One of the main reasons people move into residential estates is to recreate the sense of community typical of villages or small, well-defined suburbs.
Jennifer Stern
/ Of Interest
Size counts
One of the main reasons people move into residential estates is to recreate the sense of community typical of villages or small, well-defined suburbs.
People once knew their neighbours – and their neighbours’ pets – and they memorised each other’ s phone numbers. In their heads! Kids played in the street or in public open spaces, wandered in and out of each other’ s houses, and only came home when they were hungry.
There are still communities like this, and some estates approximate that halcyon era. But what is it that made villages work, and that can make a residential community into a real community? There are lots of theories, but the most convincing is that proposed by British evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar. While studying apes and monkeys, Dunbar noticed that specific species of primates had pretty much the same troop size, regardless of their environment. If the troop started to get too big, it would split, and a splinter group would leave to start up somewhere else. He guessed he was onto something there – something that would affect humans as well as monkeys – so he tried to work out the connection. Eventually, he figured out that troop size was governed by the number of individuals that each member could keep track of – and that was determined by the size of their neocortex. If that was the case, he reckoned, he should be able to work out the ideal size of a human‘ troop’, and he did. It’ s about 148, so let’ s say 150.
villages had between 100 and 200 residents, most armies have companies of between 100 and 180 soldiers, and most church congregations fit in there too.
Once a community gets bigger, it becomes impossible to self-regulate just by peer pressure, so we need hierarchies, bosses and police. We need a structure to replace the informal structure that we could hold in our heads when the community was smaller.
It’ s not a‘ rule’ and it’ s not written in stone anywhere – it usually just happens. Think about it. Everything is going smoothly, the village( church group / division / whatever) is harmonious, and people are drawn to join, so it gets bigger. And then a bit bigger, but then, once it exceeds that magic number, people start rubbing up against each other.
The reason for this, Dunbar postulated, is that we can remember 150 people, we can relate to them personally, and we can remember the relationships between them. Community is all about trust – and you can’ t trust people if you don’ t know them. So it’ s not a coincidence that many groups throughout history have numbered close to this magic number. From the Neolithic through to the 18th century, most
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