Among the books mentioned during Civics 101 was Bowling Alone, an influential documentation of the increasing fragmentation and isolation of modern US living.
How social is our society? Are there metrics that we can apply, or must we rely on anecdotal evidence? Clearly there are different intensities of sociability in different communities. In mine, which has 1,600 homes, we have one organization that attracts a small fraction of the residents to meetings.
Here's a bit of random evidence that I found startling -- from a discussion about "Creating Healthy, Livable Cities" on LinkedIn, from Han Blok, a contributor based in The Netherlands:
Citizens are in general too lonesome and too individualistic. My village has 650 houses and we have 50 active social associations (culture, hobby, sport etc) all associations run by volunteers. many similar villages are present at 5 km distance. The houses and streets are not the core of the structure but the integrated social structure is the essence. Such social cores could also be achieved in neighboorhoods or quarters of larger cities. It requires thinking about social behaviour not calculating the supporting force of a concrete construction. A 20 store city building may house the same number of living units without any social coherence and most people there feel lonesome.What are the drivers behind this level of intense volunteerism and social creativity? Does it help to ask: which is a more telling metric of "civicness": Geoffrey West's model of cities as supercenters of creativity, or a metric that compares things like civic participation?
