Urbanity

Most people that know me know that I’m a devoted Woody Allen fan. I knocked out another one this holiday weekend and watched Anything Else, the film from a few years back where he began to hand over his leading acting roles to others, namely Jason Biggs. The neuroticism and hyperbole is still very much in play, and I’m still very much susceptible to it. No wonder I get in trouble for constantly talking about human relationships with this for my cultural medicine.

Anyway, I’d like to talk about the idea of place. In a follow up some point this summer, I’ll throw up my thoughts on how our place/environment/local geography shapes us (at least from an American perspective with an eye to divisions like the ideas of “East Coast,” “Midwest,” “South,” and “West”). But for now, let’s jump in and take a look at exactly what place is. In examining this question, I want to focus in on the idea of cities, and in my Woody Allen frame of mind, New York City in particular.

The (somewhat obvious) conclusion that I’ve come to is that cities especially are a patchwork of places and experiences. Very little will draw me to New York, but a Woody Allen movie most definitely will. The light in which he shoots the cities and films it’s gritty beauty is enough to captivate many hearts. At the same time, we have the corporate coldness and glitter of Manhattan for the business world, the place where deals are made for the continent and the world. Then we have the glitz and flash, flesh and fashion of the Sex and the City girls, stirring the lust of many a young girl and woman and coloring their perception of what New York is. Then we move further out, to the boroughs or to upper Manhattan. Then we have a New York that is a world of tragedy, poverty, pain, and quiet suffering. So what is New York? New York is all these things and more, just so with most of our cities and communities. One person’s perspective may highlight a negative or positive from their personal vantage point and level of experience, while another person’s view may not even take in to account elements shaping the first persons, and even if there is overlap, things may be valued extremely differently. The only real, fundamental dividing factor in the concept of place is size and scale. New York is big and crowded; Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Amish country) is not. The more crowded a place, the wider the diversity of experiences. But the crowded factor itself will color and shape experience—the most urban cities will drive away those that hold to the “American dream” of owning a bit of property in small town America with a plot of land and a small garden to call ones own, with two cars in the driveway and all that jazz.

I find it ceaselessly interesting how revolted I can be by some of the elements that New York and other places represent, and yet simultaneously so magnetically drawn to other forces clearly at work in shaping a city/places identity. To turn to specifics, I am turned away by the stereotypical mean spirited superficiality in which a city like New York promotes the self above all else, drives with relentless superficiality to always be increasingly one’s personal bottom line and engaging in shallow nightlife and the general use of other people—effectively in large part the stereotypes that elements of New York City’s upper crust inhabit, in the corporate world or in the glamour and "see and be seen" attitude of a Sex and the City type plotline. First off, I recognize that this represents a thin sliver of city life, and that even that sliver is, in large part, exaggerated. But what I’m getting at is that this circle and pattern of city life is merely one of many threads running through the city of several odd million. Alongside it and interwoven with it lies the Central Park, the quaint cafés, galleries, movie houses, and dinner parties of Woody Allen’s neurotic, intellectual world. And of course, arranged alongside this duality of upper class New York lie the struggles of the less wealthy, the world of Amazing Grace and the expose in the NY Times about the class divisions still rampant in the city, coloring even basic things like access to proper healthcare. Many of these different threads never touch—will Manhattan socialites and Wall Street powerbrokers spare an odd thought for the struggles of life in the Bronx? Will they consider an art gallery more than a place to be seen and network? Just so in reverse: will people caught up in the struggle to survive elsewhere in the city see any value in some modern artistic enigma when they cannot even put bread on their table? The answers to these questions are largely no’s, although there will be many many yeses as well. But the prioritizing and values of different circles will exclude themselves many of the domains of other groups within the larger fabric.

So the city is a patchwork, a rich fabric, as are the other great urban places of the world. We each carry with us our own stories I we dance through the networks of asphalt and concrete, steel and glass. Some are pleasant, some are not—but they weave together to form the myth of place.