I've never been able to convince my mom that I did not grow up in a walkable neighborhood. She'll say things like "sure walkability sounds nice in theory but in practice everyone drives," citing the stripmall that was just over a mile from my childhood home. Even though she has visited me many times in various urban neighborhoods, I can't seem to convey the difference.
On the other end of the spectrum the definitional ambiguity of "suburb" caused me quite a bit of angst. I lived in urban neighborhoods in Arlington and Alexandria, VA for years. Occasionally you encounter people who live in DC and just won't believe you when you say that while Pentagon City or Old Town Alexandria are, yes, technically suburbs of DC they are not actually suburban in nature.
That’s a great point. There are many small cities, including ones that are “suburban” in relationship to a nearby larger city. But we don’t have vocabulary to distinguish between that spatial/population relationship and the pattern of the built environment.
This is a great assessment and something I’ve experienced but never considered why the interactions are like this. I too use the word “walkable” because I don’t know how else to describe it. Thank you for putting this into words for me.
Whenever I say I live in Chicago while traveling, people often comment on the 'traffic.' For a long time, I would respond 'oh yeah it can be bad but I rely mostly on the L.' At some point, I realized they were almost universally referring to the act of living in the suburbs and getting into the city (aka the traffic) when visiting family or colleagues etc in "Chicago" aka the suburbs spanning from Indiana to Wisconsin.
I have never lived in the Chicago suburbs so have not actually experienced the 'traffic' as they are describing it on any kind of regular basis. It was a funny talking past each other moment and it also highlights that my home is viewed as 7 million other people's 'entertainment district' that they visit when they have relatives in town.
Huh. You kind of brush up against the idea of suburban walkability but then immediately abandon it as a weak facsimile. I guess I’m a city person in the suburbs. I lived in Wedgwood (Seattle) Brighton (Boston) and know all about neighborhoods. But I’ve been living for 8 years in a suburb of Boston.
My life is WAY more walkable now than it ever was within city limits. And it’s definitely more than a single open air shopping center. But you add together some corner stores, schools, playgrounds and a library you can walk to, and it pulls together. Commuting by bus or train is still commuting.
Thanks for sharing! I’m not familiar with Wedgwood, but I would not consider Brighton suburban. Brighton definitely has city life, especially in and around the historic center.
Looking at a map, Wedgwood is on a grid and has buildings lining the street, so it’s easy for me to believe you that you had city life there too.
We don’t have a good vocabulary for this kind of stuff, unfortunately. I wrote about this last year with some pictures, which might help:
I used to live in Brighton (my city person cred). Now I live in Woburn. It’s definitely suburban. But my kids elementary school is a quarter mile away, the boys and girls club is a third of a mile, our favorite ice cream shop is half a mile and the library is .75 miles. My community pottery studio is just under a mile and so are a slew of great restaurants, churches, etc. Sidewalks everywhere. Not much nightlife, but I don’t need that. It isn’t just “walkable”, it’s actually walkable in that every day kind of a way.
I do drive my kids around 2 miles each way for dance and theater classes once a week, but if we were in Brighton, we’d be taking the train for things like that. I do drive to the grocery store, but I hated schlepping groceries home in Brighton so I almost always drove and double parked outside to unload anyway.
Walkability builds. I imagine that most people in Woburn drive almost everywhere. But each drive or commute you can eliminate, each community space or friend you can frequent within 10 minutes of your front door builds the kind of local feel you’re talking about.
Boston and its suburbs are less sprawl-y than most US cities, so maybe our suburban experience is unique. But people in any size community can (and should!) build a rich center that they can easily access.
As someone who has never lived in the city, but visited her cousins who lived in a large apartment of a downtown metropolitan area, I can safely say that my personality is incompatible with city life. That is not to say that one lifestyle is better than others, we need both. Not everyone is suited to living on 34 shrinking acres… I say shrinking because my very rural area is becoming dotted with new constructions and even a projected data center (which we are fighting tooth and nail).
I think that the cultural divide that you speak of is also the political divide that sometimes seems insurmountable. People who are used to condo restrictions, noise ordinances, public transportation, etc. cannot fathom how people who live in the middle of nowhere and are used to a certain independence and freedom do not resonate with any kind of coerced collectivism. By the same token, people who have to share resources and habitats in close quarters cannot understand the “selfishness” of those who,live in rural areas. One of the problems that we will have to contend with is that we cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to governing, and city dwellers should refrain from telling rural folks how to live, and like wise, farm folks should be more understanding of the constraints of those who live in the city.
I certainly agree with your conclusion, that the best outcome would be “live and let live,” with our governance respecting different communities and letting them be different. And also that there isn’t a single lifestyle (or subculture) that is better or worse, or that should be favored over another.
I want to gently push back on some of what you said though, because the way you said it makes me strongly suspect you haven’t experienced what I’m calling “city life.”
The reason I say that, is that, if I had to pick just a few words to describe it, I would say things like *freedom,* *community,* and *opportunity.*
These aren’t things you can truly experience by visiting, in the same way you don’t really know what it is to be French even if you’ve visited Paris several times.
What you described, particularly “coerced collectivism,” does not resonate at all with the communities I’ve lived in. I think that might be like me saying rural living seems “boring and inconvenient” … except, it must not be, or else why would you love it? I’ve never lived on 34 acres so I’m exercising my imagination here, forgive me if I get it wrong, but I would expect that the city person who imagines rural life as boring and inconvenient is simply failing to understand what you actually do with your time and why that’s enjoyable, perhaps because you’re *able* to do all kinds of interesting things on 34 acres that someone happily living in a city simply couldn’t, and therefore can’t really appreciate.
Two last thoughts:
I think it’s possible that the cousins apartments you visited are not actually in “a city” in the sense that I mean. I say that because one of the hard things about our culture and language is we don’t have words to disambiguate “city life” from “urban density” even though they’re not the same at all. Many small towns have great city life, and there are many densely populated apartment districts in places like Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles that don’t have city life at all.
And finally: I actually thing the rural Americans and “City Life” or “Urbanist” Americans should be allies, because we’re both having America’s dominant suburban culture and preferences forced on us, and in many cases that’s what messes things up and takes away the freedom of both rural and urban communities.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and apologies for such a long reply :)
I think that you would find rural life boring and inconvenient, not because there is something wrong with you, but because we are wired differently. For context, I lived in an apartment outside of DC during my college years, and my cousins lived in a high rise in Paris. I also lived the suburban life in community 1 hour outside of DC for a few years. I felt like a caged bird. There is nothing wrong with those communities, but I hated that life. I never identified myself as a city dweller, even if I did live in one for a time. Collectivism would always feel coercive to me, but would be considered being a good neighbor when living in more densely populated areas.
I have no issues with people who live in cities, suburbs, etc… but I do have a problem with people who move into my area and then try to import with them their urban and suburban culture where I live.
Great article. city life, to me, is fundamentally a small town life. We walk to the dentist and the supermarket. Our kids walk to school. We know all our neighbors. (Like em or not, we know them!)
I think that's right, in two senses: (1) there are many small towns that have good "city life," especially college towns, and (2) the best big city neighborhoods often function and feel like small towns within the larger metro surrounding them.
Agreed! I’d say our neighborhood in Philly feels very much like a small town to me. I see the same 15 or so families on a daily basis at the playground or the coffee shop or daycare pickup. My husband and I work remotely and almost everywhere we need to go is within a half mile radius. Even going to “Center City” 1.5 miles away feels like going to the city despite us very much already being in the city.
This is the avenue I've used to write about urbanism in America: small towns are essentially urban in nature, but we don't think of them as such. IOW there are people who *have* experienced city life but don't think of it as such.
I just experienced City Life on a two-week vacation in Spain. Really just a tourist version of City Life but still it was revelatory. I realized that I've never really experienced City Life before, despite living "in cities" for most of my life. I'm having a hard time expressing to others (and to myself) what it is that I experienced and why I think it might really matter. Thanks for writing this!
I hadn’t considered the distinctions that you describe but they ring true for me. I fully immersed myself in city life during my twenties while living in Boston (Beacon Hill, the North End and Charlestown) and NYC (Upper West Side of Manhattan). Then I moved to LA for a job and commuted from Santa Monica to Burbank for work. I still recall the shock to my psyche after attempting to walk to lunch one day to a place that was less than a mile from my office. The lack of connecting sidewalks and the dominance of the cars confounded me. I look forward to reading your article on city life. I am happy living in a small town in Oregon now, but I still miss that city lifestyle!
Thanks for putting into words just how I feel like some people don't "get it". I've had so many family members just ask different variations of "how do you do X without owning a car?", and it feels like they never understand my answer haha.
I also think that among a certain track of middle class --> professional career track peers, the divide can start just with the college they attend---the ones who go to colleges with great walkability and integration into the urban fabric can see the appeal of city living (even if it's not for them!), while the others just can't.
There are definitely advantages to living in the suburbs. But the amount of dispersion and the fact that you can't walk (safely) to any business, even for a candy bar, makes for an isolating and boring experience.
This is a great article. Reminds me once of walking in downtown Chicago (my hometown) with some folks in from Florida. They saw an apartment building with a Walgreens on the ground floor and I am not exaggerating when I say they reacted like a UFO had landed. Just absolutely goggling over the idea of "going downstairs to get some milk."
So true, and it makes it difficult to talk up TOD and walkability in the suburbs when people have no reference point for what you are talking about and have been car-dependent for generations.
My favorite way of describing what I love about city life is that I can set out from my apartment in the morning with just my two feet and backpack, like Dora the Explorer. That’s all I need for my day to unfold before me, both the planned necessary parts and the inevitable surprises and opportunities.
I recently moved to a new city where I have to drive fairly frequently, because though I live in a neighborhood where I can enjoy city life locally, it is not the norm for the majority of neighborhoods around me. Every time I have to think about parking I get sad and miss the subway desperately.
Suburban/rural types absolutely consider my postwar low density city neighbourhood to be "too city", so I would expand the group of "people who have experienced city life" a bit (especially when I look at the differences between my parents - mom grew up in a *newer and further out* neighbourhood than me but still legally in the same city I've always lived in, dad grew up in a small town where the "city" to go shopping in was barely even a city)
Maybe I'm just Canadian though. Outside of Toronto and Vancouver we have a lot less true legally-separate suburbia (and when I look at the construction of my own city, I would distinguish the "true postwar" 1945-early 1960s period from "boomer adulthood construction" of the 70s onwards)
I've never been able to convince my mom that I did not grow up in a walkable neighborhood. She'll say things like "sure walkability sounds nice in theory but in practice everyone drives," citing the stripmall that was just over a mile from my childhood home. Even though she has visited me many times in various urban neighborhoods, I can't seem to convey the difference.
On the other end of the spectrum the definitional ambiguity of "suburb" caused me quite a bit of angst. I lived in urban neighborhoods in Arlington and Alexandria, VA for years. Occasionally you encounter people who live in DC and just won't believe you when you say that while Pentagon City or Old Town Alexandria are, yes, technically suburbs of DC they are not actually suburban in nature.
That’s a great point. There are many small cities, including ones that are “suburban” in relationship to a nearby larger city. But we don’t have vocabulary to distinguish between that spatial/population relationship and the pattern of the built environment.
Clarendon, Rosslyn, Pentagon/Crystal City, and Old Town are very literally denser and more urban than most (landwise) of DC!
This is a great assessment and something I’ve experienced but never considered why the interactions are like this. I too use the word “walkable” because I don’t know how else to describe it. Thank you for putting this into words for me.
Whenever I say I live in Chicago while traveling, people often comment on the 'traffic.' For a long time, I would respond 'oh yeah it can be bad but I rely mostly on the L.' At some point, I realized they were almost universally referring to the act of living in the suburbs and getting into the city (aka the traffic) when visiting family or colleagues etc in "Chicago" aka the suburbs spanning from Indiana to Wisconsin.
I have never lived in the Chicago suburbs so have not actually experienced the 'traffic' as they are describing it on any kind of regular basis. It was a funny talking past each other moment and it also highlights that my home is viewed as 7 million other people's 'entertainment district' that they visit when they have relatives in town.
Huh. You kind of brush up against the idea of suburban walkability but then immediately abandon it as a weak facsimile. I guess I’m a city person in the suburbs. I lived in Wedgwood (Seattle) Brighton (Boston) and know all about neighborhoods. But I’ve been living for 8 years in a suburb of Boston.
My life is WAY more walkable now than it ever was within city limits. And it’s definitely more than a single open air shopping center. But you add together some corner stores, schools, playgrounds and a library you can walk to, and it pulls together. Commuting by bus or train is still commuting.
Thanks for sharing! I’m not familiar with Wedgwood, but I would not consider Brighton suburban. Brighton definitely has city life, especially in and around the historic center.
Looking at a map, Wedgwood is on a grid and has buildings lining the street, so it’s easy for me to believe you that you had city life there too.
We don’t have a good vocabulary for this kind of stuff, unfortunately. I wrote about this last year with some pictures, which might help:
https://www.freerange.city/p/when-urbanists-say-urban
I used to live in Brighton (my city person cred). Now I live in Woburn. It’s definitely suburban. But my kids elementary school is a quarter mile away, the boys and girls club is a third of a mile, our favorite ice cream shop is half a mile and the library is .75 miles. My community pottery studio is just under a mile and so are a slew of great restaurants, churches, etc. Sidewalks everywhere. Not much nightlife, but I don’t need that. It isn’t just “walkable”, it’s actually walkable in that every day kind of a way.
I do drive my kids around 2 miles each way for dance and theater classes once a week, but if we were in Brighton, we’d be taking the train for things like that. I do drive to the grocery store, but I hated schlepping groceries home in Brighton so I almost always drove and double parked outside to unload anyway.
Walkability builds. I imagine that most people in Woburn drive almost everywhere. But each drive or commute you can eliminate, each community space or friend you can frequent within 10 minutes of your front door builds the kind of local feel you’re talking about.
Boston and its suburbs are less sprawl-y than most US cities, so maybe our suburban experience is unique. But people in any size community can (and should!) build a rich center that they can easily access.
As someone who has never lived in the city, but visited her cousins who lived in a large apartment of a downtown metropolitan area, I can safely say that my personality is incompatible with city life. That is not to say that one lifestyle is better than others, we need both. Not everyone is suited to living on 34 shrinking acres… I say shrinking because my very rural area is becoming dotted with new constructions and even a projected data center (which we are fighting tooth and nail).
I think that the cultural divide that you speak of is also the political divide that sometimes seems insurmountable. People who are used to condo restrictions, noise ordinances, public transportation, etc. cannot fathom how people who live in the middle of nowhere and are used to a certain independence and freedom do not resonate with any kind of coerced collectivism. By the same token, people who have to share resources and habitats in close quarters cannot understand the “selfishness” of those who,live in rural areas. One of the problems that we will have to contend with is that we cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to governing, and city dwellers should refrain from telling rural folks how to live, and like wise, farm folks should be more understanding of the constraints of those who live in the city.
Thanks for sharing, Fran.
I certainly agree with your conclusion, that the best outcome would be “live and let live,” with our governance respecting different communities and letting them be different. And also that there isn’t a single lifestyle (or subculture) that is better or worse, or that should be favored over another.
I want to gently push back on some of what you said though, because the way you said it makes me strongly suspect you haven’t experienced what I’m calling “city life.”
The reason I say that, is that, if I had to pick just a few words to describe it, I would say things like *freedom,* *community,* and *opportunity.*
These aren’t things you can truly experience by visiting, in the same way you don’t really know what it is to be French even if you’ve visited Paris several times.
What you described, particularly “coerced collectivism,” does not resonate at all with the communities I’ve lived in. I think that might be like me saying rural living seems “boring and inconvenient” … except, it must not be, or else why would you love it? I’ve never lived on 34 acres so I’m exercising my imagination here, forgive me if I get it wrong, but I would expect that the city person who imagines rural life as boring and inconvenient is simply failing to understand what you actually do with your time and why that’s enjoyable, perhaps because you’re *able* to do all kinds of interesting things on 34 acres that someone happily living in a city simply couldn’t, and therefore can’t really appreciate.
Two last thoughts:
I think it’s possible that the cousins apartments you visited are not actually in “a city” in the sense that I mean. I say that because one of the hard things about our culture and language is we don’t have words to disambiguate “city life” from “urban density” even though they’re not the same at all. Many small towns have great city life, and there are many densely populated apartment districts in places like Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles that don’t have city life at all.
And finally: I actually thing the rural Americans and “City Life” or “Urbanist” Americans should be allies, because we’re both having America’s dominant suburban culture and preferences forced on us, and in many cases that’s what messes things up and takes away the freedom of both rural and urban communities.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and apologies for such a long reply :)
I love long replies…
I think that you would find rural life boring and inconvenient, not because there is something wrong with you, but because we are wired differently. For context, I lived in an apartment outside of DC during my college years, and my cousins lived in a high rise in Paris. I also lived the suburban life in community 1 hour outside of DC for a few years. I felt like a caged bird. There is nothing wrong with those communities, but I hated that life. I never identified myself as a city dweller, even if I did live in one for a time. Collectivism would always feel coercive to me, but would be considered being a good neighbor when living in more densely populated areas.
I have no issues with people who live in cities, suburbs, etc… but I do have a problem with people who move into my area and then try to import with them their urban and suburban culture where I live.
Great article. city life, to me, is fundamentally a small town life. We walk to the dentist and the supermarket. Our kids walk to school. We know all our neighbors. (Like em or not, we know them!)
I think that's right, in two senses: (1) there are many small towns that have good "city life," especially college towns, and (2) the best big city neighborhoods often function and feel like small towns within the larger metro surrounding them.
Agreed! I’d say our neighborhood in Philly feels very much like a small town to me. I see the same 15 or so families on a daily basis at the playground or the coffee shop or daycare pickup. My husband and I work remotely and almost everywhere we need to go is within a half mile radius. Even going to “Center City” 1.5 miles away feels like going to the city despite us very much already being in the city.
This is the avenue I've used to write about urbanism in America: small towns are essentially urban in nature, but we don't think of them as such. IOW there are people who *have* experienced city life but don't think of it as such.
I just experienced City Life on a two-week vacation in Spain. Really just a tourist version of City Life but still it was revelatory. I realized that I've never really experienced City Life before, despite living "in cities" for most of my life. I'm having a hard time expressing to others (and to myself) what it is that I experienced and why I think it might really matter. Thanks for writing this!
I hadn’t considered the distinctions that you describe but they ring true for me. I fully immersed myself in city life during my twenties while living in Boston (Beacon Hill, the North End and Charlestown) and NYC (Upper West Side of Manhattan). Then I moved to LA for a job and commuted from Santa Monica to Burbank for work. I still recall the shock to my psyche after attempting to walk to lunch one day to a place that was less than a mile from my office. The lack of connecting sidewalks and the dominance of the cars confounded me. I look forward to reading your article on city life. I am happy living in a small town in Oregon now, but I still miss that city lifestyle!
Thanks for putting into words just how I feel like some people don't "get it". I've had so many family members just ask different variations of "how do you do X without owning a car?", and it feels like they never understand my answer haha.
I also think that among a certain track of middle class --> professional career track peers, the divide can start just with the college they attend---the ones who go to colleges with great walkability and integration into the urban fabric can see the appeal of city living (even if it's not for them!), while the others just can't.
There are definitely advantages to living in the suburbs. But the amount of dispersion and the fact that you can't walk (safely) to any business, even for a candy bar, makes for an isolating and boring experience.
Well written and a great topic.
This is a great article. Reminds me once of walking in downtown Chicago (my hometown) with some folks in from Florida. They saw an apartment building with a Walgreens on the ground floor and I am not exaggerating when I say they reacted like a UFO had landed. Just absolutely goggling over the idea of "going downstairs to get some milk."
So true, and it makes it difficult to talk up TOD and walkability in the suburbs when people have no reference point for what you are talking about and have been car-dependent for generations.
My favorite way of describing what I love about city life is that I can set out from my apartment in the morning with just my two feet and backpack, like Dora the Explorer. That’s all I need for my day to unfold before me, both the planned necessary parts and the inevitable surprises and opportunities.
I recently moved to a new city where I have to drive fairly frequently, because though I live in a neighborhood where I can enjoy city life locally, it is not the norm for the majority of neighborhoods around me. Every time I have to think about parking I get sad and miss the subway desperately.
Really enjoyed reading this and was even more excited at the end. Gig’em from a fellow Aggie!
Gig’em!
Suburban/rural types absolutely consider my postwar low density city neighbourhood to be "too city", so I would expand the group of "people who have experienced city life" a bit (especially when I look at the differences between my parents - mom grew up in a *newer and further out* neighbourhood than me but still legally in the same city I've always lived in, dad grew up in a small town where the "city" to go shopping in was barely even a city)
Maybe I'm just Canadian though. Outside of Toronto and Vancouver we have a lot less true legally-separate suburbia (and when I look at the construction of my own city, I would distinguish the "true postwar" 1945-early 1960s period from "boomer adulthood construction" of the 70s onwards)