Coming Back to the City

The American city has taken quite the rollercoaster ride over the past 70 years. For the half century following World War II, anti-urban sentiment managed to keep pace with the United States’ unprecedented affluence, creating glistening suburban landscapes that surrounded increasingly troubled urban cores. Eight of the ten largest US cities in 1950 recorded their historical population peaks that year (only New York and Los Angeles continued to grow after that census).

This trend has reversed itself in the past couple of decades, of course, and most cities have benefited from the newly widespread appeal of urban living. As Mark Twain reminds us, though, history tends to rhyme rather than repeat itself, and the rebirth of cities is no exception.

A few months ago, Marc described a phenomenon he called Earbud Urbanism. Contemporary technology as epitomized by the iPod, he wrote, now allows us to replace our actual surroundings with personalized content, one sense at a time. Kazys Varnelis made a similar point last week, just before the 30th anniversary of the Sony Walkman. The Walkman, he wrote, symbolizes the recolonization of US cities just as boomboxes (perceived as “sonic assault devices”) symbolized the height of urban tension and decay.

Why, then, did cities become more appealing in the 1980s and 1990s? Perhaps Earbud Urbanism contributed by making it easy to ignore the unsavory elements of urban environments. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, cities teemed due to lack of choice: If you wanted to do certain things you needed to be in the city. Now, our choices have increased exponentially, and comparatively few people truly need to be located at any one place in order to do something. Everyone’s loved ones are just a virtual arm’s reach away, consumer products can be delivered to some of the most remote places on earth, and one can practically run a business without rolling out of bed. The physical locations of jobs seem to follow people to where they’ve decided to live, instead of the opposite.

Perhaps the suburban fortess mentality of the postwar era gave way to a subtler kind of fortress mentality. The affluent who have chosen to return to the city have come back on their own terms, not the city’s. Many inhabit condos that are sealed off from the surrounding urban environment, with plenty of parking infrastructure to facilitate driving everywhere else. The same high-end chain stores, also with ample parking, have even filled in the formerly industrial spaces of many cities (Chicago’s Clybourn Corridor, for example). And when we do have to venture outside of our comfort zones on foot, of course, we have our iPods to keep us company.


(Photo from Flickr user fensterbme.)

Cities and the Big Sort

Why do we love cities? One of the main reasons is surely that cities create opportunities to meet many different people, and many different types of people. The notion of a rural-urban cultural dichotomy has existed as long as cities have, and the distinction has always been characterized by the diverse social opportunities that cities offer.

Smaller towns undoubtedly provide more homogenous social climates than cities, partially because of sheer numbers—the fewer the people, the fewer the types—but cities have homogeneity problems of their own. The culprit: a phenomenon author Bill Bishop and the Economist have called the Big Sort. As a society, it seems, we are getting better and better at seeking out those who are most like us and surrounding ourselves with those people.

Kazys Varnelis writes on his blog that “mobility is leading individuals to cluster in communities of other like-minded individuals.” Communication technology, especially the Internet, certainly facilitates this sorting process. The mobility Varnelis describes finds its ultimate expression in the instant communities we form online, and the tools that help us comb through cyberspace allow us to hone in on exactly what we’re trying to find. In short, the Internet allows us to sort ourselves more effectively than cities ever could.

Christopher Alexander managed to get way ahead of this problem in 1977, viewing the Big Sort through the urban lens. In A Pattern Language, he acknowledges the value of some degree of societal sorting: a compromise between the two extremes of ghettoization and uniform heterogeneity, both of which stifle diversity. He calls this compromise the Mosaic of Subcultures and he describes it as follows:

“The metropolis must contain a large number of different subcultures, each one strongly articulated, with its own values sharply delineated, and sharply distinguished from the others. But though these subcultures must be sharp and distinct and separate, they must not be closed; they must be readily accessible to one another, so that a person can move easily from one to another, and can settle in the one which suits him best.” (Alexander 48)

Alexander’s solution makes perfect sense for a physical city, but given the layers of information and digital connectivity that overlay contemporary cities, it may not be so simple anymore. Yes, the Internet lets us move from subculture to subculture more easily than in the past—more easily than in the most vibrant and diverse city—but that same technology lets us ignore other subcultures just as easily. One of the virtues of the physical city is that it forces us to face others in realistic way, unpleasant though the experience may be. As long as this keeps happening, we'll remember how to live amongst those who approach life differently than we do. A true mosaic of subcultures, in other words, is an urban asset worth preserving.


(Photo from Flickr user wenstrom.)