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Comment by yagodragon | Hacker News Reader

You can't design a new city from the ground up and make it perfect. Cities grow organically over the time. Athens is one of the oldest inhabitated cities in the world. Growing up in Athens I really hated this ugly architecture but now I realize that nearly every little neighbourhood has it's own piece of history and every street is so full of life. I wouldn't trade that with any lifeless good-looking residential area on a European country

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Communities are interesting things - I grew up in a small fishing village in the north of Scotland which was extremely socially integrated - everyone went to the same school regardless if their parents were worth millions (and some were, although I only realised this years later) or were unemployed.

Then I lived in Edinburgh's New Town for over 20 years which is utterly gorgeous but a bit lacking in community as there is a fairly narrow band of people who live there and school attendance is largely private and even more stratified.

Now I am back living near a old small town and to me the whole place just feels more "organic" than where I lived in Edinburgh (although I dearly love the place).

My whole life growing up I was taught about how repressive the socially integrated model was, where everybody knows everybody, and how we should celebrate that the modern world has left it behind.

As time goes by, I'm starting to realize that while it can be very repressive for people who don't fit in, in trying to discard that model outright we've lost something incredibly important.

I think what is important is that everybody find community. And it shouldn't be a surprise that that is easiest in the smaller settings that most humans have lived their lives in before the modern era. But we can have both. The great cities of the world have vibrant local neighborhoods AND "scenes" based on common interests. And for the smaller towns and villages the internet enables both online communities, and more importantly, the coordination of regional communities of shared interests. More Meetup.com, less twitter.

Well, we've gone all-in on "digital community", which has the unfortunate outcomes of 1) easy to find your echo chamber of choice and 2) limited in-person interaction. In-person community can still be found, but it seems to be in decline. For example, teenagers are spending less & less time with their friends, and church congregations continue to shrink.

For the avoidance of doubt, Edinburgh as a city is about as vibrant as it is possible to be, just that the achingly pretty neighbourhood we lived in was a bit stuffy. :-)

Its funny because both my wife and I feel that about playgrounds near our apartment -- we have 3 playgrounds and only managed to click with other parents and children on a playground that is a bit farther away, while the one right across our apartment building where we meet our neighbours we somehow always feel alien.

But you have to balance that with the common aphorism that "we don't know our own neibhrous". We meet them when tennants' councils are held to discuss the koinoxrista[1], we bump into them on the stairs or the elevator, we bang on their doors to complain about the noise, perhaps- but other than that, a polykatoikia is not often a community, it's just a place where many people live their unconnected lives together with minimal contact with each other.

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[1] For non-Greeks: that's the maintainance and heating bill that is split among tennants of a polykatoikia.

To some people (including me), that just makes it better. I'm relatively social, but never knew who my neighbors were.

Also happens here in Portugal, I thought it was pretty normal.

As an outsider I found it charming. Especially the Orange trees on sidewalks :) in the Lycabettus area.

I lived in that area for a few months and I still miss it.

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