As many of my classmates move away to other places to begin their careers, several have expressed either happiness or sorrow at moving to a “big city.” Some enthusiastically embrace the idea of city life while others dislike the lack of a strong community. One common thread is that they all note the “size of the city” and worry about how many friends they’ll have and how many hangouts. After a lot of thought, I’m not sure these criteria are really what people are concerned about. Instead, I think they are dummy variables, used for self-justification and explaining to others.

Wherever you live, you have a circle of close friends and a wider network of acquaintance friends. In most cases, your close friends tend to know each other as close friends. They may have other close friends but the majority of them form a closed network. If we were to model this, it would look something like this:

What I am implying is that the size of your city isn’t a major criteria in the size of your intimate network. This is largely determined by personality traits, preferences, length of residency in the community, etc. But what about the other concern, number of venues?

This issue is probably more realistic than the size of network issue. However, it also doesn’t seem as important as people make it out to be. Consider how many places you visit in a typical 2-week period: perhaps 2 bookshops, 3 coffeeshops, 5 restaurants, etc. Now consider how many times you visit those same places in a 3-month period. Over that same 3-month period, how many places do you visit only once? For myself, and for the couple of people I’ve talked to, the number of places we visit tends to be fairly low and fairly constant. Once I find a great coffeeshop, I tend to go back there repeatedly.

In a large city, someone such as myself would probably end up with a similarly sized pool of regular haunts with limited exploration of other places. I believe this pool would not grow much in a larger city. Instead, the geographic distance between the locations might expand. In essence, a city, for me, would function in the same way a town would, only with greater geographic dispersion.

Am I saying that the town vs city argument is pointless? No. There are still benefits and drawbacks to cities. For example, say my haunts include locations A, B, and C. In a smaller community, my friends may be more likely to have congruent sets of haunts. In a city, we may have less overlap. Additionally, there are the considerations of services like public transport or airports, career options, etc.

What is interesting, and what may be worth studying, is why people think network size and number of haunts are major considerations in selecting a place to live. This may help us to understand the disparity between what people say they want from virtual communities (social networking sites as well as the internet as a whole) and what they actually want.

Tags: communities