From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
Most of us choose where we live by commute and house price. Today's guest asks a different question, which people will be within thirty minutes of you, and what will you owe each other?
The idea
Seth Kaplan is a Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, a book about repairing society one zip code at a time. His core argument is that the neighbourhood is the scale where relationships become real, and that we have quietly thinned it out.
He distinguishes thick societies, where bonds and institutions and shared norms are strong, from the thin ones much of the English speaking world now lives in, and he is clear that thick is not for everyone but that its warmth is worth choosing.
The most practical idea he shared is his thirty minute rule. A neighbourhood, he said, is roughly a thirty minute walk, and within that radius you will find thousands of people rather than the millions a thirty minute drive contains.
His own twelve year old daughter proves the point, since three quarters of her classmates live within a thirty minute walk and she simply sets off to their houses.
He told me that when people are choosing where to put down roots, mapping the people they most want in their lives and then looking for a place within a thirty minute radius of them is a genuinely powerful starting point.
He also told me a story that shows what embodied local relationships can do.
In his own neighbourhood a message appeared on a community group that a child was missing, and within the hour around twenty neighbours had divided up the woods, the streets and the space behind the supermarket and found the child.
The whole episode lasted perhaps four hours, and it worked because they already knew each other. Technology helped, but only because an embodied relationship came first.
His closing charge was simple, think local and hyper local, be a steward of your place, find partners and allies, and do not be afraid if the first attempt does not work out.
What I took from it
When we moved to Canada in 2021 I chose our neighbourhood for the school and the commute, and I only later understood what Seth teaches, that I had actually been choosing who my children's everyday people would be.
Listening to him, I thought about how many places I have lived where I could not have named five neighbours, and how different my seasons of belonging might have been with his thirty minute map in hand.
His story of the missing child also stayed with me, because it is a picture of the kind of community I would like to be worth living in. I am still learning to be a steward rather than a passer by.
Three things to try this week
- Draw your thirty minute map. Mark the people you most want in your everyday life, then look at how many of them sit within a thirty minute walk of your home, and plan one intentional step towards closing the distance.
- Join or start one local group this month, a community chat, a walking group or a park meetup, because embodied relationships come before any emergency or celebration.
- Be a steward once this week. Do one small act of care for your street or building, greet a neighbour by name, tidy a shared space, or show up to one local thing you would normally scroll past.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and watching it gives you his argument in his own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Seth Kaplan.
You can also find the guest on Seth Kaplan on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
Building Social Wealth in the place where you actually live is the heart of my work with leaders, and you can read more about it in the research behind this work . If the people you love most were not within thirty minutes, what would you move first?