Does living in collectives make people happier? This Lethbridge prof intends to find out

Professor Catherine Kingfisher agrees with the old Three Dog Night song lyric about how one is the loneliest number, so the Lethbridge anthropology professor is setting out to study urban collective living.

It's part of a reaction to recent rise of the field of happiness studies.

"Happiness became a really popular topic in popular culture and also academia," she said Monday in an interview with host Jennifer Keene on the Calgary Eyeopener.

"There was the rise of happiness economics and positive psychology," she said.

"As an anthropologist...one of the things I noticed was that happiness studies were overwhelmingly focused on the individual, which made sense since it emerged from positive psychology ... but it's incomplete from an anthropological perspective, because we live in social systems. We are social animals.

"So I got interested," she said, "in looking around to see what kind of models for well being are out there that are not focused exclusively on the individual, that actually locate happiness and well being — at least in part — in social relations."

This fall, the University of Lethbridge professor will study a pair of urban collectives, which she describes as being "intentional communities planned intentionally by people who want to interact more with other people/families within a complex.

"It can happen organically with roommates," she said, "but we're looking at communities designed architecturally for this."

One of the urban collectives is Quayside, in Vancouver. The other is in Japan.

Kingfisher spent three years negotiating with each collective to spend eight weeks on each site, studying their happiness levels.

She says that both collectives arose out of similar motivations.

"The philosophies are pretty much the same (with both)," she said. "To have private space — but also [to] have [a sense of] community," rather than some of those emotional reactions we have come to associate with urban life such as loneliness, isolation and alienation.

Studying happiness

All of which raises a question: how do you study happiness?

"Not doing measurements," Kingfisher says, "but [by] looking at how they operate, how do they organize themselves, how do they fit in the world? Basic anthropological questions."

"[I'm] interested to see how the differences between the two communities reflect cultural differences," she said, "[because the] shift was much more abrupt from collective rural life to single-family city life in Japan, so [there] could be differences there [as well]."

It was also very much a study focused on city life, where, according to a recent survey by Stats Canada, as many as 30 per cent of the population lives alone.

"Urban collectives are (populated by) people who work regular jobs," Kingfisher said, "who are part of mainstream but looking for something different in living arrangement."

Reporting the results

Kingfisher hopes to disseminate it in ways that make it available to both the academic community and the general community at large.

"We want to do a documentary and book," she said, "allow the people to document their own experiences.

"There will be some academic papers as well," she added, "but I wanted them to represent themselves, and also make the information accessible to [a] wide audience, hoping to hone in on policymakers, and just [generally] people who are interested in collective living."

With files from the Calgary Eyeopener

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