What makes that different from rural areas, where social communities thrive?
In another small town right up the street they have a thriving main street area and the housing is mostly built around that with the exception of outlying farms. It's a smaller town, but chances are you can walk over to the square and everything you need is right there, so they have a much more vibrant feeling town even though it's smaller.
I'm not expert though, that's just my suspicion for why they're different having grown up in the area.
It is interesting that you say it is becoming a problem. Why was it not a problem in a past?
> It's a smaller town
Towns are usually considered urban. I was imagining actual, by definition, rural. Living in a small town (~2,000 people) right now, I'd say it has less of a social community that the rural areas I've lived in previously. Still nothing that should leave you feeling isolated, but there is certainly less of a "automatically friends with everyone" vibe. Granted, my rural experience is strictly in agricultural areas where everyone are farmers, which gives common ground on which to "automatically" become friends. If nothing else, you can talk about farming.
Is that the problem with the suburbs? That the people there can't find common ground on which to build friendships?
You couldn't live that far apart since there were no roads or cars that allowed for this.
People can live far apart without problem if they're self-sufficient or plan ahead: grow your own food, have stockpiles that can last months if you can't make it to town (rural winters can be a bitch). What's new is this dependency on others and belief of "oh my god, I'll die if I don't make it to town (grocery store) this week".
[0] Our closest neighbor was a quarter mile away. Nearest paved road (and our bus stop as kids) was 2.5 miles away over private dirt roads with about 1000 feet change in elevation. It was 8 miles to town, 20 to city (which would barely be a suburb most places).
Meanwhile, the other nearby town I mentioned has plenty of outlying farms that are pretty far away, but when they do go into town to go to the grocery or whatever they can also walk into the coffee shop, or the little stores or whatever and have chance encounters with their in-town neighbors. Even among the farm areas there's a coffee shop / pub that everyone goes to at the end of the day. There's even a dance hall that used to be a one room school house and now gets re-purposed for monthly dances. You don't get that in the suburb I live in now where having anything like that in a residential or agricultural area is forbidden by the zoning code.
Similarly, back before cars sure you didn't pop into town as regularly, but everyone knew when events were happening and when you did go into town for something everyone was there and things were relatively close together and easy to get to (once you were there already, I mean).
Maybe there's a language barrier here, but isn't a suburb defined by being at the edge of a city? So wouldn't a bar in the city be the communal place for the suburb, just like the bar in town is for those out on the farms?
Granted, I've known of a small number of bars operating on farms (usually farm-based craft breweries/cideries/wineries), but is not the typical use of rural properties. Having one next door that you could walk to would be unusual.
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.
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?
> 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.