Cities

I’ve got a love hate relationship with cities.

Since I was a kid I’ve lived with one foot in the city and one outside. Used to be my parents would send me off to summer camp in Quebec every year. I’d spend all of July living in a canvas tent, canoe tripping, chopping wood, and learning to tie knots. I loved it. Every August my parents would pack my brother and I into the minivan and we’d drag out the end of summer on the lake at my grandparent’s cottage.

A few years ago my grandparents passed away. The cottage went with them. And after a certain age they don’t let you go to summer camp anymore. I needed a new way to escape the city and eventually stumbled across tree planting. The job brought me to the swamps of Ontario and the spruce bogs of northern Alberta. The last year I spent in Canada I lived in a van on an organic farm, picked pinecones in northern Alberta, and planted trees in the coastal mountains and old growth forests of Vancouver Island.

I’ve gotten pretty used to living outside of the city. Now, after four months on the city free Pacific ocean, I’ve found myself in one of the biggest cities in the world. Home to over 25.6 million people, Seoul is the equivalent of ten Torontos squeezed into the space of one (four if you count the GTA). The shock of it has got me thinking about cities.

Shaunn’s my couchsurfing host here. I got lucky and his roomate happened to move out the day I showed up, so he’s invited me to stay at his home until he can find a new roomate. He’s a great guy and we get along well. The best part is his cooking, we’ve been sharing a mix of our Korean and Canadian cuisine and it’s the unspoken rule that our meals should have at least three courses.

Beyond our love of food, we share a troubled relationships with the City. We’re both from ’em and we don’t like ’em. You’ve probably seen photos of some impossibly crowded Asian subway station or city street. It really does get like that. Shaunn calls it the swarm. He complains about it so much that pretty soon I asked him, “If you hate living in the city so much, why do you live here?” He looked at me kind of funny and said that he doesn’t have much choice. It isn’t like Canada where you can buy a van for a thousand dollars and live wherever you want. There aren’t things like grandparents with cottages, summer camps, and free parking. To prove his point he opened up his laptop and together we scrolled through Google’s satellite view of South Korea. The yellow lines of the country’s road system look like the bulging varicose veins of an old man’s hand. Virtually every strip of land is under cultivation or has been paved over. The only “wild” land that still exists is the steep slopes of the mountains. It’s really overwhelming. A few days ago I took a commuter train to Icheon, the next city over, to buy a ferry ticket to Qingdao. For an hour and a half all I could see from the train window was a blur of high rises and dreary concrete apartments. You can’t escape the city. It’s everywhere.

On the train ride to Icheon, this TED talk by Stewart Brand I watched a long time ago popped into my head. Brand’s a pretty influential environmental thinker – a Stanford graduate, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, he was an advisor to Jerry Brown back in the 70’s, his articles get published by the likes of MIT and Yale, and his TED talk has nearly a million views. The talk he gives is an ode to the city and urbanization. It’s only three minutes long, give it a whirl.

The talk is from 2006 and way past being topical, I know. Could be I’m putting Stewart Brand’s face on a punching bag. Gotta work off that city stress. But he’s no straw man, he’s one of the world’s most influential environmentalists.

And he actually does alright for nearly a minute until, at 0:56, he flashes a slide that tells us life in the country is:

– Dull
– Backbreaking
– Impoverished
– Restricted
– Exposed
– Dangerous
– Static

Wait, what? Life in the country is dull? And what does he mean that it’s exposed? Is he saying that you’re exposed to the elements? Or that there’s tigers and bears?

I guess the country sucks so hard that he doesn’t even need to explain why. And clearly the city speaks equally loud for itself – it’s:

– Exciting
– Less grueling
– Better paid
– Free
– Private
– Safe
– Upwardly mobile

Oh man oh man. I don’t even know where to start with this. It’s like his sixth grade grandson wrote it for him backstage a few minutes before the presentation.

Life in the city is exciting, that’s why urbanization is good? The guy next to me at the internet cafe has been playing some sort of starcraft game for three hours straight. People die here from that sort of thing. Is that exciting? And the city is free? What’s he trying to say, that you don’t need money in the city? Oh man. It’s so bad that I’m not even going to get into it. The ridiculousness speak for itself.

In a longer version of the talk, 4 Environmental Heresies, he says to much laughter that “[he] used to have a very romantic idea about villages, and it’s because [he] never lived in one.” All that proves is that Brand and his audience who’s paid $6000 to hear him speak are pampered asses. He probably spent a weekend on a farm once and quit after he had to spread manure. So he distanced himself from the sentimental hippies. He started calling himself an ecopragmatist. Why get all sentimental and cry over the death of rural villages and traditional lifestyles? It’s a good thing, their rural lives are boring! Think of how exciting their new lives in the city will be. They might look like impoverished slum dwellers, but that’s a line from the bleeding hearts. They’re creative and aesthetically vibrant! They’re safe now! They have privacy! They’re “upwardly mobile”!  

It’s ludicrous to suggest that the mass exodus of people from the countryside to slums is voluntary. That it’s driven by some sort of adorable, small scale capitalist opportunism. As if nothing but boredom and a lack of privacy has driven millions of people from their homes.

Remember The Grapes of Wrath? Have things really changed since Steinbeck wrote it in the 30’s?

Representatives of the company come to tell the tenants that they must get off the land. Sharecropping is no longer profitable, so the bank has bought the land to farm. The men representing the company are mean or nice or cold because they are ashamed of what they are doing, yet none take responsibility for their actions. It is not their fault, but the fault of the Bank, and the Bank is not a person. The squatters try to bargain, offering to rotate crops or to take a smaller share, but the bank men are not interested. The tenants argue that the land belongs to them because their families have lived and died on it, but the bank men only reply, “I’m sorry.”

The next day, a tractor arrives, bulldozing whatever is in its path. Disconnected from the land on which he works, the driver is not a living man, but an extension of the tractor. The tenants recognize him as the son of a neighbor and question why he would help to put his neighbors out of their homes. He replies that he has his own family to take care of, and the bank will pay him three dollars a day, every day. The tenant wants to know whom he should kill to get his land back, but there is no person he can fight. While the tenant tries to figure out what to do, the tractor bites into the corner of his house.

– John Stienbeck “The Grapes of Wrath”