Living alone
This article focuses on the phenomenon of living alone in modern big cities. The growing number of people living alone suggests that new dynamics are at work. Living alone appears to rely on a contemporary “state of mind” of which the city is the theater. Common features of these diversified experiences of living alone are examined under the microscope of a sociology of individuation. Notably, the ambiguity of this phenomenon in contemporary societies can be associated with three main tensions that we will expose : a tension between interiority and externality ; between proximity and distance ; and between differentiation and identification.