Don't it always seem to go...?

Don't it always seem to go that we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone. Right as usual, Joni. The "it" that's gone in this case is the public realm, with the public in it. A paradise in its own way, even if it is in fact often paved. Love of cities in the time of Covid-19 is problematic. It even feels inappropriate (self-serving, off-key, tone deaf...insert your own adjective) to ruminate on civic health as distinct from public health.

Before--yes, we can now speak of a before and an after--I had a little notebook filled with half-baked ideas for blog posts. They were stranded in the notebook, half-baked, because I had failed to maintain the dam that held back just enough of my administrative tasks to keep my productive writing wetlands from being drowned. Failure to maintain may be a theme here. One post, on what the rules of improv have to do with good urban space, is a bit more than half-baked; it's actually browning nicely, if still soft in the middle. Yet it seems too chipper and shallow to post right now.

What is it that's gone that we didn't know we got 'til now? Sharing the spectacle of sport. Gathering to protest an injustice. Marching. Occupying. Assembling to redress a grievance. Worshiping someone or something. Live music--playing it and listening. Seeing coffee shop regulars, and the other familiar strangers who speckle our lived space. Being alone in a crowd. Watching people. Eavesdropping. The world of together, of transit, of third places, and parks, of plazas and piazzas. We're missing the city floor.

Residential buildings in US cities often don’t have the fringe of balconies that characterize housing in Italy or Spain, and we tend to draw a sharper line between public and private. We have seen the isolated in those countries engage with one another in applause and song, several floors above the street, but still in the manner of the street. It's as if the social space of the piazza, flat as a sheet of paper, crinkled up until it invaded the previously private air between homes. In dense cities people have to practice the fine art of a disattenuation, which is being in a position to see what someone is doing nearby but pretending, politely, not to--think of elevator cab or subway platform behavior. But now, with the possibility to assemble, to be part of a civic body, denied at ground level, the desire has no where to go but up. In time, that air will float slowly back to the ground, as one by one we congeal back into a public. Will we remember what we got when it was gone?