Neighbours as infrastructure

Getting to know the neighbours is useful before a leak appears between you.

You don’t have to become close friends. Names, a way to reach each other and a few shared rules are enough.

Neighbours can:

• notice smoke or an open door;
• take in a parcel;
• warn you about building work;
• help during an outage;
• tell you something odd is happening at your place;
• call the emergency services.

Normal relations also cut down on conflicts built on guesswork. Noise through the wall is easier to discuss with someone you know than with an anonymous source of evil from the flat above.

But friendliness doesn’t cancel boundaries. A neighbour gets no automatic right to know where you are, to enter your flat or to discuss your life with the stairwell.

Good neighbourly relations are a small network of mutual attention, not compulsory adoption of the whole building.

The value of the acquaintance becomes clear at the moment when it is already too late to make it. Someone on holiday gets a message saying “looks like you’ve got a drip” — and everything after that depends on whether anyone in the building has his number and whether he has anyone’s. If not, the next step is the door being forced open with strangers present and at his own expense, plus a wet ceiling downstairs that will have dried into a stain by the time he’s back. Swapping numbers on the landing takes half a minute and feels pushy right up until the first time it comes in handy.

After that it runs on ordinary reciprocity: take in a parcel, hold the door for the removal men, warn people about a noisy day. The network holds together on small favours nobody counts, and falls apart at the first attempt to count them.