Why Should We Care About Cities?

Cities are where we want to be. As Aristotle said, “While coming into being for the sake of living, the city exists for the sake of living well.” The promise to raise our lives above mere existence to the plane of “living well” is the siren call of cities through the ages, and explains why cities have attracted an ever larger share of the world’s population over the course of history. If present trends continue, more than two-thirds of us will choose to live in cities by century’s end. Across the globe, we may complain of those cities as difficult, expensive, overcrowded, yet the attraction remains. Despite the hassles and challenges of urban life, all of us who have tasted life in cities know that what John Updike wrote about New Yorkers also applies to those who live in cities anywhere across the globe from São Paulo to Istanbul to Shanghai. “The true New Yorker,” and by extension, the true urbanite, “secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”