Everybody needs good neighbours

insight: Louise billingham

I have become accustomed to being in a strange balance of living in very close proximity to hundreds of other households yet feeling remote and detached from my immediate neighbours

When developing high density neighbourhoods, we strive as designers for places where residents can be neighbourly. To create somewhere individuals, feel part of a community and can be proud of where they live and want to stay. But unlike the sub-urban semi-detached street where you meet neighbours over the garden fence while mowing the lawn, meeting people within large, flatted developments is actually quite hard.

Having spent a vast percentage of my year within my high-rise apartment building, I ask, where can you actually meet your neighbours?

Here are my top destinations in my building for a guaranteed encounter with another human.

Post room

The post room. The ultimate excuse to leave your desk and just check whether your parcel has arrived. Here there is opportunity to tut at your fellow residents about that uncollected package left for Angela at No. 302 which has been sitting there for a week. Pass the time of day for a grumble about the weather. Or even help someone carry a heavy item to their door.

This a vital opportunity to meet in the age of next day delivery. I therefore appeal that post rooms in any development going forward need plenty of space. Plenty of space for parcels and plenty of space for people.

The gym

Developments with on-site amenity such as gyms are good for selling homes. But they are also a genuine opportunity to meet your neighbours. Our development has a gym for use of residents which also hosts exercise classes.

It is here by seeing the gym staff each week and chatting to people in my exercise group that I get the warm fuzzy feeling that I am connecting with real life neighbours. It has given me people to smile at in the corridor and a reason to hold open a door.

These spaces within large developments as well as promoting healthy and active lifestyles are also about being part of something based within your immediate postcode. They give you somewhere to go, especially in a time where at present there really aren’t many other places to visit.

Co-op

Ah the Co-op. So convenient. Located at the ground floor of our building it is actually great having a shop right on your doorstep. The week it opened it was immediately heaving and it still is. Where did everyone shop before I wonder? Anyway, now every morning when I go for my walk, I see the same lovely elderly lady with her frame making the daily pilgrimage to the Co-op. I make sure I say a neighbourly hello and she has now become part of my routine.

The way forward….

As we continue to design and develop swathes of the city my experience tells me it is vital to have a joined up approach where we integrate spaces within residential buildings for neighbours to meet.

It is all too easy otherwise to live in isolated cabins within great vessels of housing.

I look at an empty retail unit on the ground floor of the building opposite and know it would be an ideal candidate to provide simple workspace for people who are now remote working. With the benefits of a short commute coupled with the upside of a space which is psychologically separate from the domestic requirements home, it would generate opportunity to share ideas, get people talking and allow residents to become genuinely good neighbours.

Space standards for homes are not going to evolve any time soon to react to a shift towards home working. Instead offering space on site, funded through the overall service charge is an easy win.

So, I challenge designers and developers to be brave and put the case forward for joined up design and to commit just a little bit more space to creating opportunities for people to actually become good neighbours. Even if that is just a great post room.