I live in a large apartment building and I’ve literally never met any of the people in the other units, not even the ones directly beside mine. In the previous building I lived in there were a few people I could recognize and say as few words to, but no one I knew in any detail. I’m aware this kind of isolation isn’t necessarily typical of humans today, but how far back in history would I have to go for it to be abnormal? How far back was the first civilization in which it was normal, if it isn’t ours?
I won’t limit this topic to neighbours who live in the same building; the history of social interaction between neighbouring single-family houses is also of interest to me.
For us, it stopped about a month ago, when my wife and I sold our house and moved to an apartment. Before that, we knew the neighbours on all three sides (left, right and across the road). However, it will start again in about 10 days, when we return to a house that we left about 12 years ago: there we have known the neighbours on all three sides for a very long time, going back in a couple of cases to before we bought the house. (For example, I once taught the woman who will be our left-hand neighbour, about 40 years ago.) So things can still be like the “old times”.
It’s really all about urbanization. The residents of Ur probably didn’t know their neighbors, and a lot of modern rural people do. So the question is when did society become urbanized. The answer is that it was a gradual process, and has waxed and waned over the millennia in different parts of the world.
I doubt we can identify any such point. I suspect it would be connected to urbanization in some way. I just don’t need to know my neighbors in the same way I might have needed to know him if our farms were on adjoining property. Some people will point out to suburbs as contributing to people not knowing their neighbors. Supposedly we’re far more likely to move several times in our lives which means we don’t put down roots. Why get to know your neighbors if you’re just moving in a few years anyway?
I agree that it’s about urbanization. In an urban area, there is so little privacy in the physical sense that we build strict walls of privacy in an intellectual/emotional sense. We pretend not to notice our neighbors’ comings and goings, and we give them lots of “space”, and expect it in return, because we don’t have any actual space of our own.
My SO moved into a Chicago apartment with me after living 25 years in a true Small Town where everyone knows everyone. He knows the names of our neighbors and their relationships and a bit of the drama between them and our (crazy) landlord and such. I can’t remember a word of it, even when he tells me about it. I’ve trained myself NOT to know, after more than a decade of apartment/city living. The longer he’s here, the less time he spends in front of the window watching the world and trying to keep up with the neighbors’ business.
Interesting point, WhyNot. Another possible dimension of this is that urban people tend to have completely neutral non-relationships with neighbours because the potential unpleasantness of sharing the halls with an enemy outweighs the potential pleasantness of sharing the halls with a friend.
“I read somewhere” a major step towards not knowing your neighbors, at least in parts of the US, occurred with the widespread availability of windowscreening. It was pretty common to sit on a porch or step in the evening. With the availability of screening people staying on the porches or indoors to avoid insects were not be as accessible to adjacent or passing neighbors.
Talk to anyone who has an adult when TV became common in their area. Everything went from knowing neighbors really well, having neighborhood get-togethers each week, etc. to people staying inside and watching the boob tube.
This is nothing to do with urbanization. I’ve heard farming relatives talk about this too.
So, generally early to mid 1950s in most of the US.
It’s not just urbanization alone. Social and physical mobility make neighborly relations more transitory, and therefore less worthy of pursuit. So this isn’t a question about “When in History…” but more about particular places and societies, and especially class strata within those societies. 19th century London could very likely have had buildings similar to the OP’s.
Why do we make the assumption that it’s abnormal to know your neighbors? I’ve never lived in a neighborhood where we didn’t at least have a contact sheet passed around with everyone’s name and phone number on it. And my current neighborhood has quarterly potlucks where we actually get permission from the city to block off the street and set up tents and folding tables in the middle of the road. Granted, I don’t think *that’s *particularly normal, but I’ve always believed it was pretty normal to at least know your neighbor’s names.
For the OP, I’d ask if you’ve ever actually gone over and introduced yourself to your neighbors.
Like the others, I think it’s related to urbanization, but possibly for a different reason: density of friends.
Most people want a group of friends. Most people also want friends that share interests, and friends that are close geographically.
In a rural area, there might simply not be that many people within a small radius. So of course you become friendly with your neighbors: they’re the only choice you have.
In an urban area, you have a much better selection. The odds are low that your neighbors share your interests, so you become friends with others, and there’s just not much reason to meet the neighbors.
This effect is even stronger with modern transportation and communication devices. Automobiles, phones, and computers have made geographic proximity even less important.
When I was a child (50’s thru 70’s) very few of the women in our neighborhood worked, and all the kids were school age, and there were really few homes on our street that didn’t have kids or grandkids. With no air-conditioning, usually only one car per family, big yards to tend to, kids running everywhere and schoolbus stops every ten houses, parents were out of doors more and chatting with their neighbors. Except for the three Catholic families and the one Lutheran family, all us kids went to school together and knew each other. So you had to know your neighbors.
Nowadays, half the homes on the street are elderly folk who rarely come out. Most of the homes with teenagers have an average of three cars, and some kids are home-schooled, some kids don’t ride the bus (their parents drive them every day) and almost every parent is working if the lack of anyone home during the day is any indication. Most of my original neighbors are dead or moved away, and the only reason I know anyone on the street now is that some of us have inherited our parents’ homes, and I made an effort to meet the people on either side when they moved in. But the majority of neighbors, I have no clue who they are.
That’s not the only way to respond to living in close quarters. I dispute the notion that it is the normal response, though it may be typical for many classes of people today.
These two points dovetail together rather well. In short, it’s only been pretty recently, still within living memory, that it’s become practical and desirable for many people to shut themselves up in their homes–for so little of life, urban or not, to take place outside, where we may see other people.
I would further offer that residential architecture and even town planning since the '50s have gradually shifted to accommodate this, with the loss of features like porches and sidewalks and the rise of attached garages and “family rooms,” to name a few examples.
All the above reasons are good. We don’t usually know our neighbours because:
-too busy most of the time - both parents work, commutes are often longer
-no reason to be outside, more reasons to be inside. AC, TV, etc.
-other socialization has precedence - in cities we can find and socialize with the people who share our interests - clubs etc. Neighbours just coincidentally own the house next door.
-few opportunities to meet neighbours in apartments. They are pretty isolated and private, and you are in your corridor for 30 seconds - what are the odds the neighbour picks the same time?
-privacy - the don’t talk to strangers (or too busy to chitchat with strangers) means we don’t talk to random peole just because they, like 500 others, live in the same hirise.
There are still plenty of small towns where everyone *does *know everyone, and who’s related to who, and who’s schtupping who and more, though. And they have air conditioning and television (and internet). So I can’t see how we can ascribe it to those technologies - at least not solely.
The working mom thing is interesting, though. My mom has talked about it, how she used to sit out on the front storch (more than a stoop, not quite a porch) with the neighbor moms while we kids played in the yard, because no one worked outside the home. I’ve got a small town living friend in an area of very high unemployment, and she and her neighbors still do that.
I find it interesting that here, moms and dads don’t even chat on the playground, unless it’s the one at school (that’s full of awkward small talk). The kids play, and half the parents have their noses glued to their cellphones and the other half are either playing with their kids or standing around trying to avoid eye contact. (Or, I suppose, maybe they all hate the look of me and are ignoring me. Maybe they’re all Chatty Cathies when I’m not there.)
The ability to select your friends from people not in your immediate geographic region is another good point. Didja know there are family “dating” sites now? Maybe no one’s talking at the playground because they’re arranging family date nights on their smartphones.
