By: Nour Attalla
Are you friends with your neighbours, or do you avoid eye contact at all costs when walking past them on the street?
If you do, you’re not alone, as recent statistics show that loneliness and social isolation in our cities has been on the rise.
Enter the Republic of Super Neighbours (aka Hyper Voisins), a group of Parisian neighbours who decided that things don’t have to be that way.
They started out with a simple goal of bringing the people living on their streets together and creating closer communities. On the weekends, they would organise brunches in the street that anyone could join, with the only rule being that you had to talk to strangers. Eventually, the brunches became so popular that entire streets had to be closed off to accommodate the crowds. At times, more than 2,000 people would be eating together on Sundays.
The Hyper Voisins expanded beyond just brunches as well, organising movie nights, coding and cooking workshops, and memory swaps with older residents. They even founded a local health clinic staffed by volunteers, to bring care to the doorsteps of the neighbourhood’s residents in need. Having grown to over 15,000 members in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, they have been taking back their neighbourhood step by step.
With loneliness and social isolation contributing strongly to our mental health crisis of today, this project had tangible benefits for the people living in the neighbourhood, and helped them feel more at home in their fast-paced city.
As globalisation allows increasing amounts of people to move around the world, and we are seeing a new wave of migration to big cities, loneliness is a quickly growing structural social issue. This is not helped by the fact that loneliness rates tend to be higher in urban than in rural areas.
“Wealth means living better together”
– Patrick Bernard, initiator of the Hyper Voisins
But, projects like the Hyper Voisins show that grassroots initiatives can provide effective solutions in the battle against social isolation. As communities globally rebounded and organised during the pandemic, it showed that we possess many of the tools needed to tackle this crisis. Perhaps all it takes is a little bit of courage to bite through the social anxiety, bring together your own friends, and start having lunch on the street as well.
