As much as I’d personally love London to be like Vancouver or Chicago — with a dense, vibrant, creative urban core — it isn’t, and we need to get over that fact.
As much as I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of James Shelley’s From My Bottom Step post about car-less living (and I’ve got some very similar thoughts in response I might post soon), I’m also as skeptical as anyone regarding whether that sentiment could be embraced (voluntarily) by more than a minority of Londoners.
Londoners like driving. Londoners like drive-thrus. Londoners like garages and lawns at least big enough to toss a frizbee around on when friends drive over for leisurely barbecues…
The other day in the New York Times David Brooks presented a pretty good contrasting case to the urbanist ideas promoted by Richard Florida (which have played a big role in recent discussions about cities in Ontario). He cites a Pew Research Center study (full pdf) that found the places people actually want to live are different from the places that are usually mentioned in the “creative cities” literature.
This is a US study but I can’t attitudes being vastly different in Canada. I thought this was especialy interesting:
Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area.
City doesn’t beat rural by much — and I wouldn’t have guessed small town and suburb would come out on top… I guess the people who spend the most time thinking, talking, and writing about ideal places to live aren’t exactly average citizens.
And take a look at the ten big cities Americans most want to live in: Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, Tampa, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, and San Antonio.
Apart from the fact that most of those are sunny cities (and they’re obviously larger), I wouldn’t say London’s culture is all that different from what I’d expect to find in most of those cities. Here’s Brooks on their selling points:
These are places (except for Orlando) where spectacular natural scenery is visible from medium-density residential neighborhoods, where the boundary between suburb and city is hard to detect. These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A. These places are car-dependent and spread out, but they also have strong cultural identities and pedestrian meeting places. They offer at least the promise of friendlier neighborhoods, slower lifestyles and service-sector employment. They are neither traditional urban centers nor atomized suburban sprawl. They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red.
As I said a couple of weeks ago, “average is underrated.” (But then again, how do we make sure we’re not like Minneapolis or Cleveland at the bottom of the survey?)
Now the biggest question in my mind is, How does where people want to live relate with where the economy thrives? They aren’t necessarily correlative, and the two studies aren’t necessarily contradictory. Brooks and the Pew study are more concerned with the former, Florida is more concerned with the latter (though in Florida’s work, economic flourishing is a result of satisfying where specific kinds of creative people want to live).
I think we can get along pretty well together. There are certainly a lot of synergies — hinted at in the above paragraph from Brooks — between the happily car-less (among whom I count myself) and the happily auto-reliant within London. Identifying and cultivating those synergies will be challenging, but working on common challenges can be an eminently fruitful way to generate civic cohesion and integrity (not to mention both prosperity and well-being).
And if “being creative” and attracting creative people is something we really want/need to do, then let’s do it in a way that’s distinctly Londonesque. After all, we’ll never be able to compete on the “bohemian index,” and even in technology we’ve fallen behind our neighbour Waterloo far enough it’s wasteful to compete head-on; what we have instead is a pretty outstanding opportunity for nuanced social and civic innovations.
To me this is increasingly London’s true calling: to reconcile the diverging demands of economic development and livability in a singularly pragmatic and grounded manner… by being exceptionally average without shame.
