Durkheim had already suggested that society’s space-time perceptions were a function of social rhythm and territory. That being so, one might imagine, the swifter and starker the transition between a rural universe pulsed by the seasons and an urban dispensation governed by the clock and industrial discipline, the greater the potential for disorientation as to time and space - the very bedrock of an individual’s mental well-being. Any such problem might be further exacerbated by the effect of fatigue on a person’s circadian rhythm.

It was because in the pulsing, plural hearts of big cities, people found companionship and comfort among others who did similar work and so shared similar experiences, with the result that in cities people’s individual social identities often merged with the trades they performed.

Since then, the kind of stability that Durkheim imagined would eventually settle in following industrialization has come to resemble just another infinite aspiration that slips frustratingly further away whenever it seems to be nearly in reach. Instead, as energy-capture rates have surged, new technologies have come online and our cities have continued to swell, constant and unpredictable change has become the new normal everywhere, and anomie looks increasingly like the permanent condition of the modern age.

Indeed, one of the solutions he proposed for dealing with problems of social alienation in cities was the formation of workers’ guilds similar to the hundreds of collegia that were formed in ancient Rome.

For much of human history, these immediate social networks took the form of multi-generational communities that were rooted in shared geography, expressed through the intimacy of kinship, shared religious beliefs, rituals, practices, and values, and were nourished by working and living in the same environments and experiencing similar things. But in densely packed cities, most individuals’ extended social networks take the form of complex intersecting mosaics of relationships cobbled together from our involvement in a whole series of sometimes very different interests and hobbies. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for many of us our regular social networks are made up of people we have worked with or encountered at work.