Whilst you can pick your friends, you can’t pick your neighbours. With the potential of both parties to negatively impact each other’s daily lives, positive neighbour relations entail a careful balance of respect and friendliness. It is a balance that students often struggle to maintain. Such was the case when my flatmates and I fused introductions with an apology for the cigarette butts a guest had dropped from our kitchen window onto our neighbours’ back doorstep. The evidence had been rounded up in a clear bag and dropped off with a polite note of warning; a perfect example of tactfully managed neighbour relations.
Far more commonly than speaking to their neighbours, students speak amongst themselves of their neighbours. Neighbours become a sort of anecdotal currency. The overwhelming response from my peers was that there was little interaction past a nod of greeting in the stairwell, or a warning for a coming flat party. But apart from the cursory hellos, most had a story or two which they recounted with zeal. There were neighbours hanging pagan wreaths throughout the tenement, neighbours leaving ominous noise complaints with hand sketched floor plans, package thieves, and even journalists contacting residents with warnings of a neighbour’s alarming criminal past. For all the odd habits and noises, few students had actively addressed any neighbourly discontent, nor had they come by their anecdotal material through face-to-face interaction.
This made me consider whether the common feeling of detachment was due to the fact that maintaining a degree of separation allows us to more comfortably reduce our neighbours to a funny story to be spread around. By virtue of a busy student lifestyle, there are those who feel content with their level of social interaction and find it more beneficial to use neighbours as an anecdote than to truly get to know them. This pattern highlights the role circumstance plays in navigating neighbour relations, with the student routine and the transitory rental process lying in stark contrasts to other demographics.
I was kindly invited in by the family next door to talk to a group of Marchmont residents they happened to be hosting. They were all parents of kids at the local school who had unanimously strong relationships with their neighbours. The fact was, the neighbours in question were demographically aligned; they were other long-term residents or families. My host spoke of garden and even street parties that had been held in the past, and how their kids would meet and play in the shared gardens, enabling them to get to know other parents and residents.
Regarding the student population, there was a remarkably warm feeling; “I think many residents have little sympathy for the parties and noise at night, but they forget we were all students once.” One of the guests even told me she brings cake upstairs whenever new students move in. The other couples were impressed by this, feeling that the students next to them had always kept to themselves.
Crashing this dinner party was about as neighbourly an experience as it gets. I confess I was surprised at their eagerness to integrate with the student population, despite the lack of common ground. Their final message to all students: “in the name of community, go and use your shared garden or chat to your neighbours.”
The transition from first year halls to individual flats also reconfigures neighbour dynamics. For students who did not get on well with first-year flatmates, choosing who to live with makes social interaction accessible and comfortable and improves their sense of community. However, unlike the mad scramble to cement new friendships and to go out and experience as much of the student life as possible, it becomes almost too easy to self-isolate when you can choose your flatmates. Many students feel content to simply stay in their flats. One friend who grew up on a cul-de-sac where neighbours would bring each other milk and the paper, said it made her feel sad to think that such detachment might be a generational shift. Her feeling was that an inclination to stay in and to prioritise comfort was tied to the rise of technology and increased daily stressors.
“I can go home and I’m in my own bubble and it feels like an easy route to happiness. But I do feel it has affected my sense of community, and I know it isn’t the way to build community”
Another interesting development is the transference of neighbour relations from across a hallway or within an accommodation block, to the level of the neighbourhood. I often find myself, in pyjamas with a pack of digestives, popping a few streets over, or across the meadows to Newington to watch some television or steal some flour. While not literally knocking on a neighbour’s door, this, to me, constitutes a neighbourly relation. As friends disperse across an increasingly familiar environment, the network which operated internally expands outwards.
So, while the students I talked to may put less effort to getting to know their neighbours than their non-student counterparts, it is not to say the student housing is an isolated set up. Community and neighbourly interaction are determined by a range of factors. Though trends certainly emerge in the student demographic, when it comes to neighbours, often it’s simply the luck of the draw.
Photo by Christian Stahl on Unsplash
