Fear thy neighbour? Why our cities need to be more community-centric and child-friendly

Mumbai once nurtured remarkable micro-communities: the chawl with its shared taps and gossip, the middle-class colony where Diwali meant collective rangoli patterns, and the narrow lanes where children played under the benign eyes of neighbours who might scold yet feed them. These spaces blurred class lines and built the city’s greatest scaffold of invisible infrastructure: trust.

A recent Netflix documentary, The Perfect Neighbor, created almost entirely from police bodycam footage, reveals the paranoia and potential for ruin that emerge as the social fabric that binds a community begins to fray. The film revisits the 2023 killing of Ajike ‘AJ’ Owens, a 35-year-old African-American mother of four, shot by her Caucasian neighbour, Susan Lorincz, in Florida.

Lorincz had spent over 18 months repeatedly calling 911 to complain about neighbourhood children playing outside, making noise and trespassing on property (not hers). When Owens knocked on her door to confront her about racial slurs hurled at her kids, Lorincz fired through her locked door, killing her. The incident is horrifying but also symbolic.

It captures what happens when fear replaces familiarity and surveillance replaces sociability. Jessica Winter, in The New Yorker (shorturl.at/zMdHL), notes that Lorincz embodied a post-pandemic American pathology—the rise of “snitches, narcs, and paranoiacs” who see normal public life as an intrusion. What gives the documentary its power is not just its tragedy, but its warning: neighbourhoods die not from violence, but from mistrust.

That message resonates uncomfortably with Mumbai. As with India’s other urban centres, the city’s densification has paradoxically bred disconnection. Redevelopment has replaced courtyards with parking lots and neighbourly banter with WhatsApp groups that mostly exist to complain. The idea of ‘society,’ once a triumph of India’s cooperative imagination, is morphing into a cluster of sealed units that are guarded, gated and silent. We are witnessing our own version of The Perfect Neighbor, a slow and steady descent of community life.

Lorincz’s story unfolded in Florida, not Mumbai, but her mindset is hauntingly familiar. The enemy, in her eyes, was not a stranger, but proximity. The children she called the police on were the same ones she saw everyday. The tragedy lay in that inversion: neighbours as threats, not ties. Sociologists call this the ‘privatisation of the commons.’ When every space is owned, rented or restricted, we lose the idea of shared ownership and the sense that a lane ‘belongs to us all.’

The Perfect Neighbor lays bare the moral bankruptcy of modern suburban fear and holds an unsettling warning for cities like Mumbai, where people live physically close yet remain emotionally walled off.

If American paranoia took the shape of a gun, that of Mumbai’s high-rises takes the form of a camera. CCTVs, security guards and gate-entry apps may symbolize safety, yet they also mask a culture of suspicion.

The new ‘enemy’ could be a vendor, domestic worker, a neighbour who parks wrongly or even a ‘noisy’ child splashing in the society pool or playing in its parking lot, with each up for trial by WhatsApp groups or housing management panel darbars.

Watching the documentary, I found myself relating the events in faraway Florida to my own Mumbai high-rise, trying to understand how fear turns into culture in an age of ‘shrinking commons.’ When we trade human engagement for tech vigilance, we erode the essence of a neighbourhood. A watchful eye of care has turned into a lens of judgement. The result is a city perpetually on alert but rarely at ease, where both community and childhood are sacrificed at the altar of ‘safety.’

Cities thrive on trust. They breathe easier when residents greet rather than glare, and resolve disputes without calling the cops. Psychologists have long shown that unstructured outdoor play is vital to both children’s emotional development and their mental health. It teaches empathy, flexibility and self-regulation. When fear takes over and adults over-police children’s play, it stifles not just fun but the idea of citizenship.

Urban design is never neutral, with streets and lawns either fostering or fracturing social links. American suburbs, built for cars and privacy, spelt isolation. Mumbai is headed down that path, literally, with narrow pavements, gated compounds, elevated skywalks and ‘kids’ zones’ that look like containment pens—spaces that separate rather than connect.

Our city planners need to reverse this. Let’s prioritize walkability, design public ‘play zones’ closed to traffic and create other shared spaces that are open to all. A city that plans for sociability plans for safety. If we are to reclaim our cities, we must first reclaim our childhood by protecting our commons, rebuilding communities and remembering that open associations are what make a neighbourhood.

The author is professor, economics and executive director, Centre for Family Business & Entrepreneurship at Bhavan’s SPJIMR.