Back From the City

But if New York is a city, what is Little Rock? Clearly not the same type of city. In fact, is Little Rock a city at all?

Nope, I'll say for argument. Little Rock is a lovely place, spread along a river and up into the foothills of the Ozarks, but why call it a "city?" Like half the nation, it is a distended realm of housing and businesses, like a paved prairie for living, and with this distinct shift in the urban environment of the country should come a name to acknowledge the modern feat. Little Rock is not some ancient collection of resources gathered within walls or some honeycomb of culture concentrated within easy distance of inhabitants. "City" is just the name of the government. Once you have traveled far enough away from one government to run into another one, voila!, you've switched "cities." Efforts to revitalize downtown centers the country over are a testament to the fact that most cities are no longer "cities" and are trying to reinvent the lost image of self in the shell of a pre-car downtown root. Nothing wrong with that. But there is the danger of costly boondoggles while trying to get people to live in ways that modern society outgrew (trolleys?). Why not just rename our spaces a title more suggestive of what we are and what we have invented? Maybe thinking of where we live as "cities" is what causes some of the hang-ups with planning because the conceptions are all wrong, old old images that don't apply. Maybe we should name the realms something new and get busy landscaping.