City Mouse

The news is comforting. Articles appear, here and there, stating that retailers and developers are rediscovering the city as people give up their tract homes in sprawling nowhere suburbs for close-in, urban neighborhoods. Even Baltimore, still suffering from decades of neglect and abandonment, has found new life as young couples flee the suburbs that were supposed to keep them safe as children. Not enough to stem the tide of suburban sprawl, but a start.

Despite what some conservative critics may say, cities, not small towns, are the true foundation for our civilization. Centers of commerce, art, culture, philosophy, science and technology, they are the incubators of human enterprises, the engines of our economy, the cradles for our greatest artistic achieivements. I don't pretend that cities are perfect. Crime, poverty and corruption are common from New York to Asheville, but are not merely urban phenomena. Crime threatens all communities, large and small, some of the most devastating poverty can be found in mountainside trailer parks, and corruption depends on power and greed, not population density, to thrive.

Each aspect of daily life is cut off in the Sprawl. Nothing can be reached on foot; homes, offices, stores and schools are segregated from each other across miles of freeway. Each person is isolated, divorced of human connection except, sometimes, the family. This isolation destroys community and slowly kills the institutions of democracy that bind us together in common cause. It is no wonder that the progressive values of community, tolerance and cooperation are disappearing while selfish self-interest and intolerance creep into our cultural and political life.

When Americans began to abandon cities in the 60s and 70s, we were abandoning our civilization itself. As we rediscover and rebuild our cities, undoing the mistakes that made us leave in the first place, we will also rediscover and rebuild our civilization.