buy a house may not be there for more than a few months or years.
I love how some people point out that Europe is 40 something countries with different cultures, and its a very big place.
Have you ever been to the United States? It geographically larger than Europe and there are 50 state governments that all have unique cultures. Ask about the difference between someone from Fargo, North Dakota and New Orleans, Lousiana. Hell they probably couldn’t understand each other either.
I don’t recall seeing this with our neighbors growing up in the 80s and 90s in Fairfax County, VA. My parents had friends in the neighborhood but they weren’t the next door neighbors. We were friendly with them, but the adults didn’t socialize with them. The original group of people who moved in when the neighborhood was built were a lot friendlier among themselves than the people who moved in later.
It would seem that age of the neighborhood itself plays a decent part in “neighborliness,” from what I’m reading. As a child my family moved to a brand new development. The houses were all in different states of completion at the time we moved in; the house directly across the street was still just a foundation, many on the street and around the neighborhood were just frameworks. Our immediate neighbors quickly became my parents’ friends, and at this point, 30-some years later, are pretty much my parents’ only friends.
When I grew up in the burbs we were very friendly “on borrowing terms” with our two next door neighbors, but we knew all about everyone else on the block. At least superfical, for instance, you knew who was living in the house, and how many kids or grand kids they had and such. And we usually knew what people did for a living and/or where they worked. But it was all just superficial knowledge.
And everyone knew we had a dog. He was one of two dogs on the block and he was a collie/shepherd mix, the other one was a little terrier. So my poor dog when he did escape the backyard, in ten minutes our phone would be ringing, “You’re got out…” from all the neighbors. Poor guy always got caught
Like my mum would have a 4th of July party in backyeard and invite the two next door neighbors, but if any other neighbor was passing by they would be asked to join us. And they would generally stop by for ten minutes and exchange “small talk,” then leave.
And the food would come in when there was a death. When my dad died, and later when mum died, everyone on the block brought over food. Most of them were nodding aquaintences but they still brought over some sort of food, even if they bought it from the grocery store deli.
I recall in the summer and winter, I would just start walking up and down streeets in a, say four block radius, wth a lawn mower or snow shovel (depending on season) and someone would always call me over and give me a job, cuttting grass or shoveling snow.
I got a lot of, “I usually cut grass myself, but since you’re here, I’m tired today,” type of work when I was between say 8 and 15.
Excellent point! Each of our states is about the size of a country, and while our language is homogeneous, and some aspects of our culture are as well, small things like this are very different, however, I would say its more of a regional thing, rather than state by state.
