Tales of the City

Eventually, with the restaurant about to close and reality setting in, I begin to pack my things. I put on my coat, stuff my journal and pen back into my messenger bag, and empty out my tray above the garbage can. The thoughts begin to cascade: the irony of this happening right now is so painfully clear, how could I have been so naive in this city,... See more

If the societal remedies inspired by a degraded discourse of doom leave much to be desired, then the individual actions prescribed by this degraded discourse only generate further discontent. If your city truly is doomed, then amidst heightened pessimism about governmental efficacy, exit seems the only logical choice. During the pandemic, the media... See more

What bothers me most about this inflammatory language is that it provides ideological cover for only the shittiest of knee-jerk solutions. In the Progressive era, Beauregard observes, commentators believed problems could at least be fixed. Terms like “crisis,” “doom loop,” and “urban death” carry a far more intractable connotation or at least sugge... See more

All of these trends had been decades in the making, but as esteemed urban planner Robert Beauregard notes, it was the summer of unrest that marked a paradigm shift in the minds of the American public. In Voices of Decline , his seminal work, Beauregard traces American perceptions about urban progress and regress in the twentieth century through a d... See more