What Does it Mean to Live in the City

I tried living in the country for a while and I have to admit; I take my hats off to those that can do it year in and year out because it isn't for everyone. I had always been to the country, special trips for school, holidays and vacationing with family, but had never really considered living there.

What is so great about living in the city? People think that city living means that you are all outgoing and stuff, loud, fast and quick on your feet, and just all around slick, but that isn't the case at all. Some are like that, but many are just focused on keeping everything okay and well with their own little corner of the metro and go to work and home, and then back to work, and just like what the city has to offer.

What does it have to offer? Thousands of shops, hundreds of schools, and tens of thousands of traffic signals and intersections. High-rise buildings and small buildings not much bigger than a single family home that serve as "hole in the wall" mom and pop establishments. Mega projects that take up acres and attract thousands, on acres of land and smaller, more intimate settings. A variety and contradictory fusion of conflicting ideas about life, race and culture that it is difficult to find anywhere else.In the city you'll find everything from those whose heart is in the middle of nowhere to those that feel that the city is never big enough, overcrowded enough, or fast enough for them. You'll find God in places with huge billboards for the work of the enemy across the street from each other; churches with strip clubs 100 feet away and hospitals with gun shops and liquor stores within walking distance. You'll find streets that are elevated that overlap other streets that are elevated that overlap a street that actually is "on the ground, on the street" and bridges whose sole purpose isn't to take you across a body of water, but to ease traffic flow and take you across another street.

You'll get lost in the city, physically, yet find yourself mentally, spiritually and psychologically. You'll find plenty of trouble when you're looking to cause it, and none at all if you don't know what to do with it. You'll drive for miles trying to escape the city, yet will almost always find some detour that prevents you from leaving. You'll work and spend the overwhelming majority of your money to stay in a neighborhood that is within walking distance with the rest of the working class folk; thinking you should be in the rich part of town, but no, you really shouldn't.

You'll find ghettos a stone throw away from mansions with circular driveways, schools named after prominent citizens that died over a hundred years ago, streets named after civil rights leaders in the worst parts of town and native Americans in the best part of town. At first, if you have never been in the city before, you'll stop to look and partake of everything, but in a matter of days you're only concerned about whatever affects you directly because to consider everything that goes on in the city is entirely too overwhelming for any one person.

The beauty of the city is that you aren't locked into any one mentality, look or feel or culture; if you do not like what these people over here are doing there's a group over there that you'll feel at home with. It really doesn't matter where the city is at either; our biggest cities have their own unique flavor, but the size of the metro has as much to do with the pace of the city as it does the location of where it is at.

Well designed cities can be driven around and avoided entirely through expressways, leaving you to only deal with the suburban areas that sprout up around the highway so you can get where you're going. Coastal cities and metros around the water may require you to go in a bit further in, and some cities have expressways that cut like a knife through ghettos that are elevated and prevent you from having to deal with the city at all if you do not want to.

People fall asleep while traveling but the presence of a city always wakes you up and forces you to take a look around through the window when passing through. Some areas have you going up hills over bridges and landing you back down to see a confrontational view of downtown, like Cleveland and Detroit, while other cities like Chicago will have you on a crowded interstate that slices through the city that doesn't allow for any look around, going under bridges, and other buildings. The Hampton Roads area takes you through a thick forest through Williamsburg and Newport News then opens up into Hampton with a view of electronic billboards, anywhere from 8 to 14 lanes before you get to the bridge-tunnel, and the choice to branch off towards other highways. If you choose to stay on I-64, you have the luxury of going underwater, then back over a long bridge across water back to Hampton and then into Norfolk; yet even more highways can snake you into Virginia Beach and Suffolk, or you can ride it out and go into Chesapeake.

People say that isn't the most metropolitan of areas, but you are confronted with the reality of the metro all the same; with a sudden shift from 4 lanes to 8, and the evidence of a highly built up area, just without the high-rise buildings, unless you detour onto one of the other roads. There are few greater satisfactions than traveling down a highway into the city; going into DC from either direction, from Southwestern Virginia on what seems like it takes forever until the highway opens up into a very compact and dense series of lanes, interchanges and bridges, and then again from Central Virginia, the only difference being that the road is 6 lanes all the way from Richmond to DC.

It goes on forever until you almost out of Maryland over an hour later, a stunning display of complex road construction that took years to fully implement. My own city is a hidden treasure as well; there are no real indications that you are anywhere close to Akron Ohio until you come up on the expressway and decide to head downtown towards the University of Akron. It opens up from trees and grass into an aged jungle of concrete for as far as eyes can see until you pass through on the other side towards Youngstown.

Regardless of how disciplined planners are at trying to develop the city, it always takes on it's own organic presence and finds it's own way to move people around, through and underneath the metro. Well polished ideas about what the metro should be are usually shattered once economic realities sit in; the city grows around decaying ghettos like a body reconstructs itself when fighting cancer, at times people move in and rectify issues creating new neighborhoods and opportunities, but one can never truly forget what used to be there, and outsiders can always feel the presence lingering long after the empty houses have either been destroyed or rebuilt.

Changes in the environment or topography create different patterns of growth in the metro; height limits and construction requirements change, some areas may be more "spread out" because that it is all that the land can support, from the dense construction of the cities center. New technologies comes along to make duplicating previous efforts a reality, though often at an unrealistic cost. Leadership is elected in to take control of the cities economy, services, and job market, yet often leadership's natural inclination to bring more money into the area has them contemplating controversial projects that displace the poor and working class and favor the rich. Outsiders love it because the city has opened up for them, insiders hate it because their way of life is affected.

You love to hate the city, but you rarely hate the city enough to give up on the life altogether. People from the larger metros gravitate towards smaller, less densely populated areas when they want a change of pace and those from the smaller cities that may not even have a metro area gravitate towards the larger cities when they want a change of pace. One thing is for sure, there is a city for everyone, somewhere, no matter where in the world you are living ...