The past few days I've spent a deal more time than usual in the local metropolis, and the experience has compelled me to reflect upon the benefits and drawbacks of such a way of organizing human habitation. I can tell you from the start that for a number of reasons I am biased against most forms of large cities I've experienced, but have over time come to see their positive side too. It is my hope to use reflection as means of considering those biases in light of experience and what I've actually seen.
To paraphrase a passage from my developmental psychology textbook, societies in general tend to benefit when its people organize themselves into families, but the case for individuals is less certain; a good family can make all the difference for a troubled person, but a bad family can undermine an otherwise promising individual.
A similar idea I think rings true for cities: they benefit society but not necessarily individuals. As a featured story by the World Bank in 2010 describes them, cities have been, and in the developing world are becoming, "...engines of growth, [and] incubators of innovation."
Cities bring together a huge variety of people, sharing spaces, ideas, languages, and cultures in a highly stimulating exchange. As the historian Harold J Cook argues in Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), the "...beginnings of a global science occurred during the period of the rise of a global economy," a point which one reviewer says was "no coincidence." Later the reviewer writes "Matters of exchange demonstrates how the values of commerce—its ways of discovering new things, of determining truth, and of assigning worth—were identical to the precepts of the new philosophy." In other words, the global exchange of matters-of-fact, ideas, and culture--driven and colored by the "values of commerce"--contributed chiefly to the emergence of modern science as we know it today. It therefore comes as no surprise that cities--centers of flux and exchange--are also centers of innovation and growth.
I personally enjoy cities for the variety of experiences they offer, and the concentration of culture which can often be found there. The vast majority of trips I make to the local metropol are for cultural reasons; to visit a museum, meet a friend, run a race, or go to see and hear the local orchestra. Mass transit makes these trips convenient, particularly since I don't like cars. Cities with good mass transit are wonderful in that respect, because it makes a car-free lifestyle viable. Maintaining such a lifestyle in a suburb like mine is not an easy task.
Yet for all its benefits, even a cursory glance about a major metropolis reveals the harm this "engine of growth" can incur on vulnerable individuals. Throughout the center-city train station I found numerous people begging or staring dead-eyed into space while smoking cigarettes and muttering to themselves. Similar instances I found throughout the downtown area, folks who babble nonsense to no one in particular in the park, go to the bathroom in city fountains at night, and sleep in the cracks between buildings because they have no other home.
Sights like these saddened me, despite their familiarity; they've appeared on every trip I've ever made to the city. It makes me wonder that, for all the ways humanity profits by the existence of cities, how many individual human lives are destroyed in the process? How many are left behind by increasing prosperity and learning which cities generally promote? How much promise is lost by crime, pollution, and mental illness left untreated by the vast scope of metropolitan areas? It is a difficult question, and a difficult double-vision to maintain; that cities are generally good for societies, but not necessarily individuals.
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