To tackle the rising problem of loneliness in New Zealand, politicians need to reimagine our cities by reclaiming city centres and building strong urban communities for tenants instead of more suburban development. Dr David Jenkins and Eileen Corcoran sketch out three general directions Aotearoa urbanism might follow.
Opinion: According to Loneliness NZ, more than 650,000 Kiwis have felt lonely within the past four weeks, with 137,000 of them feeling lonely most or all of the time.
Especially worrying is that loneliness is highest among 15-24-year-olds, a demographic in this country that has the highest rate of suicide within the OECD countries.
The harms to health caused by chronic loneliness include its negative impacts on our endocrinal, immune and cardiovascular functioning, with the overall effect likened to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and the shortening of a person’s lifespan by as many as 15 years.
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Aotearoa is far from being an outlier. In the US, the surgeon general has declared that the country is in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness, calling for a response that commits to the same level of investments that were made to address “tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis”.
In the UK, as early as 2013, Jeremy Hunt – the then secretary of state for health in the UK – promised £20 million and a chief inspector of social care to help those suffering from chronic loneliness, those he labelled the 'forgotten million'. In 2021, the Japanese government appointed a minister of loneliness to counteract spikes in suicide rates, especially of single women under 40.
As creatures who are, as the social neuroscientist John Cacioppo put it, ‘naturally gregarious’, social connections are not some optional extra. On the contrary, feeling connected to others is a constitutive feature not only of a flourishing life, but a minimally decent one.
Cities vs Loneliness
About 90 percent of New Zealanders live in cities, as blessed with beautiful scenery as New Zealand is.
On the face of it, cities should be places where it’s far more difficult to feel lonely than in isolated villages. After all, they are places full of people, where it’s all but impossible to go a day without some kind of human interaction.
Walt Whitman described New York as a “ceaseless, devilish provoking, delicious, glorious jam … a banquet where all may come, and none shall be thrust aside.” More concretely, it is often in what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg described as their “third places” — churches, bars, barbershops, youth clubs, leisure centres, diners — that cities provide spaces for gathering, sociability and community.
Of course, the more troubling truth is that cities can also be lonely places.
Recapturing Aotearoa’s urban space from the anti-urban machine that is the car will help generate more sociable public space
It is important to acknowledge that the role of design can only ever contribute in limited ways to measures that seek to alleviate loneliness – there are deep, underlying structural issues that need to be addressed if we, and those who claim to represent and serve us, are serious about ending loneliness.
For starters, people need the time and energy to better connect with others. People who are harried between home, work, the commute and all those other activities – shopping, taking children to school, etc – or who lack the material means or security to actually do anything beyond keeping their trains on the track, are not going to be able to take advantage of cities designed to prevent and alleviate loneliness.
Nevertheless, Aotearoa also needs to rethink the model of urbanism it elected to follow in the latter half of the 20th Century. Even though its cities are small by international standards, they are typically sprawling, dominated by cars, with populations underserved by public transport that is infrequent and inconvenient.
A major problem with changing the built environment to make it more sociable is that it consists, largely, of concrete, metal, and glass – materials notoriously difficult to ‘edit’.
The only way out of this morass will be gradual change. With that in mind, we want to sketch three general directions that an Aotearoa urbanism fit for the 21st Century might follow.
First, rather than focus on moving materials around our cities, we should prioritise improving tenants’ rights. Improving security of tenure, imposing price controls and more strictly enforcing sanctions against errant landlords can help people put down the kinds of deep roots that turn neighbourhoods into communities.
The Residential Tenancies Amendment Act 2020 signals improvements in the right direction but Aotearoa can continue to strengthen tenants’ rights and, perhaps, develop more proactive government provision of high-quality social housing, of the kind enjoyed by 60 percent of the residents of Vienna, the most liveable city in the world, according to a report by the Economist.
Although the 2023 Budget stipulates an extra 3000 public houses to be built in 2025, on top of 14,050 to be built in 2024, these are still framed as emergency housing, rather than as a more general mode of delivering decent housing. Longer term, community planning needs to be placed at the heart of Aotearoa’s responses to the ongoing housing crisis, something only the Green Party, at least at the level of aspiration, seems to clearly recognise.
Second, reorienting ourselves to a public culture of parks, plazas and ‘the street’ more generally will create a livelier and more welcoming urban environment.
Recapturing Aotearoa’s urban space from the anti-urban machine that is the car will help generate more sociable public space. Forcing people out of their cars and onto affordable and well-resourced public transport might also reorient us to more sociable forms of commuting, one where the relationship we share with fellow citizens is not mediated through glass, metal, asphalt and speed.
There is also a related need to rejuvenate the culture of our parks, to reimagine them as places that might in fact be preferred to our private, single family unit gardens. Too many of our parks are little more than patches of wide open grass with a few sorry-looking pieces of playground furniture scattered in the corner. Christchurch’s bustling Margaret Mahy Family Playground should be the rule, rather than the exception.
Third, we need to refuse our sprawling suburban mode of living and reclaim the centre of our cities as belonging to ordinary people.
We travel to city centres for work, shopping, restaurants, bank appointments, and so forth. Even as cities are treated as sites of concentrated activity, they are also always treated as somewhere to go to, rather than somewhere to dwell and reside.
Our commutes are the price we pay for affordable housing because, we think, centralised urban space cannot be for us, the plebeian urbanites. We need to be far more demanding of our cities, and learn how to treat urban spaces as residential areas, not just as CBDs where a few of our wealthier compatriots happen to live.
National’s backtracking on Medium Density Residential Standards, which were brought in to prevent urban sprawl, represent the wrong direction of travel, opting for suburban development into greenfield zones rather than allowing building upwards in central city space.
Increased density is no magic bullet to loneliness, but the quality of density – managed through the careful design of housing that ensures privacy while facilitating neighbourhood level sociability – disrupts our tendency to build cities around the single family unit, based in stand-alone houses. This style of housing may work in rural areas and provincial towns, but in urban centres it is untenable as our primary mode of housing.
