I started smoking cigarettes this summer. This will come as a serious disappointment to my lungs, 5K time and my mother when she reads this column. Smoking compromises my physical health while simultaneously enhancing my social life, which is why I don’t intend to quit soon.
One of the things I love about smoking is its ability to instantly disrupt social barriers we construct in public and private spaces. People smoking can always find something to discuss, whether they’re the loathsome flagpole-people or my uncle and me discussing his life’s career in journalism. But it’s the informal, unplanned interactions I love the most.
Wednesday afternoon’s tornadic winds crippled Duke Energy’s ability to keep my house heated and my soy milk from spoiling. At 1:30 a.m., the howling wind called me outside to decompress with an American Spirit.
Three units down from my apartment unit, voices echoed over the parking lot that sits under our complex’s 10-foot-tall decks. Those voices sounded friendly and beckoned this lonesome degenerate to offer a bummed cig.
An hour later, I had made numerous friends of neighbors who, until my seventh month of residence, I had never bothered to meet. One also writes for The Daily Tar Heel, and we created a great connection discussing her fantastic investigative reporting, a fading feature of this publication. I left with a phone number and the knowledge that my neighbors aren’t just folks who happen to live near me.
What does any of this have to do with urbanism? Great neighborhoods create close social connections through intentional design. In urban environments, we come to know our neighbors by seeing each other at the grocery store, at the bus stop or in the stairwell. We learn to trust our communities and welcome people distinctly different from us.
I don’t live in a great neighborhood. I live on a street so steep that it becomes impassable in snow. I live more than an hour’s walk from the nearest grocery store, and before Wednesday night my neighbors might as well have been aliens. This reality is an unfortunate consequence of Chapel Hill’s sprawled development and the physical and financial unattractiveness of on-campus housing, but it’s not insurmountable.
The University and town can be more intentional in their policy to encourage off-campus living that is dense, doesn’t gentrify and is walkable. It can stop trying to force mature adults to live in a system where check-ins with residential advisers is an expectation. It can provide alternative living situations like co-ops to students who are willing to work for their stay. Students shouldn’t have only the choice of Corbusian towers (HoJo), luxury apartments (Shortbread) and single family homes (Northside).
It was great to meet my neighbors — I’m looking forward to more evenings with them on the porch. But living in a neighborhood should mean knowing your neighbors well enough not to have to break the ice with a cancer stick.
