Jennifer Senior has an interesting New York feature on cities and "loneliness" -- or why new social science research shows that urban dwellers are less likely to be lonely than people living in suburban, exurban, or rural areas. Cities, Senior writes, foster friendships by allowing individuals to meet more new people and giving them more interesting activities to do. Similarly, urban living helps marriages by providing couples with new stimuli -- essentially preventing them from "falling into a rut." This is all despite that fact that far more people live alone in cities; in New York, an astounding one in three households contains just one individual.
Senior sets up her piece as a foil to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, the 2000 book that argued Americans are more socially atomized than ever before, eschewing clubs, games, church groups, and other activities that once defined adult social life. To be sure, Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, is a pessimist, and his conceptions of social activity in Bowling Alone were limited. But Senior ignores Putnam's more recent work, which raises, I think, a much more pressing concern about urban life. In a study of 30,000 people across the country, Putnam found that Americans living in more diverse communities -- cities, in most cases -- are far more likely to have negative views of people racially and socioeconomically different from themselves. So while urban dwellers may be less lonely and have a larger social circle, they are, in many cases, distrustful of difference, and so are choosing to socialize with people much like themselves.
We saw the effects of this trend during the Democratic party, when white voters in some heavily white states, such as Iowa and Minnesota, were far more sympathetic to Barack Obama than white voters in states with larger black populations, such as Missouri and Pennsylvania. Many of those same voters turned around and voted for Obama in the general election, but the trend is disturbing nonetheless, and worthy of further study.
--Dana Goldstein
