Urban Life and Cities

1London does not sleep so much as shift. At three in the morning the bars have closed but the night buses run, carrying their cargo of people who work when others sleep: the cleaners, the nurses, the delivery drivers, the security guards who sit alone in glass-fronted lobbies reading paperbacks. The city reorganises itself in the dark, and by the time the first commuters begin to fill the Tube platforms at half past five, everything is already in place for the day ahead. The machinery runs without stopping.

2Cities are, by any measure, among the greatest human achievements. They concentrate resources, talent and ideas in ways that generate innovation at rates impossible in rural communities. The coffee shop conversation that becomes a business. The chance meeting at an exhibition that produces a collaboration. The lecture attended by someone who had no intention of attending, which changes the direction of their work entirely. Cities do not plan these things. They create the conditions in which they happen.

3They also concentrate poverty, pollution and isolation in ways that their planners consistently fail to anticipate. The tower blocks built in the 1960s across British cities were designed with genuine optimism: light, air, modern kitchens, indoor plumbing. Within a decade many had become symbols of social failure. The gap between the drawing board and the lived experience of urban housing is one of the persistent tragedies of twentieth-century city planning. Good intentions, it turns out, are not a substitute for listening to the people who will actually have to live there.

4The city is also, increasingly, a place of loneliness. This is one of the paradoxes that urban life produces with unfailing consistency: the denser the population, the more invisible the individual. A street in Tokyo or Manchester can hold ten thousand people within walking distance of each other, none of whom knows the names of more than a handful of their neighbours. We have built environments of extraordinary physical proximity and, within them, managed to produce extraordinary social distance.

5And yet cities endure, and people continue to move to them, and the reasons are not difficult to understand. They offer what smaller places, for all their warmth and community, often cannot: anonymity, opportunity, the possibility of reinvention. The ability to be nobody for a while, in a crowd so large that your absence would not be noted, is not nothing. For some people, at particular moments in their lives, it is everything.