Urbanity, Here and There
I am reading Vishaan Chakrabarti’s (visually, substantively) beautiful The Architecture of Urbanity. Setting the stage, Chakrabarti defines an urbane community not as "elitist or metropolitan," but rather "one that embraces and celebrates pluralism across race, class, and gender regardless of its size." Cities may be large without being urbane, as when segregation discourages mixing outside of one’s narrowly defined group. And communities may be urbane yet still small, as with the quintessential college town.
This provokes two thoughts.
- Some regimes seem more tolerant than others of urbanity. There is a connection to Paul Tillich’s observation (in The Metropolis in Modern Life) that the dictator fears the "strange" in cities, as "the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition."
- My hometown of Lincoln, IL has not, since my childhood, had an urban core that promoted urbanity. But perhaps that is changing. When visiting Lincoln for the holidays, I found downtown a small string of quality shops, cafés, and restaurants that attracted customers and conversation. Why this is happening deserves some fieldwork, but my guess is that Amazon has killed off trips to the mall in Springfield and Bloomington, leaving behind demand for local retail.