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In many rapidly urbanising regions, multigenerational households, once the default arrangement for most families, have declined sharply over the past four decades, replaced by smaller nuclear or single-occupant homes clustered in apartment towers far from extended relatives. Sociologists studying this shift in mid-sized cities across several continents have documented a parallel rise in what they term 'chosen kin networks': voluntary support groups of neighbours, close friends, and colleagues who perform many of the practical functions once handled by grandparents, aunts, and uncles, including emergency childcare, elder companionship, and informal financial assistance during hardship. These networks appear most robust in neighbourhoods with stable long-term residents, community centres, or religious congregations that provide regular, low-cost opportunities for casual contact, and weakest in transient rental districts where residents turn over every year or two. Interviews conducted across a sample of these cities suggest that chosen kin networks partially but not fully replace the functions of biological family; participants reported strong emotional support from friends but were markedly less likely to rely on them for major financial commitments, large sums of money, or long-term eldercare, which respondents overwhelmingly still expected to fall to biological relatives regardless of geographic distance. This gap has prompted concern among policy researchers that ageing populations without nearby biological kin, and without the financial means to purchase professional care services, face a growing risk of falling through both informal and formal safety nets simultaneously. Several municipal governments have responded by subsidising intergenerational co-housing pilots, pairing unrelated older and younger residents in shared buildings with common areas designed explicitly to encourage the kind of repeated, low-stakes contact that fosters durable chosen-kin relationships, though early results on whether such pairings reduce isolation are still preliminary.