When I recently found myself flooded, during the ever-expanding shopping frenzy of the so-called Black Friday season, with offers branded as Singles' Day deals, it struck me: singles have become a remarkably powerful force in our societies. The prominence and intensity of Singles' Day—a celebration that began among students at a Chinese university in the early 1990s and has since grown into one of the largest global shopping festivals—underscores that singles are no longer just a demographic statistic, but a transformative presence reshaping cities and economies worldwide. That is why we aim to investigate, with this new issue of MONU entitled "Singles Urbanism", how singles transform cities and to understand the spatial consequences of life lived alone, and the growing prevalence of living outside the traditional structures of coupledom and family, and its urban influence.
In recent decades, cities around the world have witnessed a profound demographic shift: the rapid rise of single-person households and a growing number of individuals who live, work, move, consume and socialise primarily on their own. Today, in many metropolitan regions—from Stockholm to Seoul, from New York to Nairobi—singles make up one of the most influential and fastest-expanding urban groups. This development is not merely a matter of changing household figures; it is reshaping the very fabric of contemporary urbanism. Across much of the rich world, singlehood is becoming ever more widespread. In the United States, for example, the share of adults living without a spouse or partner has risen sharply over recent decades, mirroring a broader global pattern in which increasing numbers of people of all ages live alone or outside long-term relationships. Since 2010, the proportion of people living alone has increased in 26 out of 30 high-income countries. Today, around 40% of the approximately 8 million private households in the Netherlands are single-person units.
