Suburbia versus evolution

Evolutionary Anthropologist Robin Dunbar is the author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (Faber) and he has just been interviewed by The Guardian’s Aleks Krotoski on the subject of how we came to be modern humans. His findings say a lot about why cities and villages work best at high density, and why suburbia is disastrous for humanity.

What does your work tell us about the way we interact socially?

The way in which our social world is constructed is part and parcel of our biological inheritance. Together with apes and monkeys, we’re members of the primate family - and within the primates there is a general relationship between the size of the brain and the size of the social group. We fit in a pattern. There are social circles beyond it and layers within - but there is a natural grouping of 150. This is the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation - there’s some personal history, not just names and faces.

And this is the Dunbar number!

Yes.

You're a lucky man, with a number named after you. How did you come up with this concept?

Looking at the Machiavellian intelligence theory, I was working on the arcane question of why primates spend so much time grooming one another, and I tested another hypothesis - which says the reason why primates have big brains is because they live in complex social worlds. Because grooming is social, all these things ought to map together, so I started plotting brain size and group size and grooming time against one another. You get a nice set of relationships.

It was about 3 in the morning probably, and I thought, hmm, what happens if you plug humans into this? And you get this number of 150. This looked implausibly small, given that we all live in cities now, but it turned out that this was the size of a typical community in hunter-gatherer societies. And the average village size in the Domesday Book is 150 [people]. It’s the same when we have much better data - in the 18th century, for example, thanks to parish registers. County by county, the average size of a village is again 150.

Can we grow the Dunbar number?

We’’re caught in a bind: community sizes were designed for hunter-gatherer- type societies where people weren’t living on top of one another. Your 150 were scattered over a wide area, but everybody shared the same 150. This made for a very densely interconnected community, and this means the community polices itself. If you step out of line, somebody else will wag a finger at you, maybe granny or great-granny.

Our problem now is the sheer density of folk - our networks aren’t compact. You have clumps of friends scattered around the world who don’t know one another; now you don’t have an interwoven network. It leads to a less well-integrated society. How to re-create that old sense of community in these new circumstances? That’s an engineering problem. How do we work around it?

The alternative solution, of course, is that we could evolve bigger brains. But they’d have to be much bigger, and it takes a long time.

To see this interview in full, visit www.guardian.co.uk/video

And keep it dense! Dr Dunbar's studies certainly point to the advantages of avoiding overcrowding, but equally they highlight the necessity for communities to be physically interconnected.

Suburbs - from urban blight to global mess

In an article for the London Observer (19.07.09), Tristram Hunt posited that " Suburbs are derided by snobs, yet they are the best hope for our future."
In this, he completely missed the point. Hatred of suburbia is not snob-driven. It is in our nature to live in high-density surroundings, from the nest to villages to industrial cities. This is how animals function. We are happiest and least stressed when everything and everyone we need to make our life complete are within touching distance, and cities work because the citizens are able to come out of their homes, assemble and exchange ideas.

Suburbs, the enormous swathes of miniature manor houses, which largely grew with the spread of private car ownership, are the antithesis of human nature, and are only attractive to those who actively court alienation, a life spent zooming between work and the telly with no danger of connecting to society.
The current vogue for second houses (and even first ones) in the countryside for city workers shapes up as the vanguard of Antisociety. Try taking a walk along any 'quiet' country road in England and parts of Wales, but especially in the so-called Home Counties, and you will be overwhelmed by the new country people, roaring back and forth in their tin boxes between their little hidden homes and town work, the pub or a supermarket. This pattern of life is repeated in suburbia.
But easily the worst aspect of suburbia is that unlike the Great Mistake of the Sixties, the high-rise blocks (many now being thankfully dynamited), these interminable rows of little castles with their lovingly tended little gardens are 'facts on the ground'- the castles are places, no matter how cut off from their neighbours and society, which resemble real homes. Prefabricated boxes in the sky weren't able to exert such a sense of proprietorial belonging.

Unlike the natural high-density growth of villages and cities, suburbs swallow up huge chunks of greenery, too. As the glaciers retreat, the suburbs advance.

The most disturbing, and saddening, tendency in urban planning now is for cities to raze their ancient terraces, the infrastructure of community; and high streets with homes, shops, pubs, businesses, cafes all rubbing shoulders, to replace them with randomly scattered low-density inner-city suburbia. Often living streets, part of the 'internet' of the city, have been replaced with the town planning equivalent of the apple-pie bed: tiny, worming cul-de-sacs. Someone must have thought this would redress the balance after the high-rise Sixties; but the truth is that those old schemes or estates had so much empty space between the blocks, space with no pubs, shops, cinemas, or shelter of any kind, that in effect this is a repeat of the old disaster. Leave your car behind, if you have one, and go for a walk through suburbia. You will see how vast and bleak it is. This has nothing to do with snobbery.