Further Urban Musings

Starting shortly (and probably with Tokyo), I'm going to try and write a bit about each of my top fifteen cities to visit / revisit. In the majority of cases what I write will be heavily based on ignorance, as two-thirds of them are cities I've never been to in my life, but I hope that I can at least justify why these are places I'm keen to visit.

I've never been able to afford a great deal of international travel. Apart from a month of interrailing (as it actually was then) in 1992 -- passing through France, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic and (if we'd only happened to be awake at the time) Germany and Austria too -- I've only managed trips to countries beginning with an "I" and ending with "land". I've never been out of Europe, unless you count the portion of Iceland that's on the North American continental plate. The non-British cities I've visited (as opposed to staring at in bleary confusion through a train window) have been precisely ten in number: Paris, Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Athens, Prague, Dublin, Cork and Reykjavik. Oh, and I think I went to the lavatory in Limerick once.

The point is, I've loved them. (Although I wasn't particularly taken with Limerick.) I find the permutations of behaviour and expression which manifest themselves in human cultures endlessly fascinating, and I'm hungry -- indeed, after not having been out of the country for over five years I'm positively champing at the bit -- for more direct experience of societies and civilisations against which to compare my own. (Other than that of the U.S.A., that is. I've nothing against it, but it does get pumped into my house on an hourly basis, so I'm more or less used to it by now.)

It's one of the things I respond to so strongly in science fiction, I suspect: the exploration of other ways of thinking, of seeing the world, and of responding to it -- whether these are alien in the biological, or merely the parochial, sense.

More specifically, though, I adore cities. Aesthetically, I respond to them with something like the reverent awe which the Romantic poets (who loathed urban spaces to a man) reserved for the countryside. Politically, I warm to their heterogeneity, their cosmopolitanism and their progressiveness. Spiritually, the City of God has always been a far more compelling image to me than that of a dreary horticultural Paradise.

Most of all, I love cities as concrete (or brick or stone or wood or glass or plastic) expressions of their society's characteristic concerns and aspirations -- and all the more so because, simultaneously, they form the environment in which the physical life of that society takes place, resulting in a glorious feedback loop of humanity and its habitat.

It's like art -- no, it's like culture -- that you can walk around in.

That I feel this way may be kind of obvious to those who've read Of the City of the Saved..., but I felt it needed saying anyway.