Cities aren’t monoliths

We need to discuss cities in America for a minute, because a lot of people who don’t live in one have a few really weird misconceptions about them. I mostly want to deal with one specific one, though.

Of course as I go into this note that I do not inherently think a city is better than a suburb, or a small town. I generally, personally, prefer cities to live in but that’s me, and I don’t think they are superior. Everywhere that humans gather to form community has good and bad in it, and about it. That said let’s get going.

Oh, also I am going to stop prefacing city with “American” after this but I Do it because though many things I will say are exactly the same in cities around the globe, not everything is and I will only talk about what I know here, and I don’t know those well enough to expound on them, so take it as writ that I only mean American cities here.

People who don’t live in a city, or haven’t spent a lot of time in one, often think of a city as a monolithic, uniform, place. It is, to them, all whatever their idea of a “downtown” is. Cities are not, however, ubiquitous lumps.

Think of the sizes, to start. L.A. is 496 sq miles, Manhattan is 22 sq miles (321 if we count all 5 boros), Seattle comes in at 84, and Jersey City is a nice 15 square miles. There are also a lot of people per square mile in each, of course. Cities are, honestly, weird fantastic horrible amazing organisms.

We talk about how much stuff there is in a city. Oh that city has stores: shopping, food, theatres, etc. Everyone can get to them quickly.

The reality is that in New York, say, or Portland, Boston, Seattle, Chicago (etc.), you can spend as much time getting around as you would going to your similar places in a small town. Not always, of course and that’s the point. But if I want to get a movie theatre I might have to go 20 minutes away for one.

Some of that is due to cities being far more spread out than many people think. Some of it is because services cluster. And add to that that while in towns and suburbs you are expected to have a car many cities it is 100% the opposite. So you are walking, or taking public transport and that can simply take longer.

Also let’s look at that little fact: Services cluster. You might not have a drugstore in your area. Maybe you have a pizza place you can walk to in 5 minutes, cool beans!, but that doesn’t mean you can get to a pharmacy in under 30.

Services will partly cluster in cities around money. Richer areas of town have more (and more expensive) services, while poorer ones have worse services, or none. They will also cluster around other things: Tourist activity, general density during business hours (so office areas get a lot of some things other places might not), and more. This sort of service cluster can be movie theatres, bookstores, drugstores, or even food. I have a mile and a half walk to my supermarket, or I can take a bus which takes 15 minutes (once the bus shows up, mind you).

Then, of course, I would need to lug everything back with me, as well.

But too many people think the entirety of a city is the biggest “center” (which is almost never a geographical center) and that the whole thing is like that. Simply not true.

My movie theatre is the same distance, in the opposite direction. My post office is about the same, distance-wise. On the other hand I have a little convenience store under 300 feet from my front door. I can get a bag of chips super easy. They don’t sell things like milk, though. Still, I admit, my Cheeto needs are well and truly taken care of.

So yeah, cities are weird that way, in ways a lot of people don’t consider.

Also go back to the size and sprawl and you can have an event in one part of the city be so unheard of in another part of the same city they might as well be on different landmasses. If you’re in Manhattan and there’s an explosion in Harlem, you won’t necessarily even notice it if you’re in the West Village just due to distance, and density. If you have large police activity in part of Seattle, the other side of town, hell, the next neighborhood over, might not even know until they hear about it on social media, or the news.

And of course then you have the news and/or social pushing a narrative that a city is a homogenous single zone. In 2020 I kept hearing how Portland was “on fire” due to protests. Well. There were a few blocks where the protests happened. Downtown. About 11 miles from me and across a river.

Zero chance I could have seen it, felt it, or anything. Not that I didn’t know it was happening, but it wasn’t going to affect me physically, where I was.

And yet “Portland was on fire.”

You see the problem. Two blocks does not a city make. Doesn’t even make a neighborhood.

But even outside of big events, just the fact that no neighborhood, or even area within one, moves the same, or has the same resources, is important to recognize.

There’s a thing in older science fiction (I’m sure it still happens but not as much) where someone will write “It was raining on planet Floop” … well, sure, but generally not all of Floop at once. Weather just doesn’t tend to work that way.

This is the same issue.

Cities are not a monolith, not a homogenous mass, not a ubiquitous lump of buildings and structures.

No, a city is a clutch of puzzle pieces.

A city is small communities Voltron’d into one larger community that holds itself together because of geographic, historical and societal physics.

A city is a forsaken hydra that secretly just wants a nap.