Stewart Brand of The Long Now Foundation is talking about continued urbanization (via Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Radar), and the impact of cities on everything from birth rates to environment.
While I enjoy the remote and isolated, I am a city dweller, tried and true. I’m not fond of suburbia or “the country life,” except in short, focused doses. Brand’s report above has prompted me to think about just why I love cities so much.
- Cities change. If there’s one thing I’ve truly embraced in life, change describes it. Being contextualized by that which is fluid and dynamic makes me fluid and dynamic in response. I’m not separate from the system of chaos, I am integral to the design.
- Cities are complex. Living in a large city is an ongoing conversation with someone new every day. The city is so much larger than you, with so many thoughts and patterns at angles with each other, you never know what will come out of its mouth. Odds are good I can turn a street corner in any district of San Francisco and find myself in a situation I’ve never seen or thought about before. This doesn’t happen nearly as often in suburbia.
- Cities enjoy economy of scale. When you look for the edge of culture or the future of technology, cities across the world are where these are found. On the individual scale, I can enjoy authentic Vietnamese cuisine one night, Italian the next and wrap it up with fine Thai and Russian food for the weekend. And I can bicycle or walk to all of them.
- Cities are where solutions come from. The three factors above create a place where many brains move and grow with each other. New people continually add to the mixture, bringing new ideas and methods to the table. The big conversation takes unexpected turns in completely different languages from one moment to the next.
We’re all here to be with each other, and, like weblogs, this is what cities are for.
