The Cities with souls - Updated


Finding the places to nourish our spirit

Online acquaintance Lupa wrote a piece a few days ago…

Boy that is an awkward phrase. Maybe when I have a spare year or three I'll bring all language describing the degrees and circumstances of friendship into the twenty-first century. Let's see what I can do.

E-friend Lupa (better, sort of) wrote a piece a few days ago about sustainable urban pagan life. Now my viewpoint is nearly the opposite of Lupa. While city life does offer things that rural life or small town life can barely approach (drool, bookstores, art galleries, live concerts, ladies in INTERESTING clothes, etc.), I am by nature a semi-hermit. Even without depression dragging me down, there's only about a third of the time that I long for those things that can only come from a vibrant city life. Another third of the time, I'm much happier with small group or one-on-one interaction. And about a third of the time I think that humans are more trouble than they are worth and the whole lot of them (save me, of course) should be exiled far beyond reach.

Fortunately for us all, the planet doesn't run on my warped viewpoint.

Now that the anthropomorphic anthropogenic global warming movement seems to be gasping it's last as the "science" collapses, maybe ecology and environmentalism will shift back to the normal place.

One thing that offends me mightily about modern cities especially in the American west is that the newer the city is, the more it is built for the car and not for the person There's more to a city than warehouses with parking lots, even if the warehouse has been prettied up and called a shopping mall. The architecture isn't designed for humans.

Now, for me, the first real city was San Francisco. Oh there had been earlier places, parts of Phoenix or Tucson, much of downtown Flagstaff, Little Rock, New Orleans is it's hot muggy almost decaying decadence, Salt Lake surprisingly enough. But no, the real City was San Francisco. Maybe I fell in love when I did the tourist thing and had the clam chowder in the open air with the smell of fish surrounding me. Maybe it was the second I bought dim sum from a street vendor. But it wasn't that. No, it was when I realized that you could walk from park to park to park, and all the statuary and ornamentation was meant to be enjoyed by pedestrians. San Francisco is a city designed to be walked in. You can't say that about Los Angeles. And you can't say that about Phoenix.

Some cities were designed around people and some cities were designed around cars. I prefer the former. those are the cities that still have soul. If you can walk at 3 AM from a small nightclub to an all night diner that serves a killer Spanish omelette, that's a good sign. If you can wake up at dawn and wonder around following your nose to all the wonderful scents, that's a very good sign. If you can wander into a museum and spend hours bending your brain, that's an incredibly good sign. And if you can do this WITHOUT driving or even seeing your car for hours and hours, you've arrived.

I've pointed people to the works of Malcolm Wells before. The first design of his that I ever saw was a theatre with a garden on the roof. More than that, the garden was the roof.

In The Probability Broach, L. Neil Smith describes a world founded on principles of individualism and liberty. One of the big changes is architecture. Industrial plants are underground. There aren't wheeled cars, there are hovercraft, and that means no asphalt roads and highways. That's something I would like to see.

I think we could do sustainable cities, I am just not sure that central planning is the way to go.

And I want to see the Golden Mean returned to architecture. More than that, I want a place that the senses move into the spirit. A city that we see pass our windows at 70 miles per hour is not a city. I feel we need to reclaim this. Because we will be doing cities in space. Cities on the Moon. Cities on Mars. And eventually, cities on worlds circling other stars.

Our cities can incubate our dreams, just as Nature can give us the dreams to begin with.

_____
Update - Regular reader BTHO pointed out on 24Feb2010 that the correct term is anthropogenic, not anthropomorphic.

Posted: Tue - February 16, 2010 at 02:26 PM
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