Are we now demanding too much individual space?
The population of the world has more than doubled over my lifetime and is now in excess of eight billion. It is not evenly spread across the globe. There are regions sustaining no human life while somewhere like Manila in the Philippines has 43,000 people per square kilometre over 119,000 square miles. In our part of the world, we crave more and more ‘personal space’, while the nations of Latin America and the Middle East have it in their culture to ‘live in each other’s pockets’, as we might say.
In Ireland, we really love our own bit of space. This security of space is a deeply ingrained psychological requirement that some would tell us was born out of the suffering of our ancestors through the Famine and landlord evictions. In modern times and up until recent years, we had one of the world’s highest house ownership numbers. The percentage of home ownership has fallen due to the housing crisis, but it is worth remembering that we are still above the European average.
As well as the population of the world having doubled during my lifetime, it is exactly the same scéal where Ireland is concerned. Most would argue that there is still loads of space for everyone here – but is it any harm to ask how much personal space do we really need?
I remember bits of a column I wrote here several years ago asking the ceist; ‘Is our planet becoming overstocked?’. I used the quote from my good sheep-farmer friend, Philip Conroy; ‘a sheep’s worst enemy is another sheep’, to make the point. I was really surprised by the reaction of readers – all disagreeing with me. Some comments were founded on religious grounds; others pointed out stats to prove that our planet was capable of feeding double what we had if we wanted to distribute our food fairly. Anyway, (as Ben Dolan says when he wants to change the subject…) let us do a summing up of what we know about the evolving pattern of individual space requirement, based on what we know and what we can see.
A hundred years ago, around a quarter of the population of Dublin city lived in one-room tenements, while a third of the entire population lived in what was even then regarded as severely overcrowded conditions. And before you start blaming ‘British Rule’, we were no different from New York or London. An example of how bad things were comes from the 1911 Census of Ireland, which showed 104 people living in one house on Henrietta Street, Dublin. I wonder how many from that household died in war or the 1916 Rising. It is a sad historical fact that wars and plagues kept the population culled until a couple of generations ago. Please God we are not going there again.
But back to the overcrowding in cities and how that changed when corporations started to re-house citizens in new housing estates away from city centreS. As well as that movement, the people who could afford to move out began buying houses in what would become known as suburbia. Those who might have had allotments if they were lucky now had back gardens of their own. Since then ‘space’ has become the most sought after factor when choosing a place to live. The more money you have, the more space you can own.
Personal space means different things to different people, and we do need our ‘bubble’ – whether that is a big bubble or a little one. Even out and about in public, each person will manoeuvre to give themselves as much ‘my space’ as possible. If you managed to get an overhead view of the pedestrians walking up and down Dominick Street, you would be amazed at the pattern of how people slow down or increase their step to leave the maximum distance between themselves and other street users. Another intriguing fact is that the taller the person, the more space he or she is given on the footpath.
More living space has become a symbol of individual prosperity. Bigger houses for smaller families, larger cars carrying 1.5 people on average, SUVs to consolidate the fact, and a couple of acres to feed a pony – maybe without the need to have the pony. We could do an entire article on the reasons one-off houses are so bad for the environment, and now of course, holiday homes contribute significantly to living space consumption. Haven’t we moved a long way since the ‘two up, two down’ was the dream home!
Everyone is entitled to strive for and keep their own personal space and it is a valid need among humans. But the question has to be asked; are we demanding too much individual space and is that leading to social withdrawal and social isolation?
Don’t Forget
Many people are lonely because they build walls and not bridges.