FT: Caring communities

This article has no relation to what I have to share but it reminds me of my "stinky" neighbour.

For some reasons, my neighbour's house has a pungent stench. Whenever they open the door and I happen to be coming out or going into my house, I just got to hold my breath. The stench is definitely beyond comprehension. It lingers on for at least half an hour even though we have a rather airy common area. However, the saving grace is that this neighbour of mine is friendly and nice.

Having had unpleasant encounters with inconsiderate neighbours, I just have to be thankful that this neighbour is stinky, not nasty :)

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Caring communities

By Carmela Ferraro

Published: June 6 2009 01:25 | Last updated: June 6 2009 01:25

Andrea Buzzichelli and Tessa Kiros

At some point in our lives all of us can agree with the Robert Frost adage “good fences make good neighbours”. Think of the people upstairs who partied all night or the ones next door who never mowed their lawn. But while the neighbour from hell is common, so too is the good neighbour – the kind who feeds the cat while we’re away, lets us know when a stray window is open and jumps in to help during a crisis.

According to Bill Berkowitz, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, US, who studies communities, such people not only heighten our sense of belonging and safety but also extend our lives “by a measure of years”.

That’s not to say that neighbours are as close as they were, say, 50 years ago when societies were more homogeneous; moving house was less common; social activities took precedence over individual ones, such as watching television; and generally lower incomes prompted people to rely on each other for favours more often. “People now tend to live in each other’s pockets less,” says Mandeep Hothi from UK think tank the Young Foundation. “So what they’re after today is ‘latent neighbourliness’.”

The idea is to know those living next door – as 95 per cent of Britons do on a first-name basis, according to a 2008 government survey – and to be able to call on them not necessarily every day but in times of need. This “inclination” toward community is “as much about restraint and non-involvement as well as tangible activities and actions”. And, in the current economic climate, Hothi expects it to increase.

“We’re definitely going to be shifting towards each other,” he says. “We look for mutual support during tough times.”

Tessa Kiros, a London-born food writer who lives in rural Tuscany with her husband, Giovanni, and two daughters, nine and 11, realised just how much she relies on her neighbour, Andrea Buzzichelli, last spring. One humdrum day she and her mother, who was visiting from Athens, were at home chatting when, suddenly, six pigs that had escaped from a local farm appeared in her front garden and began to trample and feast on her lavender and rose bushes. “Mum was terrified and I didn’t know what to do, so I flew over to Andrea’s,” she says. “He bravely went outside with a stick shouting: ‘I will make prosciutto out of you if you don’t get out of here!’ and chased the pigs away.”

Buzzichelli, a stay-at-home dad who lives with his wife, Barbara, and their two pre-school sons, helps Kiros in other ways too, especially when her husband is away. He picks her two girls up from the bus stop after school whenever she can’t and even calls from the local village several kilometres away when he’s out shopping to see if she needs anything. Both passionate food lovers, they also exchange food and wine: freshly picked porcini for a bottle of vin santo; barbequed meat for moist chocolate cake.

“Of course, it’s mutual,” Kiros adds. “If Barbara is away we have him round to dinner. If his washing line is full he uses ours. Or if he needs to step out when his boys are asleep I’ll pop in and keep an eye on them. We’re both at home full-time with a young family in the countryside where there are only four other permanent families that live here. We appreciate having each other around.”

Karen Seiger, Lars Bender and Bender’s son Charly

City dwellers often have a harder time befriending their neighbours since lives are busier and closer quarters often lead to conflict. But that hasn’t stopped New Yorker Karen Seiger and her husband James from befriending other renters in the West Village apartment building where they’ve lived since 2001. Their beloved neighbours include Rosemarie McErlain, a teacher and single mother to three children, and Lars Bender, a make-up artist with a husband and four-year-old son. “I use the hallway like a street; it’s where I take a break and exercise our cat,” says Seiger, who works from home as a writer and marketing consultant. It’s so “wonderful none of the people who live . . . on my floor want to ever leave”.

When she first met McErlain and Bender, the three women would spend hours sitting outside their doors on the floor of their fluorescent-lit grey hallway talking over glasses of wine. Now they have an open-door policy. “We freely run in and out of each other’s homes, even in socks and pyjamas, if we need something or just want to say hello,” Seiger says. “We know about the likes and dislikes, the exes, the in-laws, the clients and all the daily stresses, and we keep an eye out for each other, the kids and the pets.”

At the same time, Bender says, “we’re very respectful of each others’ privacy and know when to butt out or when we’re not wanted.”

In the vast, sun-drenched outback of Queensland, Australia, where homes can be miles apart, residents feel isolation of a different kind to that felt in the city. Yet cattle grazier and photo-journalist Paula Heelan, who moved to Ulcanbah Station, Clermont, from central Brisbane 12 years ago, describes her geographically spread out community as “tight-knit”. “While I didn’t know or want to know my neighbours in the city, I’m very close to the people here,” she says.

Paula Heelan and Kelly Shann

It helps that most Clermont residents grew up in the area and now work in the cattle business; many are in fact related to each other in some way. And, says Heelan, who lives with her husband, Peter, and 10-year-old daughter, they’ll use “any excuse” to get together – birthday celebrations or cricket games, fundraisers or dinner parties. Given how long it takes to get from one place to another, these “smokos” typically last for several hours and “neighbours” who live more than a two-hour drive away often bring swags, or portable roll-up beds, to stay the night. So, unlike urban gatherings where people pop in and out, “these offer a lot of opportunity for rich, long and deep conversations that you’d never have the time for in the city”, Heelan says. “You end up getting to know each other very well and becoming very close. [And] if something happens to you, people are in there like a shot.”

For instance, when her closest neighbour, Kelly Shann, who lives 40km away, rang to say her four-year-old son had been hit by a utility van, Heelan immediately dropped everything to care for the woman’s other two children. And two months ago, when Heelan’s husband broke his knee, the phone didn’t stop ringing with offers of help from Shann and others. There are little things too. Whenever either of the two women is ill, the other will ask the postman to deliver a casserole during his rounds.

Tokyo-based textile designer Mayumi Nakai Brown is another who rejects the Frost argument, believing instead in the Japanese saying “close neighbours are more important than distant relatives” – even in an increasingly nomadic society. She lives in the Yokohama district of the city, 10 steps from a multi-generational clan led by Nakamura, a nonagenarian, who has also now cared for three generations of the Nakai Brown family – from Mayumi’s mother, who used to disappear next door even as an adult whenever she needed a break from her husband and children, to her son, Max, now aged 13. “You can sit with the old lady anytime on the veranda sipping green tea and having a snack. Nakamura provides a link to the old days and is a repository of wisdom: upcoming festivals, what the most auspicious day to prune a plum tree might be, the people around us,” Nakai Brown says. And other members of the family are just as friendly. Sometimes some of Nakamura’s younger male relatives take Max out and teach him “guy things”, such as spotting tiny crabs in a nearby cemetery.

Members of the Porchester Square Club

Not everyone has it so easy. When London-based marketing executive Marion Quillery, 26, realised her Bayswater neighbourhood lacked “community”, she found two people who live nearby, David Rolfe and Dragana Cvijanovic, and built a network on Facebook called the Porchester Square Club. So far eight people have joined and it’s a “fun way to meet”, she says. The group has organised events such as monthly pub quizzes, bowling and karaoke nights and dinner parties.

Quillery, who grew up in a small village in France’s Champagne region, says she’s just trying to make a foreign city feel a bit more like home. “It’s normal there to knock on the door and share plums, apples, or to have dinner at each other’s house occasionally,” she explains. “I’ve missed this in London, where I’ve lived for the past six years. But I thought rather than feel sorry for what I was missing and sit in a corner, why not do something to recreate this homely feel for myself and others?”

“Community-building” is a buzz word for our times and neighbourhoods are increasingly taking this sort of broader approach to accomplishing it. Apart from hosting street or block parties, the residents of one area near Boston, US, deliver a bouquet of flowers when newcomers move in, while the people living along one road in Bristol, UK, convey the same message with a card signed by everyone on the block, according to the website Streetparty.org.uk. More formally, neighbours’ day festivals are increasingly being celebrated around the world. London had its inaugural Neighbours Day in February this year, Australia celebrated its Neighbour Day in March, Europe held its version at the end of last month, with 8.5m participants in 29 countries, and the US National Neighbourhood Day is on September 20.

Moving to a new place, it’s easy to feel small and lonely. So “you strive for community”, Seiger says. “And when you find it, you guard and nurture it.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009