The Lovable City

The great Danish urbanist Jan Gehl says that a city’s primary responsibility is “to be sweet to its people.”  I think it’s our responsibility, as citizens and city shapers, to be sweet to our cities.  This blog is about the love of cities—not sappy, blind or nostalgic love—but love for the long haul, in sickness and in health, in recessions and prosperity.  Urbiphilia is an embrace of the idea of urbanity and a sustained demonstration of the value of living together in close quarters, and in so doing construct numerous wondrous places of all sizes.  And, further, that living densely—yeah, let’s use the word—is the best way to honor the natural world.

I made that word up, urbiphilia, as you may have guessed. The word is a happy hybrid.  Part comes from the Latin word urbs, urbis (f)--that’s how we say things in Latin, identify the word by its nominative, genitive, and gender-- and it refers both to “the city,” the un-capitalized ordinary noun, and to the city of Rome, literally the Capital--ized city. Add philia the Greek word for affection or devotion to something, and we’ve got a nice mongrel word, an appropriate metaphor for the mixing and fusion of cities.

My made up word pays homage to E.O. Wilson’s theory of biophilia, his hypothesis that we have deep evolutionary attractions to landscapes with certain kinds of characteristics.  The biophile, Wilson argues, has the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. “Life,” he says, “of any kind is infinitely more interesting than almost any conceivable variety of inanimate matter.”  I think that everything Wilson says about nature can also be said about cities, including the hypothesis that we have deep, evolutionary attractions to them.  Life, not the paving of the streets or height of buildings, is what makes cities infinitely interesting. 

What makes a city worthy of being loved? It’s an important question, because it’s only such devotion that will set us on the path toward a more sustainable, equitable, and beautiful world. I am an urbiphile;  I loves cities both in general and in particular and not only in the way that an architect loves cities--for the feast of buildings that a city street offers--but for many other reasons that aren’t as easy to articulate.  But I’ll try…