"Urban Living As A Noble Sacrifice" Is Not An Urban Idea

Cities can just be nice

I forget what it was, exactly, but there was some passage in the book Two Wheels Good, which I semi-reviewed here, which I took to be nodding to the idea that cities, maybe, are a little bit unpleasant or inconvenient. As if choosing to live in a city is a noble sacrifice or a productive inconvenience or a kind of going to the gym or eating your vegetables.

I asked my wife if this idea existed in China, as far as she knew. Obviously it’s not quite comparable, because most people don’t own a private automobile, and China doesn’t have the affluence or the car culture that America has, and certainly not 20 or 30 years ago or more. That’s to say that urban living and the ways of doing things that go along with it are just much more normal and expected there.

She thinks it’s a strange idea. She described growing up in a city in China as being near lots of things: pretty good transit, lots of places you could walk—a park, restaurants, friends’ and relatives’ homes—and stores and markets, you name it. It wasn’t some kind of deprivation, or seen that way by anybody. It was proximity to lots of stuff. After all, that is really what cities are at the most basic level.

Yet I myself wrote this once:

“Selling” walkability is kind of like