"Cities can't win," declares Adam Gopnik to commence a New Yorker piece on the oscillating poles of the urban crisis in the United States. "When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness." (via Planetizen)

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The reason that perceptions of cities switch so radically is twofold. Cities are the contradictions of capitalism, spelled out in crowds. They are engines of prosperity and inequality in equal measure, and when the inequality tips poor they look unsavable; when it tips rich, they look unjust. And then cities enfold a subtler contradiction—they shine by bringing like-minded people in from the hinterland (gays, geeks, Jews, artists, bohemians), but they thrive by asking unlike-minded people to live together in the enveloping metropolis. While the clumping is fun, the coexistence is the greater social miracle, though not one that lends itself to stories. Greenwich Village and Park Slope and Southie count as homes and get reverent treatment; a musical might be made of hipsters and Hasidim learning to live together in Williamsburg. But a movie about the lives of the people in a single car on the 6 train would trail off into inconsequence, since the point is that city kinds and lives are so different that contiguity is their only coinciding point. (The one proviso of the local story is that the neighborhood must be under assault and the narrator must side with the old ways, even if he or she is representative of new ones. And so Ray, in Lena Dunham’s beautifully observed, Brooklyn-based “Girls,” runs for the local community board as a champion of preservation, not transformation, though he is utterly typical of the transformative kind.)

The things that give cities a bad conscience are self-evident: seeing the rise of 432 Park Avenue, the tallest, ugliest, and among the most expensive private residences in the city’s history—the Oligarch’s Erection, as it should be known—as a catchment for the rich from which to look down on everyone else, it is hard not to feel that the civic virtues of commonality have been betrayed. Every day brings news of old favorites closed, familiar neighborhoods homogenized, ethnic enclaves turned over to the legions of Capital, not to mention Oberlin and Bard.

Yet the social crises that cities face are remarkably consistent, country to country and town to town. Very little that is going on in New York, from plutocratic excess to outlying gentrification, is not also going on, with different emphases and origins, in London: the same tales of people who drink wine and lattes buying the property of those who drink whiskey and beer. At the same time, cities are local. Saying that Manhattan and central London share the same problems is like saying that a man dying of drink in London is like one doing the same in Manhattan. It’s true, but all the local conditions—what he’s drinking, where he drinks it, who takes him home, and what kind of home he goes to—are so different that a story about the drunk in either place becomes a story about the place. Cities are at once the most cosmopolitan and the most particular of subjects; they require, and rarely receive, a view sufficiently wide-eyed as to become effectively double.1

• 1. http://www.planetizen.com/node/81484/perpetual-crisis-american-cities