Review
Somerville, MA population density: 19,652.04/sq mi
Brooklyn, NY population density: 38,634/sq mi
But living in Brooklyn is nothing like what you describe. (It’s pretty impersonal, on the whole.)
It seems to me that population density has only a very tenuous relationship to how impersonal an area is. Maybe there’s a correlation, but it’s not clear what the sign is, and it’s possible that the sign of the correlation changes between regions of the graph, etc.
Other factors play a stronger role. If I knew nothing else about a municipality or community, and merely learned that its population density is rising/falling, I would not confidently make any predictions whatsoever about whether it was going to get more or less impersonal.
I don't know much about what it's like to live in Brooklyn. Would you be able to say more about your experience living there? When I've walked around Brooklyn and other areas of NYC I haven't run into people I know, but I also don't know many people in NYC. Does it feel impersonal for reasons other than not seeing friends?
(I also suspect a lot of people have different experiences, and, still going on the basic model in the post, would predict a much higher fraction of residents experience NYC the way I described than the US average.)
I don’t know much about what it’s like to live in Brooklyn. Would you be able to say more about your experience living there? When I’ve walked around Brooklyn and other areas of NYC I haven’t run into people I know, but I also don’t know many people in NYC. Does it feel impersonal for reasons other than not seeing friends?
It feels impersonal for many reasons, I guess.
For one thing, the sheer size of the city means that your friends ending up living in the same neighborhood as you, or even anywhere close to you, is low. The likelihood of making friends with people who live in your neighborhood (as opposed to somewhere else in the city) is low, because the city is not arranged geographically by interests or by personality or any such thing. If you do make friends with people who live nearby (e.g., if you are a child, and make friends at school, and the children at said school live locally instead of being bussed in from all over the place), then people will eventually move to other parts of the city (or you will), and now you’re no longer co-located.
Aside from friends as such, few people know (or particularly care to know) their neighbors. This is again due to many factors, among which demographics is probably the most relevant one. Because of the great diversity among the city’s denizens, it is very likely that you will have nothing in common (culturally, etc.) with your neighbors (and also, that they will be much too busy to wander around in the vicinity of your/their dwellings, chatting with you or whatever). (For instance, I don’t even know the names of most of the people who live in my apartment building, nor do I care to know them.)
The sheer number of people works against personal connections. It is possible to live in the same neighborhood for years or even decades, and yet for the great majority of the people you see on any given day (while walking down the street, in a store, etc.) to be people you don’t even visually recognize, much less are acquainted with. And people arrive and leave all the time; there is a great and constant churn. You are, at almost all times, alone in a crowd of total strangers.
I think this exactly describes our neighborhood. Our garden backs on to a park. On the other side of the park is a foundation school. Next to the foundation school are kindergartens and daycares of all different ages. Shops are all a seven minute walk away (closer ones are under construction).
The pavements are extremely wide and beautifully planted, with cycle paths everywhere. There's a play area every few hundred metres, as well as benches, shades, exercise machines etc.
It is dense (approximately 25000 people in 2.5 Square Kms, but that's what makes it possible to have wide pavements and tons of facilities - they'll actually be used.
Altogether it makes for an environment where people prefer to walk (it helps that the roads are only one lane each way and with limited parking), and so we constantly bump into friends whenever we go out.
This is very different to the area I grew up, (entirely single family homes) where every single thing was at least a 5 to 10 minute walk, and people drove everywhere.
One thing I really appreciate about living in Somerville is how density facilitates serendipity. Higher density means more of the places we might want to go are within walking distance, and then walking (and high density again) means we're more likely to run into friends.
This afternoon we were walking Lily (9y) to a sleepover and we passed one of the nearby playgrounds. Lily and Anna (7y) saw some school friends and ran ahead to say hi. Anna wanted to stay and play, and I asked one of the parents if they'd be up for having Anna while I finished the dropoff. They were happy to (we take each other's kids a decent amount) and Anna got to have a much more fun half hour. Then, after I got back, we hung out at the playground with friends for a while longer before heading home for dinner.
This certainly would have been possible to arrange intentionally, with a bunch of communication, but if we had been driving I expect Anna wouldn't have ended up spending this time with her friends. I would guess that the majority of times we go out we run into someone, though it's much more common that we stop and hang out together than leave one of the kids and split up.
This sort of thing wasn't a common experience at all in the West Medford neighborhood I grew up in. It's an area not far from here, but probably only a third the density: the lots are about twice the size and there are more single-family houses. Distances meant we would usually drive, and even if our family had decided to primarily walk you don't run into friends when out walking unless your friends also tend to be out on foot. Another contribution is also that our kids' school is very close and draws mostly from the immediate neighborhood, which means their friends are almost all within easy walking distance. Whereas my elementary school drew from all over Medford and I only had one school friend whose house I could walk to, and only for two of the six years.
Americans often worry that increasing density would lead to their neighborhoods becoming impersonal. As someone who lives in one of the densest municipalities in the country, I think this is backwards: proximity fosters community.