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in part—in social relations.” Kingfisher is using this fall semester at Lethbridge to study two urban
collectives, and she describes both as “intentional communities planned intentionally by people who
want to interact more with other people/families within a complex.

“It can happen organically with roommates, but we’re looking at communities designed architecturally
for this,” Kingfisher explains. One of these collectives is in Japan while the other is in Vancouver. She
negotiated with every collective for three years for the opportunity to visit their sites for eight weeks to
study their degrees of happiness. According to Kingfisher, both collectives availed themselves in
response to similar motives.

“The philosophies are pretty much the same (with both collectives),” says Kingfisher. “To have private
space—but also [to] have [a sense of] community,” instead of some of the emotional reactions typically
associated with urban living like isolation, alienation, and loneliness. Kingfisher concedes that she’s not
attempting to study happiness itself as some psychologists have done. “I’m not a psychologist. I don’t do
psychological studies. I’m not measuring happiness in this study at all. It’s about looking at how these
communities operate as potential models for well being.”

Stats Canada recently conducted a survey that shows when cross-referenced with the data from
Kingfisher’s study that the city life she studied was in areas where up to 30 percent of the population
lives alone. Other pundits say this makes a lot of people both sadder and sicker. “There’s one academic
at Harvard who has argued that […] living in these collectives is better for people’s physical as well as
psychological health, and that these communities are a response [to that],” Kingfisher says.

“People who move into these communities, and certainly those who start them, have said something is
wrong here. Our kids are in daycare, and old people are isolated and lonely, single people are isolated
and lonely, we’re consuming too much stuff—so why don’t we pool our resources? Why don’t we get
together?” Kingfisher explains. “Absolutely I would argue that these places are models for how to deal
with some of our current social problems, but I am not about the business of measuring individual
happiness.”

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