Life is better when we know our neighbours.

Get to know your neighbours on Macpherson Ave. between Yonge St. and Avenue Rd.

• I'm Interested

Dear Neighbour,I know you don't know me (and I suppose that is precisely the point) but my name is Aditi and I have lately become obsessed with the idea of true neighbourliness — from what it looks, feels, and sounds like; how to build it; and, most importantly, why we seem to have lost it!Through a journey that has lead me from bustling Toronto to the English countryside to vibrant Amsterdam and back again, my biggest takeaway has been that in the 2020s post-pandemic, digitized world that we live in, most of us lack the belonging and identity that was once sourced from local relationships and third spaces – our community – that is so important for our long-term happiness and sense of connection.I learned this the hard way.While my chapter in Amsterdam was marked with some of the most wonderful people, I was more isolated than ever. This is because whether I was in need of social, emotional, or practical support, my access to all of these friendships seemed to be subject to at least a week of planning and upwards of a 30 minute commute. What I was missing was the ease of local connection, and low-friction hang outs.And this isn't just a problem I've experienced as a young person stepping out of the structure of school and into adult life — I've also watched it happen to my parents. When my sister and I were growing up, their social world was built around ours: school pickup, extracurriculars, the parents of our friends. They saw these people constantly, and that proximity created closeness.But when your phase of life shifts — whether you're leaving school or becoming an empty nester — something happens. Even if the friends from that chapter remain your closest people, distance creeps in. You're no longer bumping into each other by necessity. The rhythms that held you together are gone, and maintaining connection requires deliberate effort that's hard to sustain.This is why I think neighbors matter so much. Your closest friends might scatter across cities or slip into different life stages, but your street stays constant. The faces might change as people move in and out, but the structure — the possibility of proximity, of running into someone at the corner store or chatting on your front step — remains. It's a web that can hold steady even as individual threads shift.Whether the neighbourhood is about reliability, re-finding your people, or simply having someone nearby who knows your name, let's start by creating opportunities for us to actually start knowing each other.

• I'm Interested