[SamWhited]

It's much easier to get into town from a farm a few miles out than to the city from the suburbs. Plus in the city there are lots of places and in most of our cities they have similar walkability problems (I'm from Atlanta which is particularly egregious in terms of transit and walk/bikeability). There's not naturally that one place where your neighbors are going to go and happen to bump into each other. You have to first meet them, then plan "let's go to this bar at 13:00, and here's how parking is going to work, etc." as opposed to just "everyone is in town, or at the bar in their neighborhood, the obvious place where you're just going to happen to bump into someone else who showed up for happy hour" or whatever.

I'm sure I'm conveying the difference badly, but it's the difference between random encounters with your neighbors whom you'll see the next time you both go to the grocery and then walk over to the fun coffee place vs. random encounters with strangers you'll never see again.

[randomdata]

> It's much easier to get into town from a farm a few miles out than to the city from the suburbs.

It may be harder, but surely you're doing it anyway? It is not like the suburbs have a grocery store either (usually). Driving into the city is the name of the game, much like it is for farmers.

> Plus in the city there are lots of places

Presumably if you pick one, you'll start to see the same faces, though. Certainly in my youth the big city bar I hung out at had a wonderful community of regulars. If you pick a new bar every night you're going to never get to know anyone, perhaps, but there is no reason to do that.

That said, the youth today seem to be rejecting alcohol and thus bars, so perhaps the bar is a bad example for a current conversation? Or maybe it's the right example as it visibly presents something interesting that is happening. When I was young, you'd have 20 year olds, 40 year olds, and 60 year olds all mingling together at the bar. It's just what everyone did. Now the 40 year olds are busy taking their kids to youth sports leagues, the 20 year olds are doing whatever it is 20 year olds do nowadays, while the 60 year olds are still there hanging out at the bar.

Which appears, to my eye, to have created a huge division in communities. There are still micro-communities found within that, or nano-communities, particularly with the sports leagues (the parents don't really seem to mingle outside of their immediate team's social circle), but the cohesion of an entire community seems to be devastated by that separation.

Maybe that's the source of isolation that people are feeling?

[SamWhited]

This may be different per city, but at least near me this isn't true, the suburbs have a grocery (or several).

> Presumably if you pick one, you'll start to see the same faces, though

Sure, and you'll likely only see them in the grocery and not elsewhere. Probably the same with the bar; I too know a bunch of regulars at a local bar, but likely not going to run into them outside that bar unless we become friends and make specific plans to do so. Also those people probably aren't my actual neighbors. It's a different kind and frequency of chance meeting when the built-environment is designed to facilitate community. I'm not saying that you'll literally never meet a neighbor in the grocery, it will happen, it's just not going to happen with the same kind of frequency as if we actually designed the built-environment to encourage it.