A plan to introduce parking permits in Brighton’s Hanover district united the community as never before in recent months. Posters against the proposals appeared in residents’ windows and very soon Brighton and Hove City Council’s directive buckled under public pressure.

To see people coming together against over-zealous officials provided a sign we still have some human spirit. But David Bramwell, the brains behind Brighton’s most irreverent tourist guide, The Cheeky Guide To Brighton, thinks it highlighted how it sometimes takes something with selfish ends – somewhere to park our cars – to make us unify.

When it comes to wider societal problems, we are more reclusive.

“There are a lot of isolated people out there,” he says. “They might be at home alone with the curtains closed, staying in all day, with few friends and no one to care about them. When you think about how some people get forgotten by the community around them, it’s dreadful.”

Brighton is the sort of place – with its transient population and hidden pockets of poverty, its hedonism and its youth – where anomie can breed.

Yet it need not be that way thinks the man whose recent project The No 9 Bus To Utopia, charting his search for happiness and successful human interaction, debuted at this year’s Brighton Festival Fringe.

The human cost of individualism and exclusivity is high, whereas the price of generosity, the milk of human kindness, is free.

To promote a bit of interaction, to encourage Hanovians out of their houses to meet their neighbours and get to know them a little better, Bramwell has reignited the zocalo event which first premiered in Brighton in 2006.

Named after the Mexico City town square – a public space where people gather – the idea is that residents take chairs and sit outside their houses for an afternoon, meeting and greeting and wandering about the streets to stumble upon other friendly souls.

“The event was welcomed in 2006 when David Burke from anti-TV campaign White Dot devised the idea,” says Bramwell, whose optimism for the project was picked up by Hanover Directory which printed 3,000 posters for residents to stick in their windows.

“Grayson Perry even brought Channel 4 cameras to catch people nattering until dark and kids having fun for a documentary that year. He probably won’t return this year, but it’s not about celebrities or people jetting in from outside the area; this is an event for people in the community.”

Bramwell hopes the new incarnation will be the start of something bigger, that could spread to other parts of Brighton (he admits the architecture might be prohibitive in some areas) created from the ground up, not directed by “self-serving” politicians looking to score points to further their careers.

If the snowball rolls, zocalo might just catch on in Hanover, across Brighton and even nationwide, because it’s so simple.

“It’s completely free, requires no council approval and no health and safety nonsense,” adds Bramwell.

The only drawback, and about the only thing we all agree might be disagreeable, is the weather.

* The zocalo starts at 5pm. Find more information about the event on Facebook by searching hanoverzocalo.