City

You can't build a city on rock n' roll. It just wouldn't work. I suspect the foundations of any building over three stories tall would give way after a few months of being shaken all night, rattled and rolled 'till the sun comes up, baby yeah. But seriously: there is a very large list of things you simply should not be considering if you are an urban planner. You can't build and manage a city off of the particular mores of teenagers. You'd end up with block after block of houses that are just basements with chillin' rugs, televisions, cables everywhere supplying stacks of amplifiers blaring the latest craze in dissonant three-chorders with ear-piercing overtones, those curtains with beads on them that rattle as they open. You rcity would be filled with hipsters in hand socks carting monstrous bongs on those trays they use to transport overhead projectors. A city like this would have its industrial areas gutted by arson or disassembled and carted abck to the ubiquitous basements to decorate the walls as kitsch. (Who wouldn't want an industrial-strength humidifier/dehumidifier serving as a card table?) The vendors would convert to an ultra-impulse-food-based economy. You couldn't run a city off raucous gatherings and rolling street meat-markets. It's the sad truth.

Cities thrive off of prudent and boring budget allocations, not lavish costume parties where everyone funnels expensive chamapaigne. Cities thrive off of working water mains, not bathrooms with crusted vomit staining the walls and urinals and stalls. Cities thrive when there are transit systems with gleaming new streetcars, not when everyone is always dropping acid and sprawling out on the floors of said streetcars. (Though that in of itself can be interesting to watch.) Cities need planning (well, cities we'd want to live in anyway).

Where was I goinf with all this. Ah, yes. This was all a roundabout way of saying that neoliveral privatization of everything under the sun will result in a vastly changed city. Not at all the city I alluded to above, but more of a clone of Singapore, for example, where gleaming monoliths of modernity hold the fort against endless slums. I have to learn to take it to The Man in a more focused way, but that's what essays nobody ever reads are for.

Consider: "It takes hundreds of reincarnations to bring two persons to ride on the same boat; it takes a thousand eons to bring two persons to share the same pillow"