I like cities--the density and intensity of life there makes for fun and interesting things.  You never know who you'll run into, and the odds of what we can call a "cosmopolitan" encounter--an encounter with someone who is substantially different from yourself--are much higher.  So community is an interesting thing in cities.  Furthermore, I think there is more opportunity for privacy in cities, if not solitude.  (There's an interesting conversation to be had between someone like Thoreau and someone like Simmel on cities and human subjectivity, but that's for another day.)

I'm not alone in that.  "Modern humans" emerged physiologically a long time before humans gathered in cities, but the first dense concentrations of humans in settled locations are a good moment at which to mark the beginning of "civilization" (a word that is, of course, related to civitas, one of the Latin words for "city" (along esp with urbs)).  When Aristotle called humans zoon politikon he wasn't just saying we are the "political animal;" he was saying we are the animal who lives in poleis, which is not just a political structure but involves some dense urban core.  It's almost as good a translation (at least less of a simple transliteration) to say that Aristotle called us the "citified animals."  And this is not simply a Greco-Roman thing; in the New World, in sub-Saharan Africa, in South and East Asia, humans moving into urban situations is a crucial marker in our history.

Today, humanity is a majority urban population for the first time in our species's history.  This is a big deal, and one we need to dedicate significant time to thinking about.  Lots of people are, of course.  But I wonder whether it's an individual duty of more of us to think about cities and how to make them work.

If we don't want to all live in mega-cities, in some sort of Corbusierian nightmare, the idea of a topography of cities scattered in size and in location is attractive.  That means the "mid-size city" is important.  While the urbanization of the world currently seems to be an urbanization of mega-cities, I suspect the mid-size city has a lot of the advantages of urban life, without the disadvantages of massive scale.  Mid-size cities are, perhaps, more Burkean, and more civic republican, than mega-cities.  They need our help.  The Brookings Institution has a good set of studies on this, and there are others as well.

This report in the NYTimes this AM had me thinking about this. Those of us who live in or just outside mid-size cities--and I imagine Cville only counts for this quite marginally, as a super-small example--should care about their health.  

I'm interested in this issue and will undoubtedly return to it in later posts.  For now just consider this a first deposit.