Downsized homes, solo living, rapid urbanization: for various reasons,
community centres are experiencing a revival – and offering myriad
amenities to boot.
Words George Kafka
urban
living
rooms
In December 2019, The New York Times published
an extraordinary story about the mountain village
of Nagoro in southern Japan. Population decline had
struck Nagoro so hard that its residents – fewer than
30 adults – began making life-size dolls to make
Nagoro feel livelier. Fake school children, construction
workers, a teacher in front of a class and a father with
his kids could all be found out and about in the village
during an annual festival; the article reported the
dolls outnumber the town’s living residents by more
than ten to one.
This particular story is unique, but the
population changes affecting Nagoro are
not. In Japan and across the developed world
is a whole collage of stories and reports on
the emotional impacts of how we live today
as a result of varying and interconnected
demographic shifts, such as declining
populations in certain rural areas and a risein the number of people living alone in cities.
A report by Our World in Data, based at the
University of Oxford, highlights Stockholm,
where 60 per cent of households consisted of
one person in 2012, concluding that globally,
‘the current prevalence of one-person
households is unprecedented historically’.
In addition, there has also been a significant focus on
loneliness in recent years, most notably with the 2018
launch of a ‘loneliness strategy’ by the UK government,
which aimed to treat the phenomenon as a health issue
in order to reduce demand on the NHS. The strategy
also promised £1.8 million to spend on new community
spaces – although, in the face of simultaneous funding
cuts of over £250 million to library services in the UK
over the past decade, this seems like a paltry offering.
In recent years, new community centres have
instead emerged in unlikely places outside of
the traditional state provision of social »New Typology 123