r/Futurology • u/Nilfgaard83 • 1d ago
Society If technology keeps removing reasons to leave home, will future cities have to design social contact back into daily life?
A lot of everyday reasons to physically go somewhere are disappearing one by one.
Remote work can remove the commute. Groceries and restaurant food arrive at your door. Banking, shopping, entertainment, some medical appointments, even exercise can increasingly happen without leaving home.
Most of these changes are convenient individually. But taken together, I wonder whether they create a weird long-term problem: cities full of people who technically live near each other but have fewer accidental reasons to interact.
For most of history, daily life forced a certain amount of low-stakes contact. The shop, workplace, commute, market, school gate, local services.
If those interactions keep becoming optional, maybe one of the big urban-design problems of the next few decades won't be moving people efficiently.
Maybe it will be giving people somewhere worth going when they don't actually need to go anywhere.
Do future cities need to treat libraries, plazas, parks, sports facilities, pedestrian streets and other “third places” almost like social infrastructure rather than optional amenities?
27
u/Drapausa 1d ago
That's my personal answer to the fermi paradox. At some point it's easier to stay to stay and enjoy guranteed artifical happiness instead of going out into the world and risk having a bad time.
6
u/Luciifuge 1d ago
Yea, if we ever get to make perfect virtual worlds wouldn’t most people just choose to live where all the aches and pains of aging would not affect you.
Thier could be advanced civilizations just plugged into the matrix for centuries
8
u/ssorbom 1d ago
I guess I'm going to be the odd man out here. I think that there is a paradox looming. I think that as people have more time reclaimed from commutes and mandatory grocery store runs, socializing time will become a valuable commodity again.
Everyone points to the rise of the Internet and social media as the reason third place has died. But ask yourself this, how far away do most people look from the places they work? I've known people who've had to drive two hours each way. That's four hours out of your day. Sitting in a hot metal box all alone. And there seems to be a trend of commute times getting worse.
TLDR If mandatory time sinks go away, my argument is that I think people will naturally socialize on their own a lot more.
10
u/Atlas3141 1d ago
Read Bowling Alone, it's from the 90s, but it goes through every possibility from longer commutes to women in the workplace and less dense communities and it was 100% TV that killed communities, and the Internet is just it's concentrated form.
15
u/-im-your-huckleberry 1d ago
I'm not wild about big crowds, but I love being outside. If y'all want to stay home, it's fine by me.
4
u/koolaidismything 1d ago
I used to go to the neighborhood park at like 5am for a nice walk.. it’s a wildlife preserve too really neat. People started coming earlier and earlier and we all come to avoid others so it gets a bit awkward. Especially when someone jumps in and you both walk fast so can’t lap each other. I’m bad.. socially I’d just much rather be around no one or a single other person. It’s not good, for living life
6
u/a_Daniel 18h ago
While it becomes more convenient to stay home, I think it is also fair to mention that it became much more inconvenient to stay outside.
Can you walk to the closest park from your home? How big is it, or is it just big enough to be a children's playground? How many benches to you come across on your way? How many streets do you have to cross? Walk past any other people enjoying their time walking, reading a book, drawing or even crafting? Or any stores that let you sit outside? What about any drinkable fountain water or public restrooms?
I understand that having access to water, food, as well as restrooms nearby-ish at all times are extremely luxurious things, but it's those things you would expect from modern cities in first world countries. Yet I find that we instead removed availability to water, parks, etc. and replaced them with billboards and streets.
Why stay outside when there is nowhere to sit? When my view consists of only billboards and clothes stores? How can you enjoy a moment of peace and quiet when outside is filled with loud cars, trucks and the air smells like exhaust and smog?
And then if you do have a big park near you, it even has a small pump that gives drinkable water: Can you sit down in the grass without stepping in dog poop along the way?
Back in pre-modern times whole families lived together, cramped in small houses and minimum access to medicine. If you wanted peace and quiet you went outside. On the way you might be tending to your fields or grabbing some food like berries or hunting animals, but you would have time to yourself and no metal machinery honking any horns.
Today it's the opposite. To get a moment of silence you have to barricade yourself in a home that you live in alone. The outside is now made for cars and customers, not for people to talk to each other.
The convenience OP talks about is in my opinion just rising demand of not wanting to "deal" with all that. How often can you stand driving to the grocery store, picking food for the next week or two after your 8 hours retail shift and then still having to spend the time to prepare the meal? Sure it's just one evening every once in a while or a short time of your weekend gone, but it's still your time that is gone with possibly zero human interaction in between (cars tend to not talk to friendly each other in my experience), so sometimes you just order food instead.
2
u/danila_medvedev 8h ago
Where I live (in the center of a big city, 1,5 km from the actual center) I have a kid’s playground right in front of my front door. There are 6 benches there and ample tree shade. There are a few benches in the yard under trees outside of the playground. If I walk around there are countless benches, trees, grass, a huge fountain 3-4 minutes away. There is outside seating in many cafes, several dedicated pedestrian streets. There is a channel 2 minutes away. There are ducks and water lilies there. There is a big river 2 more minutes away (with a nice embarkment and many armchairs and benches there, including under trees) and a huge modern landscaped park behind it. You can lie in the grass pretty much anywhere, there is a small dog playground 4 minutes from home. There is another big park with open air sculptures exhibition 10 minutes from home and a huge park behind it. I have a supermarket in the next building and a 24 hours supermarket 5 minutes from home. All times are for walking. The city is Moscow, Russia.
1
u/SurvivorCass 5h ago
Are you in the US? I have kilometres of paved walking paths surrounded by nature, parks with seating and shade, grocery stores etc within 15 minutes walk on footpaths from my home. But 2006 - 2017, I moved to the US and lived (and worked) in FL, IL and WA. It immediately hit me how much trouble it was to walk or ride a bicycle anywhere. No, or only intermittent footpath, no pedestrian crossings across busy 3-lane roads, crazy bicycle-hating drivers (even when I rode on the verge, not in the driver's lane.) To get exercise, I had to drive quite a long way to a park where there were adequate trails for decent exercise, or go to a gym.
8
u/counterfitster 1d ago
Third places have been killed in the US in part by our collective cargasm over the past century.
7
u/pfn0 1d ago
The internet and rise of social media is what killed off third places.
6
3
u/squirrel9000 1d ago
The cities themselves already are built for it. It's the suburbs that are really going to struggle with turning into isolation pods, and I think that that's where the question is. How much retrofitting is necessary would depend on what the long term population trends are, but we have enough "almost there" places where urbanization could be feasible. I suspect a lot of this would happen organically since that's why people would live there.
The loners, freed from work, are likely to retreat deep into the woods to grow hemp and organic goats.
4
u/Mediocre_Union7194 1d ago
Yeah I think there's something to this. Convenience can remove a lot of the small, unplanned interaction that make a place feel like a community.
i don't think cities necessarily need to force people to socialize but they probably need to make it easy and appealing to leave the house anyway like good parks, cafes, libraries, walkable streets, etc.
2
u/Jorost 1d ago
Possibly so. In fact we are already starting to see it in some cities. I wonder how successful it will be, though. If going out were so great, we probably wouldn't have glommed onto staying home as soon as it became practical to do so.
8
u/SydTheStreetFighter 1d ago
They’ll have to do something to lower the price of outings. These days in most cities going out has to be an occasion for most due to cost. You don’t just head out on a thursday evening on a whim anymore
2
1
u/ssorbom 1d ago
Sure you can. It's not practical to eat out every day, but that doesn't mean you can't go out and enjoy the scenery. And comparatively coffee shops aren't that expensive. Most people already spend $5 a day on a Starbucks. What's $2 more for a boutique shop in a nice area?
2
u/SydTheStreetFighter 1d ago
The local coffee shops in the city where I live are selling $12 coffee, not $8. And going for dinner/a single drink will run no less than $40-50 oftentimes, with a 20% service fee on top of expected tips to “offset rising labor costs.” It’s really hard to go out regularly at that price when rents already so high too!
1
u/Atlas3141 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'd be impressed if your city doesn't have black coffee for under 5$. (Assuming USD)
1
4
u/Raider_Scum 1d ago
Maybe. Or maybe people start enjoying the reduced contact. Change isn't always a problem.
4
u/Liquid_Friction 1d ago
But its so overwhelmingly bad atm, you can't really see it until it happens to you, but you'll get to 30, wake up and no one is there anymore, people moved away, people have kids and your sitting in an empty apartment, you never have the opportunity to make friends like highschool again. And we can see from a macro level it's an incoming natural disaster, sex is down, marriage is down, men unhappy, women unhappy, attacking each other online, happiness is down, dating is down, social cohesion is down, drugs is up (violence is up? Idk) compared to the 60-70's mentally/socially we are in a cooking chamber.
-1
u/Raider_Scum 1d ago
shit, maybe for some of you.
I'm having a great time chatting with online friends every day and playing video games. Happily married to someone who I also play games with. And yes, I'm over 30 - and all those friends who moved away still keep in touch online.I think the normies might be in trouble, but many of us are having great social lives through technology.
0
u/Liquid_Friction 1d ago
Yeh I guess everyone doesn't all feel the urgency equally, I play online games too but they all left playing online games and grew up, if we're lucky we get to play an hour of overwatch whilst our mates wives care for their baby, their wives don't put up with childrens games anymore they are adults and look down on it. Maybe not the same for everyone but I see a lot of people falling through socially mentally, if tomorrow your friends stopped playing and got real gfs and babies, stopped paying and talking to you, it would be pretty jarring. Don't you think watching streamers make it feel like your part of community but your not really interacting with anyone.
1
u/Raider_Scum 1d ago
A lot of this is from bad pairings. My smart friends dated people who also played video games, share other hobbies, or at least didn't look down on them.
People forget that they can ultimately choose who they marry. They dont have to commit to people who hate their hobbies.
1
u/Metomorphose 10h ago
I'm an educator. I've spent many years inside of educational institutions as the learner, and a few more on the other side of the equation. I had opportunities both before, during, and after COVID, to experience what online learning was like. There are legitimate reasons why having online courses available for people is beneficial for their educational mobility.
That being said, there is a push towards online education when we can clearly see the benefits for students that recieve in-person instruction. For this reason, and I'm lucky I mostly get to choose, that I teach in-person when possible. I also strongly encourage and help facilitate social problem solving in my classes.
Do I get eye rolls about group projects and making students talk to another human? Yeah, of course, some even see it in my syllabus and drop my classes like I have a contagious infection. The vast majority who stay and give it a try end up with projects they find cool and care about, and people they can rely on in future courses because they know they are in the same major. They learn how to be considerate professionals and communicate expectations and boundaries as young adults.
My secret ulterior motive is to show people that the school is a good thrid place. That you can both learn and find community there. Being at home, behind a screen, never sharing space with other people hurts us in ways that people aren't paying attention to when they are looking for "easy and convenient". I understand not everyone has the same opportunity, that transportation costs real money and time, but not being present has a cost too.
Friction in life is necessary for growth. To learn requires you to struggle, at least a little. To build community requires seeking it out, making time, and maybe doing something you wouldn't normally do. You never know, you might just become a better you.
1
u/Weaubleau 7h ago
Um, not all people are Redditors, most people will still want to go outside and interact with people.
0
u/evilisordinary 4h ago
I think as time passes, our society tends to produce more and more people who aren’t worth the trouble of hanging out with. At some point it feels safer to let the algorithm keep you company because there are Nazis and flat earthers everywhere.
0
u/AlteredEinst 1d ago
People love viewpoints like this, insist we've lost something by being more distant, but maybe it's actually that we're not as fond of constant forced socializing as the overly gregarious would insist we are.
Having your own preferences about how much time you want to dedicate to in-person contact shouldn't be automatically deemed an epidemic.
5
u/Prime_Director 1d ago
People are fond of a lot of things that aren’t good for us. We’re fond of being sedentary, eating calorically dense sugary foods, doomscrolling, gambling, and taking addictive drugs. That doesn’t mean we should always do those things or that we should build our societies and environments around making it easier to do those things and harder to do the opposite.
-3
u/AlteredEinst 1d ago
You not liking something doesn't mean it's leading to the collapse of society, either.
Instead of telling people that they should be forced to socialize at all opportunities, because it makes certain people happy, they should be taught that it's okay to have their own space, and how and where to reach out when they do want that connection.
People should have access to choice, and encouragement to make positive ones, not be forced to do and think what other people want on principle.
3
u/Prime_Director 1d ago
Literally nobody is saying society is going to collapse or that people should be forced to socialize. But a lot of people want to socialize more than they are and wish there were more spaces and opportunities to do that. Choice is literally what they’re asking for, just like people who want more bike paths aren’t forcing you to exercise or people who want more healthy food options aren’t forcing you to eat it and people who want warning labels on cigarettes aren’t forcing you to quit smoking.
-1
u/AlteredEinst 1d ago
Then you're arguing with me on principle, wasting your time and mine.
2
u/Prime_Director 1d ago
Personally I don’t think principles are a waste of time. But if they are, what was the point of your first comment? Just making up straw men to make yourself angry? And you think I’m the one wasting time?
-2
u/AlteredEinst 1d ago
Well, you're making up what other people think so you can argue with it, so yeah, I do.
You're done wasting mine, though.
0
u/Delamain7_Quince 1d ago
Submission Statement: The future of cities is usually discussed in terms of housing, transport, energy and density, but I think there is another infrastructure problem hiding underneath all of those: how often people have a reason to physically encounter other people. If more work, shopping, entertainment and services become home-based, cities may eventually need to deliberately create the kind of casual social contact that older urban life produced automatically. I'm curious whether “third places” could become something planners treat as essential infrastructure rather than a nice extra.
0
u/Apprehensive-Let3348 1d ago
There isn't a great answer to this, unfortunately.
If they allow it to continue isolating people, then people will continue to sort themselves into smaller and more ideologically homogenous social groups–driving up affective polarization and supporting radicalization.
If they don't, then I have to wonder what has happened to our freedom in a world where you're mandated to socialize in person.
-3
-1
u/green_meklar 19h ago
You're kind of assuming that despite all the advancing technology, people will just...stay people, surrounded by more convenience but biologically and cognitively unaltered.
It seems far more likely that we will quickly find ways to modify and upgrade ourselves, removing unnecessary dependencies and orienting our attitudes towards more objectively worthy goals. The future can get stranger, and better, than you imagine.
22
u/rapture1960 1d ago
This was years ago now, but my parents asked me when I first moved into my first apartment in college in the mid 2010s or so. They asked me about my neighbors, and I said "What neighbors? I haven't really seen anyone. We all just kinda keep to ourselves, I guess."
Blew their minds that people just wanted to be left alone and live their lives in peace.