I think it's at least as much to do with expectations.
The small village in rural NM where I live generally has larger properties than you're describing, and people are really not "on top" of each other to any real extent. But for reasons that are hard to pin down, there's an expectation here that people will be neighborly - it's an expectation that is frequently broken, but persists anyway. We have community breakfasts, village cleanups, dinner gatherings, communal dog-walking schedules, book clubs and more.
By contrast, just 15 miles away in a geographically similar place, someone I know remarks with amazement at any description of life in our village. They say "just about everyone who lives here came here to be private. Nobody wants anything to do with anyone else".
So I think that some of what you're describing can be the result of a semi-self-sustaining culture of a place (a place as small as a block, sometimes). Although I'm a big believer in designing urban (and really, any residential) areas for better neighborhoods, I think that part of the equation is really independent of the physical nature of the place.
The small village in rural NM where I live generally has larger properties than you're describing, and people are really not "on top" of each other to any real extent. But for reasons that are hard to pin down, there's an expectation here that people will be neighborly - it's an expectation that is frequently broken, but persists anyway. We have community breakfasts, village cleanups, dinner gatherings, communal dog-walking schedules, book clubs and more.
By contrast, just 15 miles away in a geographically similar place, someone I know remarks with amazement at any description of life in our village. They say "just about everyone who lives here came here to be private. Nobody wants anything to do with anyone else".
So I think that some of what you're describing can be the result of a semi-self-sustaining culture of a place (a place as small as a block, sometimes). Although I'm a big believer in designing urban (and really, any residential) areas for better neighborhoods, I think that part of the equation is really independent of the physical nature of the place.