Cities Are Awesome

I like looking out of my window at work.  Naturally this is partly because getting paid for staring out a window is preferable to doing any actual work.  But its also because I have a pretty good view.  Granted, when you work on the sixtieth floor its difficult not to have a good view.  The city stretches out before me in a sprawling jumbled mess of concrete, glass and steel.  I will confess that Sydney is not the most aesthetically pleasing city in the world.  A goodly proportion of it seems to have been designed by a six year old with a monochromatic set of building blocks.  Still on a good day with the sun shining the whole layout is quite impressive as it decays gently in the afternoon pollution.

Sixty floors up is the best way to view any city as it allows you a certain amount of distance from one of the most irritating features of any city; people.  It's difficult to have a city without people if only because there are very few cities built by wallabies.  Until Wallabyville gets off the ground we're going to have to put up with the human version.  Which is probably all for the best because a city inhabited by four million wallabies is unlikely to be an improvement.  For starters we'd be neck deep in wallaby shit.

Ants build cities of course.  At least ants build large and complex habitations complete with dwelling areas and places to work, breed, live and die which seems to be as good a definition of a city as anything else I've heard recently.  I'm not sure if ants are the example we want to follow though.  If seventy odd years of communist rule in various parts of the globe has taught us one thing it is that humans are not as good at being ants as ants are.

I personally find cities a hopeful sign for humanity.  Its all very well to associate with various members of the human race if you like them but cities are proof that, if given the right incentive, we are prepared to associate with people we don't know at all and probably wouldn't like if we did.  Cities show that humans can tolerate, however reluctantly, the presence of other humans.  It isn't easy of course, humans tend to find other humans irritating and speaking as a human I don't really blame them.  The history of every city is replete with arguments, clashes, riots, crime and people who play their stereos really loud after ten o'clock at night.  From time to time whole groups are ostracised, driven out or just treated really really badly.  But for all that the city itself survives.  Cities are sometimes abandoned when the reason for its existence vanishes like Petra of antiquity or Detroit of right now and there are countless examples of conquering armies destroying cities but there are very few instances of cities ceasing to exist simply because the inhabitants couldn't put up with each other any longer.

People from small rural locales frequently comment on the unfriendliness of cities when compared to their own tightknit communities.  They highlight the harshness, greed, permissiveness and general not niceness of cities when compared with their own rural paradise where everybody knows your name and they say goodday in the street.  But this is my point, its easy to be friendly and accepting when you've known everyone in the community since birth (and let's face it, you're probably related to most of them), it also helps that anyone who genuinely doesn't fit in tends to take the hint and leave.  These people tend to go to the city. That's what a city is, a collection of people without any sense of community, who have come there for disparate reasons and who would probably choose not to live next door to most of their neighbours if they felt they had the option.  And yet in Sydney four million people wake up each day and most of them, after mature reflection, decide not to cut their neighbours throats.

That's why I think cities are pretty awesome.