The Joie de Vivre of City Life
Recently, I was pointed in the direction of Rebecca Solnit’s article in the London Review, entitled “In the Shadow of Silicon Valley.” Her piece paints an impressionistic portrait of living in San Francisco in this age of increasing automation and alienation, drawing on her experience riding a bike alongside self-driving vehicles to illustrate the loneliness of some aspects of living in the shadow of silicon valley:
“Seeing cars with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian, but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand.”
Solnit notes that the autonomous vehicles have serious shortcomings, such as block traffic or getting involved in accidents, because driving and navigating a city is a “co-operative social activity, in which part of the job of whoever’s behind the wheel is to communicate with others on the road.” It is this loss of another avenue of obligatory co-operative social activity within an already eroding cityscape that make this example Solnit uses so powerful.
It is co-operative social activity that makes a city a place. Now there is a distinction for me when one talks about a city and a place. A city is a legal reality imposed on people living within the confines of certain boundaries that implies a set of taxes and associated services to be rendered by the city government or used by its community members. A place is something that is brought to life by the cooperative social activity of people that reside in and around such legal realities. One can have countless different places within a city, which represent the multiple possible dimensions and realities that can coexist within space. For example, when I think of Denver, I think the city only exists to make sure that we are fairly contributing to the operation of basic public resources, like schools, libraries, community centers, and are actively working to address the root cause of the secondary consequences that have arisen to capitalisms impulse to externalize every social problem it creates. However, It is the actual work that we as community members do together in Denver that creates what people think of when they think of Denver.
Solnit explains this sort of co-operative work perfectly when she describes the intrinsic social benefits of the liveliness that accompanied small businesses and cafes in San Francisco:
“The San Francisco of my youth was full of small shops whose friendly eccentricity felt like part of the place. Some of them still exist but they’re rarer now. Many had old photographs of the business or the neighbourhood, some had artefacts of the past or pieces of the owner’s art. The little liquor and grocery store in my old neighbourhood had a wall of pictures of locals attending its annual barbecue and a ledger in which the proprietor recorded transactions with elderly locals who bought their groceries on credit and paid up at the end of the month. The exchanges between people who knew one another were non-commodities these small businesses offered along with whatever was for sale.”
I can feel that sort of placemaking in my neighborhood, where my local deli still has the same sort of feel as when it was first opened by an Italian family back in the 1970s. I feel this in the cafes, tattoo parlors, and bike shops that I have gone to where I have met most of the people that I know in my neighborhood. I even see it in the local community pre-school that we go to and the weekly gymnastics class that Juniper and I go to. I suppose I am lucky that I am able to live so richly within a mile of my home. I became a form of local color in these places by embedding myself into the webs of relationships that knit my community into an inhabited place. Yet, it was a choice to participate in the placemaking rather than to drop out into techno-dystopianism in my basement hermitage.
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