Why do we feel so disconnected? An acclaimed urbanist and design thinker looks to our physical and digital environments for answers and solutions.
The number of Americans who say they don’t have a single close friend has quadrupled since 1990. Increasingly, we are living, working, and eating alone. Our isolation has stark consequences: disconnected people are less healthy, less trusting, and—due to a lack of support networks—less likely to succeed. On a larger level, low-trust societies are more susceptible to violence, extremism, and inequality.
In The Trust Experiments, the acclaimed urbanist Charles Montgomery shows that our loneliness is not our fault: It’s been designed right into our society. It’s in the single-family homes that discourage neighborly contact. It’s in the car-dependent infrastructure that makes errands and commutes solo affairs. It’s in the online algorithms that incentivize angry reactions over reasoned debate. It’s even in the dense urban high-rises that crowd rather than connect. And it doesn’t have to be this way. For most of human existence, people lived in small interdependent bands. Montgomery argues that these small groups are essential to healthy connection and shows how we can create them in the modern world.
From the baugruppen of Germany to the urban villages of Vancouver to the Utopias of Mexico, Montgomery takes us into intentional communities that have been designed to promote mingling, sharing, mutual aid, and bridge-building. He also visits online activists who are using consensus-based algorithms to debunk misinformation and strengthen trust. And he shows how we can apply these concepts to our own communities in ways big and small, from joining a community garden to moving into a more walkable neighborhood to advocating for human-scaled housing, car-free oases, consensus over conflict, and intentional urban villages.
