One can easily take walking for granted. After all, it's the almost overlooked beginning of every day as we swing out of bed. We use it to get from kitchen to dining room to recliner in the living room seven days a week. In the wide open spaces that describes non-city-living (where driving is required to connect with the rest of the world) that can be the biggest part of the walking experience.
To our good fortune we don't have any real acreage around our home. None of our neighbors do either. We are literally a couple of yards from neighbors' homes on either side. And, if one sneezes in the backyard, the neighbor behind us might well say "gesundheit" from his, or her, kitchen window. Things, people, services, and society are all close.
This close proximity has for generations been seen in much of our society as a basic violation of the "pastoral ideal", the notion that we should all live in a quiet meadow somewhere as devoid of other human life as possible--as though avoiding the problems of working together to build a society make the difficult parts not exist. The elevation of pastoral living to some pedestal is the moving force behind the suburbs and the moralizing basis for expressions of disgust with city-living heard regularly in the halls of our state legislature.
However, as reasoning goes, this particular canard--despite its long life--is an easy bubble to burst. If one has ever stood on the edge of a very large cleared field (meadow, if you like) surrounded by forest and miles from houses or people and realized that the dozens of brown clumps on the ground around you are bear scat, one's appreciation for aloneness will immediately deflate to realistic standards.
The reverse is true in our neighborhood. Loud talking will immediately have neighbors looking to find out where it's coming from and what's going on. Strangers walking down the street and workmen all attract attention dedicated to the security of us all. It turns out this is really the norm of human society. From the beginning of human society working together for our mutual safety and benefit has been our secret to success.
It's not just about security. Ideas boil up more easily in places where notions--and people--bump up against one another frequently. There is the story from Jane Jacobs' ‘70s book "The Economy of Cities" that cultivated grains didn't spring from generations of careful seed selection in some desolate agrarian landscape. No, in Jacobs' telling the best seeds were brought to cities to trade. The boost to the genetic-mixing and to the visibility to more people of any new species--that proximity in and around the cities gave--shortened the process of finding the best versions of new seed species by hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years. And, she goes on to report that the power of fertilizers first sprang to broad use for humanity in the window boxes of Paris, not down on the farm.
The power to bring forth new ideas and get them in the hands of others more quickly gives societies structured around cities physical and intellectual advantages so powerful that the effects of these characteristics are often called "economic gravity". So, if you live in a state like I do where the legislature is constantly trying to tear down the cities, realize their efforts are cutting our economic necks.
Perhaps the solution to understanding how cities work is to just take a walk in a city neighborhood. That, I think, is the antidote to anti-human thinking. Society isn't some distant thing on a city street. People are close, making it difficult to deal with them as personifications of an ideology. That closeness is also indeed the secret to the cohesiveness of cities. It's not that there aren't a diversity of conflicting opinions throughout urban populations, it's just that we all know that others exist. We can't pretend they don't because, if you do...you will bump into them.
And in our little portion of St. Louis those walks are a real pleasure. Here, sidewalks aren't relegated exclusively to streetside. There are a couple of dozen sidewalks--that I call walk-throughs--that cut through the middle of blocks. Often these pathways are connected, providing for a very different kind of walk through the neighborhood than just following the streets. Walking these narrower paths is similar to the way it feels to walk through that most human-scaled of European cities, Venice, Italy. There, all streets are for pedestrians only, no vehicles.
And, it turns out that in addition to giving one a very different view of the neighborhood these paths likely make the block safer. The close proximity of neighbors by itself makes crime more difficult. But, breaking into the back of a house isn't as easy when there is a sidewalk nearby where a passerby might suddenly appear in view of the backside of the house at anytime of day or night.
Many things including crime are more visible in the city, but—as with many things in this life—appearance and reality aren’t always the same. For example, the relatively high crime statistics for the 300,000 people that make up St. Louis city aren’t the same as the statistics for the 2-million person metropolitan area, even though that’s the way it sounds when they are reported. Further, crime statistics suggests crime in cities is higher than in rural areas, but according to data from the US Justice Department as reported on the USAfacts.org website:
When it comes to reporting victimizations to police, people in rural areas do so less frequently than those in urban areas. In 2015, 19% of those who experienced rape or sexual assault in urban areas reported it to the police, versus 2% of those in rural areas. Twenty-five percent of aggravated assaults occurring in urban areas were reported, versus 8% in rural areas.
In spite of the appearances of the way city life is reported, cities are a great place for a walk and for life in general. However, they aren’t a place where one can safely assume unrealistic things about others and get away with it. They are places where solutions to problems are found precisely because there is so little safety in trusting appearances over reality.
If one looks for it, there is beauty, vibrancy, and connection in cities that can’t be found anywhere else. However, one must leave the house, car, and office to find it. Walking city neighborhoods is the beginning of an awakening to the power we have when we work together.
Earlier articles from “Commets from the Oort Cloud”