- Which one do you live in?
- In terms of people knowing each other, does it feel like everyone knows everyone, or like "a very small city", or something of the sort?
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in reply to @kda's post:
I'm a Bostonian and it feels like there's different entirely separate ecosystems for different social circles. Like, if you're into board games, you will meet everyone else who is into board games and no one beyond that.
Contrast DC where I grew up, where your connections almost completely define you and you can name drop people to get social capital.
Huh. In DC, does it seem like the same set of connections &c. matter in the same way across every social circle you've got experience with, or is it more⦠layered than that?
In my experience yes. The first thing DC folks like to ask people is "Where do you work?" because they want to know what connections you have. And everyone in DC knows a guy who knows a guy. That's how I got 3+ of the jobs I've worked at.
Lots of different social circles intersect. It's such a small city geographically and so politically intertwined that it makes sense.
Randstad (combined Amsterdam/Rotterdam/Utrecht/The Hague area) resident here and... it's complicated? There is a degree of 'everyone knows everyone' among the older locals of my particular town, but as for the newer generations including myself and the broader area... no, not at all. It's a significant chunk of the country, both area and population wise.
Yeah, that makes sense! β¦huh. In practice how much travel is there between the cities?
But definitely, with that many people, that checks out. I think here, most of the "it's a small town :)" effect comes from how many largely separate communities there are.
There's plenty, really; to the point where some roads just aren't mentioned in traffic info because 'congested' is just their default state during rush hour (the A44 comes to mind). People still gravitate towards the nearest city center where they can, but sometimes your job just happens to be several cities over within that same metro area and that's your life now.
And yeah. People have the 'it's a small town :)' feeling about their own local community often enough, but with the constituent communities having been their own thing for centuries upon centuries and managing to retain their own identities over the years, definitely not the greater whole - hell, oftentimes residents of neighborhoods of bigger cities (e.g. Kralingen in Rotterdam or Scheveningen in The Hague) that used to be their own towns still think of them as such.
Huh, yeah, that makes sense! I just wasn't sure how that'd pan out in an area with relevant cities that far from each other. (We've got⦠vaguely similar patterns here? Like, Highways 1, 7, and 99 heading into the City of Vancouver are consistently bad during rush hour, and honestly just don't get particularly non-bad at any point between 07:00 and 19:00. And no offence to smaller cities in my region with "relevant", but they're at least partly commuter towns for the City and the inner suburbs!)
And definitely, there'sβ¦ actually, almost an inversion of that here? The Hastings Townsite β East Van (amalgamated into the City in 1910) is mostly defined by people who moved there from WWI and later; Point Grey β the West Side (1929) is largely nouveau riche, retired hippies, and current UBC students; and South Van (1910) is mostly defined by post-WWII immigrants β with Downtown mostly being people who moved there from the '60s onward (and a ton specifically from the late '80s on). And yet, East Van, the West Side, and South Van all have fairly distinct identities.
In Philly the geography is kinda funny. Every part of the city is very defined by cardinal directions. West Philly, South Philly, North Philly, Northeast, Northwest, Upper Northeast, Upper North, and Center. I want to call them quadrants even though that's the wrong geometry.
Within each quadrant among gay people it very much can feel like a very small city where everyone knows each other by one one or two degrees removed. But across quadrantds you don't know anyone at all. If you venture to another quadrant you'll often have an experience of "There are trans people in South Philly??? Wow there's so many of you and I don't know any of you and we have no common friends at all???"
Sometimes someone moves to another quadrant and it's like they've left the city. "Oh they're a North Philly queer now so we never see or hear about them anymore."
I think for straight people here it's similar but a little more niche to specific neighborhoods. My coworkers who are straight don't seem to leave their quadrants much for non-work reasons
Huh! Yeah, I don't notice that same ~local subdividedness~ effect for my LGBTQ+ social circles? Though that's probably because I'm a furry; furry's a lot more regional here than it sounds like it is in some other cities.
But definitely, here, the connections seem a bit more like demographics are on par with geography in terms of importance? Largely on account of most people's family histories in this city being no more than a century long.
Emphasis on "most"; as far as I know, there're familial and political fissures here that predate the fall of Byzantium.
Toronto here; depending on which "scene" you're talking about, it can very much feel like a small town. But across those community divides it can feel like different universes. When "worlds collide" it can have a very "bizarre and unexpected crossover episode" vibe
Someone from Bogota, Colombia here.
The most common thing here is that you only know people of your neighborhood, outside of that Bogotanos are pretty disconnected one from another, the most diversity you get is while you are in university due to them normally being located in the north (for context, Bogota is divided in 2 parts, the south and the north, the north is only the northeast of the city while everything else is considered south by many, the north is the most economically advanced part of the city while the south is considered the less favored, more poor part) where a lot of people from all parts of the city, and even from the other city, Soacha (Bogota and Soacha are in a situation similar to that of New York and New jersey, they look like the same, but Soacha is technically independent from Bogota) reunite, so chances are you'll at least get to know more people outside of your local area there. However, you will still be very isolated from most of the city, maybe that's one of the reasons that we are considered more "colder and less friedly" by people from other parts of the country.
It also might be due to insecurity and the general mindset that everyone learns about how everyone new you just met tries to stab you in the back, so people are more careful with who they decide to talk. This thing is rarer in villages or towns of course, people do really know everyone there. As one man put it "Every place in Bogota feels like it's own state or nation"