The Call of Cities
Andy Crouch
January 1, 2000
I wasn't born to be an urbanite. My childhood was spent in a farmhouse surrounded on all four sides—and for miles in every direction, or so it seemed—by cornfields; my teenage years were spent in a green-lawned suburb (which the rest of my family found oppressively uniform and which I found invigorating) punctuated by happy escapes to the mountains and the woods. College was, by deliberate choice, in a medium-sized town whose location could be charitably described as "centrally isolated." There I first met large numbers of people from New York City, which they of course referred to as "The City," and I remember feeling a vague pity for them as they got on buses or wedged into cars on the way back to their urban home. I stayed on campus one break and reveled in the intense spring silence; it was full of the most extraordinary music. But for the past nine years I've lived amongst the buses, bicyclists, and mad drivers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I love it. I usually write this quarterly column in Carberry's, a bakery-plus-coffeehouse just around the corner from RQ's offices. It is just the sort of place that urbanites like to laud as the quintessence of city life—fresh, tasty food and coffee, with plenty of local color. Ah yes, we think or occasionally say out loud, you can't get this anywhere else. Actually, that is mostly self-congratulatory nonsense, as essential as it may be to justify the nonsensical prices we pay for housing and transportation. The difference between my urban neighborhood and, say, the non-urban town where my parents now live, is mostly a matter of quantity and options, not quality. True, in a five-block radius we have ten coffeehouses where they only have one, but who needs more ...
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