At what point do you achieve anonymity in a city?

[snoopygirlmi]

Originally Posted by Thoreau424

I've seen anonymity in cities of 100-200k. It really depends on the culture of the area, if people tend to get out and rub shoulders a lot, or hide out at home. I.e. a tendency toward extroverted or introverted, etc.

I tend to agree with this point. It really depends on if you are trying to build community or not. If you are introverted or not. How new you are to an area.........

There's more chance of being anonymous when you don't have a family or don't have a partner either.

It really depends on what life stage you are in.

If you go to the same places all the time, then yeah - you'll get familiar with the staff and others who go there. But if you go to different places in town all the time, you will be more anonymous.

I don't feel very anonymous in my current area because it's such a small town and we are active in our church/school, etc. I know a lot of my neighbors. I know the clerks in a few of the local stores.

However, when I start moving out into the larger suburbs or Ann Arbor or the city of Detroit, I feel a lot more anonymous because that isn't my normal stomping ground and I'm more of a consumer.

I think it's the point - whether you feel more like a consumer than a resident of an area. You're somewhere for an activity or event as a visitor, but you don't see the place as home - "where you live" "where you're from" - a temporary situation, not "home". You aren't looking for connection or to build relationships, but to use and take advantage of amenities or services.

People have a different mentality about being anonymous when someplace is "home" vs a "temporary situation". So, if see your city as home, then you are less likely to be anonymous. But that doesn't mean that you can't be lonely or alone. But if you see somewhere as temporary and you live in an area that's mostly apartments - then you'll probably be more anonymous.

I don't think that it's the size of a place that determines anonymity. I think it's things like "introvert vs extrovert", the culture of the town/area, what you are looking to get out the city - the "why are you living somewhere."

Some cities have a huge commuter population and the city is pretty dead at night because everyone lives somewhere else and work/school is the only thing they have in common.

[Marie Joseph]

Agree with the other posters who said it depends a lot on the culture of the city, stage of your life and your own habits.

When we lived in Detroit, we ran into people we knew fairly often. People tended to go out a lot there, it didn't seem to be confined to younger/single people.

Bowling Green, KY was smaller so we ran into people pretty much all of the time. You couldn't walk 2 feet without running into at least 10 people that you knew

Jackson, TN isn't that big but it was odd since we hardly ever saw anyone that we knew while we were out.

Here in Erie it is also odd since although we know a lot of people and frequently go out, it is super rare that we actually see anyone that we know.

[JohnnyGentle]

A lot of good points here, and definitely an interesting question. Basically, no matter the size of a place, most people still frequent a few spots in a relatively small geographic area on a routine basis.

I think in some huge cities, the forced concentration of people in the same areas can often lead to running into the same people you know, even if the actual population is massive. When I lived in NYC, I ran into people I knew on my walking commute into Midtown all the time, and it makes sense, you have hundreds of thousands of people all going to work at the same time, in the same small place. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing something completely nuts in Grand Central, under the assumption that I'm anonymous.

In DC, I had the same thing, in a metro of 6 million, most of the restaurants/bars/stores are on one strip in my neighborhood, so you see people you know walking to the same shops and restaurants all the time. On the other hand, the Downtown business area is very small, and so people working in the same area will constantly bump into each other.