Is big-city life making civility go out of style?

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. It’s 1am on a Sunday and the hotel bar several floors below my apartment has taken advantage of the cooler winter weather to temporarily reinvent itself as a nightclub. As loud, percussive thumps rise up and ricochet off the complex’s three towers, the space in between becomes a canyon filled with reverberating noise. The volume is enough to overwhelm distractions such as reading or watching TV. As for sleep, forget it.

I know, I know – people work hard and they’re entitled to blow off some steam at the weekend, right? Who but a Nimby-ish curtain-twitcher would object? One could just try to ignore it or put in some earplugs. Or, even better, go down and join in. Look, I’m sympathetic to the live-and-let-live approach – our increasingly fraught world could do with a bit more of it. But when it comes to modern life, there is more at stake from such nuisances than a little missed sleep.

More and more of us live in built-up urban areas. Earlier this month, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs released a new report that said 45 per cent of the world’s 8.2 billion people reside in cities. Seventy-five years ago, the global population was just 2.5 billion and only 20 per cent were city dwellers. Looking ahead, the UN says that by 2050, two thirds of global growth is projected to occur in cities and the remainder in towns.

A man stands on a platform at a subway station in T