The Lure of the City
Thirteen years into the 21st century about half of the global population lives in cities, a percentage that is expected to keep growing. Much of that is due to migration, especially throughout Asia, from rural areas to urban centers in search of a piece of globalization’s economic opportunity. Compared to many poor aspirants in Asia, people in the United States still have it pretty cushy but the trend in America is also toward urban life. 2010 Census data put at 80.7 the percentage of Americans living in urban areas.
Widespread growing desire to live in cities is likely to lead to those cities becoming safer, more beautiful and economically robust in response to demand, and vice versa. It is important for that to happen because, at every point in time, any given city has been either on the way up or on the way down. In 1965 Hartford, Connecticut was a thriving, bustling city full of department stores, restaurants, ladies wearing hats, honking taxis and buses coming and going. By 1990 it was a sad example of urban decay. When a city's trajectory is upward, one sees a steady increase in refurbishment of shabby buildings. A new park turns up somewhere. More people move into the city than move out. Streets are cleaner. Rents go up. A grimy block is cleared and something attractive is built on the site. This happened notably in Washington, DC, where a major entertainment arena and the International Spy Museum were built at Gallery Place, a rundown spot formerly characterized by the presence of loafers and petty-criminal elements.
Several particular things come together to help explain the lure of the city.
People need people.
Cities have always been intensely human places, infinitely more so than rural areas. That’s not because rural people are lacking in humanity but because there are so few of them relative to the amount of land. Cities are laboratories for the social evolution of human beings. In a world of close to 7 billion people humans seem to be opting for the pleasures and challenges of living together cooperatively and deriving mutual enrichment and security. It’s not just about finding a job.
Cities are also human in a sense that seems paradoxical but isn't. The city is characterized on the surface by noise, speed and bustle, as well as anonymity and seeming disregard mistakenly interpreted as not caring. Yet in the mind of every long-term city dweller there is a long list of human connections one has seen or experienced there. The little knot of concerned people gathered around someone who has tripped and fallen on the sidewalk. The person rushing to work who nevertheless stops to give someone directions. Neighbors socializing outside on the front stoop on a warm summer night. The woman who did not want my urban-explorer brother to take her picture but who had told him her “whole life story” by the time they had reached the other side of the bridge.
Today’s young people banking on a good quality of life in the city are not thinking only about evening entertainment and upscale boutique groceries. They seem to have a sense that in an urbanizing world, all kinds of cooperative relationships, subtle and otherwise, are being worked out in both spirit and system.
Technology plays an interesting role in bringing people to cities. It turns out that more and more technology does not lead to widespread desire to live out in the country, telecommute and be isolated. In the late 1990’s, when the Internet was still new and being totally wired was a utopian idea, many did not realize that, sequestered out in one’s ex-urban home, one would be doubly isolated. In addition to the geographical isolation, there would be the long hours that, perhaps unfortunately, millions of people spend in front of a screen. The consuming role of technology in our lives has actually promoted human desire to live near other humans in cities while enabling them, in a more technical sense, to do so. Smart phones are everywhere, their apps routinely used for interests and purposes that can be served right in the city. From his small apartment in New York or San Francisco, a student can take an online course offered only by some agricultural college in the Midwest, and still have Broadway or the Golden Gate Bridge within walking distance.
Economic conditions.
If successful job hunting is difficult in a sizable city, it’s not very likely a young person would hang around the country’s backwaters for very long. Cities have many more potential employers, plus opportunities for networking, volunteering, interning, and other social situations that can lead to paid employment.
With the decline of huge companies offering hundreds of jobs, countless smaller businesses have located in urban areas, creating jobs.
City life is far easier and more rewarding for a person with little or no money, especially one who appreciates cultural and intellectual enrichment. Cities offer a wealth of low-cost attractions that in some cases are even free, like summer concerts in the park, free Thursdays at the art museum, and simply the passing scene -- people with friendly dogs, or a colorful phalanx of cyclists rounding a corner.
The prosperity that ordinary Americans could realistically aspire to fifty years ago was well illustrated by the 1964 movie, Send Me No Flowers, with Doris Day and Rock Hudson. It wasn’t just the couple’s gorgeous suburban house and yard. It was the big shiny convertible that Doris drove to the train station at the end of the business day to pick up Rock, who emerged from a train that ran on time. It was Doris’s stridently carefree ignorance of the cost of Virginia ham. It was Rock’s response to Doris when she asked him if all was well at work: “oh, I’ll have that job forever.”
Few young Americans will experience the real-life version of that movie, but they don’t care about it. They are not festering with longing for something that happened in 1964 any more than young Boomers in that year regretted missing the heyday of singer Al Jolson. Young people of every generation look at current conditions with clear eyes and make their decisions accordingly. If they lack money to buy and maintain a decent car they become urban hipsters and ride bicycles everywhere. Problem solved – with no angst or baggage about the sun-washed America of some old movie.
Many young people also see no incongruity between city living and achieving environmental objectives. Far from it. Resources of land, housing, water, energy and power go much further when large numbers of people live cooperatively in an urban setting. Producing food locally has immense appeal in cities where people enjoy working plots in community gardens.
Many American cities today offer good public transportation.
With the mid-20th century building of the Interstate Highway System, the popular assumption was that one’s own automobile was the only transportation one would ever need (the nation’s train service was on its last legs and many Americans had never been on a plane). Serious public transportation existed only in a few major American cities. Now, there are light-rail systems, commuter trains and even full-fledged, metro-wide subway systems in cities that formerly had only a few buses or nothing at all.
It is impossible to overestimate the difference that reliable public transportation makes to an urban area. A personal vehicle becomes optional instead of obligatory. People can reach everything from the grocery store to the arboretum on the edge of town. Although city streets are still crammed with cars, the mere thought of how it would be without comprehensive transit alternatives is a nightmare. Countless users of trains, light-rail and express buses enjoy not only time to read or listen to music on their way to work, but greatly reduced stress levels. The environmental benefit of a vehicle carrying 40 concerns instead of just one is replicated many times and continuously.
Technology pairs well with public transportation. With a smart phone app, urban dwellers with no car can find out where the bus is, relieved of having to wonder how long they will have to wait.
Freedom
Only love competes with freedom for the designation of Greatest of All Things.
As technology permits a degree of surveillance unimaginable before, cities will have more appeal, not less. Cities have always been places of ragged diversity, kaleidoscopic opportunities for enjoyment, and chances to commit bizarre or otherwise questionable acts under the protection of anonymity, thousands of private spaces, and the indifferent mass of urban humanity. Even with today’s capabilities, authorities simply cannot do very much harm to the freedom-minded in big cities.
Cities offer space that is different from the kind of space one associates with the country or suburbs. A labyrinth of commercial streets teeming with stores, eateries, bars and bright lights offers an enviable personal playground. City parks may not always be the safest places, but their safer sections are peaceful, scenic oases. Dicier park precincts remain, it must be said, havens of opportunity for endeavors that the safety-minded avoid.
Nowadays, even many dogs make out better in the city than they do in the suburbs – something that surely suggests that suburban authorities have overreached. Towns with leash laws, probably most, but no dog parks provide absolutely no opportunity for a poor dog to run, ever, unless the dog lives with a jogger or has a fenced-in, large enough yard. It’s analogous to a person suffering lifelong house arrest, only worse. Cities often have dog parks, where dogs can run and chase and play – things they can only dream of in an American town locked down with laws, rules and neighborhood association restrictions.
Ever in tune with the zeitgeist, young people are flocking to the cities, leaving more land on which cities of the future may someday be built.
