How do you design a neighbourhood where people actually know each other?
A new housing development goes up, everyone moves in, and a year later the neighbours still do not know each other's names. So somebody organises a barbecue. Launches a neighbourhood app. Appoints a community coordinator. And it barely moves the needle, because the problem was never a shortage of events. It was the buildings themselves.
Most new housing is designed for maximum privacy. Front door straight onto the street, garage as a buffer, garden fenced off. That is perfect for people who want to be left alone, and quietly miserable for the much larger number of people who actually want to know their neighbours. So here is the question worth asking instead. How do you design a place where knowing your neighbours happens on its own? The Danes have an answer that has very little to do with anyone's personality.
What Danish cohousing did
Danish cohousing, bofællesskab, arranges homes not as isolated private units but around a shared path that everyone has to pass through, with a common kitchen, a shared laundry, and a garden in the middle.[2] You cannot get from your car to your front door without crossing the space where other people are. The contact is not left to chance or goodwill. It is built into the route you walk every single day.
And the result is consistent: residents tend to know each other by name within their first year, not because they are unusually outgoing, but because the layout keeps putting them in each other's path. The design does what the barbecue could not.
Why this is design, not personality
It is easy to assume the people who thrive in cohousing are simply the sociable types. The evidence points the other way. Put the same private, reserved person in a layout that crosses their path with their neighbours several times a day, and they end up knowing those neighbours, whatever their temperament. The friendships form because of where the walls and paths are, not because of who the residents happen to be.
Which means neighbourly connection is far less about finding the right kind of people and far more about how the buildings arrange their daily movements.
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The science: proximity beats personality
There is a striking piece of research underneath this. In 1950, the social psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back studied friendship formation in a married-students' housing complex at MIT, the Westgate study.[1] They found that the single strongest predictor of who became friends with whom was not shared interests, age or background, but physical proximity and the paths people walked. Around sixty-five per cent of the friendships people named were with others living within a few doors of them, even though apartments had been assigned essentially at random.
The most telling detail: the only residents who made friends across different floors were the ones who happened to live next to the staircases, the spot everyone passed. Their position on the route, not their character, decided their social life. The researchers called this functional proximity, the friendships followed the floor plan. (Worth noting the study looked only at the men, a limit of its time, but the core finding has held up across decades of later work.)
Through a Behavioural Design lens: engineering the chance encounter
It is worth naming the discipline here, because cohousing is a clear example of designing for behaviour we cannot summon by willpower. You cannot decide to become close to your neighbours through sheer intention; friendship grows out of repeated, low-stakes, accidental contact, the kind you cannot schedule. Most attempts to build community ignore this and aim at the conscious decision: the invitation, the event, the app, all of which ask people to choose to connect, on top of busy lives.
Cohousing does not ask anyone to choose. It changes the situation so the contact happens whether or not anyone planned it. The shared path, the common kitchen, the route past the garden manufacture the small, repeated encounters that friendship actually grows from. The residents are not trying harder to be neighbourly. The building is doing the work, by ensuring they keep meeting. That is the behavioural design move: rather than urging people to connect, you redesign the situation so connection becomes the natural by-product of how they already move through their day.
What this means in practice
Start with your own life and the routes built into it. The people you stay close to are very often simply the people your daily path keeps crossing, the colleague by the kitchen, the neighbour by the shared bins. If there is connection you want more of, the useful move is rarely to schedule more time, which competes with everything else. It is to change your routes so you naturally pass the people who matter, and let proximity do what intention struggles to.
For anyone leading a team, Festinger's finding is a practical tool. Who sits where, who shares a route to the coffee machine, whose desks fall near the natural crossing points, shapes who collaborates and trusts whom far more than any team-building day. If two people or two groups need to work together, the highest-leverage move is often not another meeting but putting them on the same daily path. Proximity builds the relationship that the away-day only gestures at.
And at the level of the organisation, this reframes how you think about offices, layouts and remote work. Spontaneous collaboration is not a matter of telling people to collaborate more; it is a matter of whether your spaces create the accidental crossings that relationships grow from. When those crossings disappear, fully remote, or an office designed so nobody need meet, connection has to be deliberately re-engineered. The skill this teaches is to stop relying on events and start designing the everyday routes along which relationships actually form.
What you can design this week
You will not be building a cohousing scheme, but the underlying move works on any place you want people to connect. Three ways to start:
Put the people you want connected on the same path. Festinger showed proximity beats personality. Whether it is desks, routes or shared spaces, arrange things so the people who should know each other keep crossing paths without having to plan it.
Create a route everyone passes through. Cohousing works because of the shared path. A common kitchen, a single coffee point, a route past each other turns isolated units into a community. Design the bottleneck where people meet.
Stop relying on the event, design the everyday. The barbecue and the away-day are one-offs. The daily route is constant. Put your effort into the ordinary crossings rather than the occasional gathering.
The Danes did not find unusually friendly people. They built homes where neighbours could not help but keep meeting, and let friendship follow. That is the difference between organising community and designing for it, and it works on a street, a team or a whole organisation.
Want to learn to read a space for what it does to the people inside it, and design it on purpose? That is the heart of our Behavioural Design training. Details on the SUE website.
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