Apartment Communities

It struck me while I was living in an apartment how ridiculous it is that we live so close and yet don't know each other. That everyone loved such isolated lives. 

This apartment would function very much like my experience of many hostels in Canada and the ones in Australia - especially the nicer ones. Only everyone would have their own private apartment. 

The apartments would be small with a room or two, maybe a bathroom and maybe a small area. Otherwise, for your kitchen, reading, entertainment, playrooms, dining rooms, balcony they would all be communal. 

You would obviously need rules to regulate usage and ways to reinforce them and people would need to buy into the idea, but it would, hopefully, naturally create a communal atmosphere.

People would still have their private space,  but they would then be somewhat forced to be together outside of purposefully choosing privacy, instead of the opposite. Dependent on design this could actually save space as well, instead of everyone having their own kitchen, dining room, tv room etc. For more specialty things you could have what apartments already have: floors dedicated to the extra - pool, party room, work out room, etc.

Building a whole apartment from scratch to try out this experiment might not be a feasible investment. So if someone was to try it they could reconfigure floors in office buildings. Depending on the layout more extensive things may need to be done for sound, privacy, functionality etc. 

I was particularly discontented lately with seeing 4, 20+ story office building torn down to be replaced with probably a 30+ story apartment building in my area. It is not just the construction waste that is being created, which is a lot, but also the amount of time, energy and expertise that is having to be re-sacrificed, for what feels like a bit of minutia.