rebeccmeister | The Ideal City

Yesterday I enjoyed simply sitting on the BART (subway), realizing that my travels from Berkeley to San Francisco were far from unique, having the chance to surreptitiously watch my fellow human beings through their reflections in the windows. Houses in San Francisco proper are sandwiched tightly against each other, stacked several stories high, and I envy in part the potential they create for human interaction. My friend V, ever-lucid, says she loves to people-watch here, finds appealing the tolerance of other perspectives, however radical. She, too, has felt a shift away from anywhere-but-here to a feeling of homecoming, a love of the dark and gentle fog.

The difference in social interactions (and we both recall the rude abruptness of Boston) makes me wonder how the structure of our urban environments affects the quality of our life. Kunstler (The Geography of Nowhere) argues against mass-manufactured, car-built cities (Phoenix and LA, yes) and offers some alternatives (homes above, shops below, human scale), but how many cities actually realize the ideal? My longing for casual human contact isn't well-satisfied by Phoenix--people are too separated in their car-coffins, so contact is too eager and thus strained. The current trend of building block-sized luxury condominiums in urban cores also fails to satisfy--the buildings are too massively imposing, their understories too polished. And most cities seem to undergo a constant shaping and re-shaping. Does any one get it right, I wonder. Does the ideal city exist, or do cities morph too slowly to fully reflect the ideals of the populace?

I should return, briefly, to this reflection on the car-coffins, for a few years ago

annikusrex and I attended an exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery that perhaps accidentally captured the car-coffin too well: the show consisted of three pod-cars sized to contain one human each. Inside, one donned a pair of headphones and was given the option of singing karaoke in this tiny sensory deprivation chamber. The purported objective was to provide the sensation of singing one's own personal soundtrack, but the car-like surroundings--yeesh. They speak to contemporary feelings of isolation as well. We do not realize our dreams solely through ourselves.