People in ethnically diverse urban regions tend to ‘hunker down’ into their own little worlds. “Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us,” says Harvard’s Robert Putnam. “The more ethnically diverse the people we live around, the less we trust them.”
Are you engaged with your community? Or are you “hunkering down?”
Are you connecting with friends, volunteering or involved in politics? Or are you drawing into yourself, “like a turtle?”
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam has completed an important study of more than 30,000 North Americans and concluded that – especially if you live in ethnically diverse cities such as Toronto, Vancouver or Los Angeles – it’s likely you are “hunkering down.”
That’s the colloquial phrase that Putnam, who has been an adviser to everyone from Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to the U.S. State Department and the World Bank, uses to describe the lack of trust he discovered among most North Americans in diverse urban settings.
Since geographers rank Greater Toronto and Metro Vancouver respectively the third and fourth most “hyper-diverse” cities in the world – more than 45 per cent of the residents of each metropolis are born outside the country – Putnam’s findings are more than relevant to these regions.
Indeed, when the Vancouver Foundation recently conducted a massive survey of Metro Vancouver residents, researchers discovered most people in this West Coast city feel unusually high levels of loneliness and lack of friends.
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