'Social Streets’: Where Facebook Meets IRL
(Photo by Tullio Dainese, Flickr)
Actually knowing your neighbors is becoming popular again.
Neighborhood connections have often been replaced with online connections, leaving people feeling a little lonelier as they walk around their neighborhoods–and without anyone from whom to borrow that proverbial cup of sugar.
In 2012, Laurell Boyers and her husband, Federico Bastiani, were feeling that isolation when they moved in together in Bologna, Italy.
“We didn’t have family or friends connections here. We knew people occasionally, but none in our same situation,” Boyers told the New York Times.
So Bastiani created a simple Facebook group, posting neighborhood fliers about it inviting neighbors to join “Residents of Via Fondazza-Bologna.”
They did.
The messages were simple at first, looking for someone to run errands with, looking to change train tickets, or looking to split a bottle of wine – the type of things a neighbor does with another neighbor.
“We live near one another, and we help each other. That’s it,” Bastiani told the Times.
Within days, the Facebook group had 20 members; two years later, their group had swelled to 1,100. That’s about half of Via Fondazza’s residents. The other half don’t get left out; they get invited the old-fashioned way, by word of mouth.
Caterina Salvadori moved to Via Fondazza six months ago. She posted about a clogged sink on the site – and soon a neighbor was at her door with a plunger in hand.
“Can you imagine, in a big city? It’s not about the sink, it’s the feeling of protection and support that is so hard to find in cities nowadays,” she told the Times.
But it’s growing easier. The couple’s project inspired a site called Social Street that spells out exactly how to create a community the way they did. More than 400 streets across Europe and around the world are now “social streets.”
And it’s not the only game in town: Nextdoor, a social networking site for neighbors, claims to connect people in more than 76,000 U.S. neighborhoods, and it’s expanding internationally as well.
A social street is free to create, join and maintain, and it puts the real-life “social” back in social media.
One tip: Build in a little extra time to talk to your neighbors when you’re out and about. Boyers joked to the Times that she is now obligated to speak to everyone when she leaves the house.
“It’s comforting and also tiring, sometimes. You have to be careful what you ask for,“ she says.
