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Guess What? We Will Always Write About Cities
For many, the pandemic has been a catalyst to compare the urban life that was to what it now seems to be. Yet, that is not an easy task, because in a world of moving targets, balancing priorities, and mixed messages of fact and emotion, each day’s news has a new gloss. For me, during two months of renewed writing, one conclusion has remained constant: when we write about cities, sometimes it is helpful to take the metrics away.
Almost 10 years ago, amid a visit to San Francisco and just back from Africa, I offered some thoughts about cities as the stage-sets of intangible socio-cultural phenomena.
That short piece was one of the first times I expained why we write about and photograph cities worldwide. Then, as now, I concluded that, in combination with numbers, qualitative inputs contribute to an understanding of cities amid an economic boom, or bust, a political revolution, or while facing or remembering the challenge of reconstruction. I now add the repercussions of a pandemic that is evolving at different stages from place to place. Further, as David Brooks recently implied in his summary of America’s current five crises, we are, in effect, trying to understand and…
