how we shape cities, and cities shape us

Why do American cities feel less "alive" than their European counterparts? It's because of something called the "missing middle". A century ago, American cities looked completely different... (thread) 🧵 https://t.co/zwNWejfx4L

The story of humanity is an urban one, a slow 20,000 year drift towards a largely urban condition. A city does the same thing to individualism that a natural ecosystem does to a tree — thriving there is about living well with people who are not like you. Just as a tree revels in those multifarious interdependencies, so we do with cities.

American cities have not been too kind to minorities because (most) American cities have not been, well, cities. They are not dense, not walkable, don't allow people to rely on public transport, don't create enough opportunity (or necessity) to interact with people from different socio-economic brackets.

It's not only UK dance music of the Nineties that is associated with cities; the whole history of popular music is about urban scenes. It's no accident that Motown started in Detroit, house in Chicago, hip-hop in New York… Cities are pressure cookers which can synthesise influences

quickly and in a way that is both collective and idiosyncratic.

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There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of

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n Hannah Black’s essay for Artforum, “Go Outside,” she describes the possibilities illuminated by 2020’s riots, emphasizing a return to social life and public space. A riot, she writes, is “just something that can happen when a lot of people are outside in the same place.” She continues: “By providing new uses for public space—by uprooting street... See more