On space and spaciousness.

I grew up in Brooklyn and have mostly lived in urban areas, and when I am away I notice how my sense of space has been formed by that experience. In Chicago and Toronto the streets seem impossibly broad, there are no tall buildings in Paris, any place not on the water feels lonely and stranded. I don't know how to look at a field; they all look the same to me, though trees and flowers don't. I hate the way farm animals smell and the centralized planning (via zoning laws, community boards, and community pressures) of practically every American suburb.

I have lived in smallish towns of ~20,000-30,000 and found them more congenial: a small walkable area, streets and structures grown up haphazardly, reflecting their centuries; quiet spaces discovered only by the diligent; people of different ages passing and mingling on the streets; real neighborhoods, different in feel from block to block; and much else that is inaccessible but impressive. Distinctly, an overall devotion to pleasant liveability -- by my parochial urbanite's standards, anyway.

These towns (college towns, I should note) have accepted the principle of organized space and spontaneous growth. That is the city principle -- the suburbs are arranged so as to ignore unintended consequences, but cities live and die on the unintended, the planners outwitted by time. When I say that cities grow spontaneously I of course do not mean that they have wills of their own, but that order simply can't be imposed thoroughly for long on such a large number of people and such a large number of groups of people. You can't control all of the changes all of the time.

So the spontaneity of urban growth after all has something of freedom in it. Like weeds bursting through the cracks in a sidewalk the citizens reshape what was given to them.