Research paper adresses hidden price of urban loneliness

LONELINESS is one of the fastest-growing contemporary issues, but health and housing policies to counter the problem are virtually non-existent.

LONELINESS is one of the fastest-growing contemporary issues as Australia's population ages and the number of single-person households and one-parent families rises, but health and housing policies to counter the problem are virtually non-existent.

With a third of Australians saying they suffer from loneliness, city design must move from its current family focus to building connections for those who live alone, a new research paper by sociologists Adrian Franklin and Bruce Tranter says.

The paper, Housing, Loneliness and Health, prepared for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, warns that loneliness "has complex demographic, sociological, technical, psychological and cultural origins and . . . will have major ramifications for housing and health and requires policies that anticipate it and plan effectively for it".

"Unless policymakers intervene, it will remain a largely hidden but costly problem and will only grow if the Australian Bureau of Statistics is correct in their prediction that the proportion of single-person households continues to rise over the next 20 years," the report, to be presented in Melbourne later this week, says.

Professor Franklin said work in 2009 had revealed 35 per cent of Australian men and 29 per cent of women reported that loneliness was a serious problem.

He said loneliness was most prevalent in single-person households, lone-parent families, new migrants and refugees.

"It challenges policymakers, planners and builders to think about the city in new ways," the report says. "If past cities were largely family-focused and designed to foster family wellbeing and health, how can we now design cities that foster robust social connections, belonging and attachments to a population that live increasingly alone?"