Vancouver City Hall sees block parties as cure for urban isolation
This notion that Vancouverites are somehow less interactive than people in other cities has always irked me.
Basically, the complaint is that when newcomers try to connect with strangers on the street or on the bus, they are met with cold shoulders.
I have lived in a few major cities, and I have neverfound any of them to be any more or less “cold” than Vancouver. I completely reject the notion that people in other cities are supposedly saying hi to random strangers and making friends on the bus or the street and forming networks in that sense. I’ve also lived in small cities < 50,000 people and it’s equally difficult to make friends or meet people.
To start, almost no other city has ever compiled numbers on loneliness.
I would wager that if other cities started to do so - also, how do you even quantify loneliness? - we’d find very similar patterns across cities of all sizes.
