What I Mean When I Use The Word "City"
I don’t just mean Chicago or L.A. or those other places MAGA refers to as “hellholes”. I mean human settlements of all sizes that play the vital role of bringing people and economic activity together.
Join Diana Lind of New Urban Order and me Thursday, September 4th, and 2 pm Eastern/11 am Pacific for a Substack Live discussion about raising kids in cities, California, housing, and more! Join us here.
There’s an amusing little video floating around the Internet that trolls the MAGA crowd by making fun of things they are apparently afraid of. Mexicans! California! And … cities! All those tall buildings! All those people!
You can just imagine the progressive counter-video about things they are afraid of. Exurbs! All those SUVs! All those Ford F-150s! I haven’t seen such a video but it must be kicking around on the internet somewhere.
The amusing MAGA trigger video about cities.
Whether we like it or not, both sides of our currently stark partisan divide have appropriated the term “city” and the term “urban” (as well as “urbanist”) for their own political purposes. The MAGA folks view all “cities” as corrupt hellholes, which is why the Trump Administration must bring in federal troops. The progressives view cities as havens free from the evils of auto-dependence and sprawl, which is why our public policy must favor density and transit.
There’s nothing new about this split. Remember that Thomas Jefferson didn’t like cities at all, writing to James Madison in 1787 that “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural ... When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton argued for a mercantile society from New York.
Following Jefferson’s lead, rural folk in the United States have always been skeptical of cities, though the partisan divide has flipped from time to time. During the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century, the rural folk who hated cities were mostly populist Democrats led by William Jennings Bryan, while the wealth of cities (though not always their political machines) was controlled by Republicans.
We All Live In Human Settlements
But the truth is that we all live in human settlements of one kind or another, which I tend to call “cities”. That’s why the logo for this Substack newsletter depicts two types of communities — a small-city Downtown in California and an exurb in Maryland.
Monticello, Jefferson’s estate in Charlottesville, Virginia, was no less a “city” than Hamilton’s New York. It was smaller, of course, and not everyone was there voluntarily because Jefferson enslaved many of its residents, but it functioned like all human settlements do. It provided those who lived there with the basic necessities of everyday life, much – if not all – of which was produced within the settlement at that time.
The Future Of Where depends on subscribers to help spread the word and pay the bills. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today.
It’s easy to blame the current divide on MAGA, as the video I mentioned up top does, by blaming the liberal cultural elites for all the problems we see in cities. But Democrats and progressives deserve some of the blame. Often in my world, I hear the holier-than-thou idea that we all should live in dense communities and ride transit a lot and anybody who doesn’t is somehow morally wrong. As somebody who lives in a dense community and rides transit a lot, I think it’s important to make the point that suburbs and exurbs and small rural towns are all human settlements too, and the way they work on a daily basis is not very different.
We Have More In Common Than We Think
People live in homes. They travel – usually not very far – to work and school and shopping, They go to restaurants, to parks, to visit relatives, who are also usually not very far away.
And yes, no matter what kind of community a family lives in, they need pretty much the same things. They need shelter and plumbing and roads. They need to be able to call the police or fire department when necessary. They need retail stores nearby as well as recreational activities. If they have kids – which, by the way, most households don’t these days – they need schools.
Yes, some of the homes, especially in the suburbs and exurbs are large single-family homes while some, especially in cities, are condos or apartments. And yes, almost everybody travels around in automobiles, though some people don’t or can’t or can’t afford to.
Society’s problems are not concentrated only in cities. Today’s overwhelming whataboutism from the Right will likely point to the reasons they think cities are hellholes: the homeless problem, the drug problem, the murder problem. The Democratic leaders have been soft on crime. These problems, they claim, drive people away from cities and they don’t exist in suburbs, exurbs, or rural small towns. All these points have at least some truth to them. Except, to indulge in a little whataboutism myself, drugs are a huge problem in small towns and rural communities across the country. So is suicide, especially among white men who seem to be inclined toward MAGA thinking, which seems to be related to a general sense of hopelessness about these communities.
So the question of fulfilling lives versus social and economic woes doesn’t break down quite so easily on the urban-rural continuum as either the Right or the Left might think. For every Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s pleasant fictional small town in Minnesota, there is a Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson’s harsh and narrow fictional small town. And for every Theodore Dreiser, who depicted the evils of early 20th Century Chicago in Sister Carrie, there is an author like Jane Jacobs or E.B. White, who understood – and communicated – how many neighborhoods in large cities are really just small towns.
White’s 1948 essay Here Is New York, written in the middle of a pre-air conditioning heat wave, is as masterful a depiction of a large city – and a large city as a parochial neighborhood – that you will ever read. And the corollary is that small towns and rural areas are more connected to the rest of the world than people often think. As a teenager I couldn’t image a more insulated, parochial city than my hometown … and yet, as I have written elsewhere, raw materials constantly flowed into the town from around the world and manufactured products constantly flowed out to the rest of the world. A friend of mine who is writing a book about my hometown calls it “The City That Touched The World”.
So I think it’s time to get rid of the silly partisan divide between cities and exurbs, big cities and small towns. Different types of human settlements have more in common than its denizens typically believe, and we’d all be better off if we understood that these different human settlements have essentially the same function and serve the people who live and work there in more or less the same way.