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Sometimes I think about the meta-level of what I’m actually doing, running this little magazine-of-one, or however you or I think about it. And one thing I see myself doing is providing arguments, or telling stories, about what urbanism/cities/walkability/density are about, in a way many of its advocates do not, to an audience that is largely skeptical or simply indifferent.

It’s almost like the work of a negotiator, a diplomat, or an ecumenist. It requires you, firstly, to separate an issue or a policy from your mental conception or framing of it—to separate outward form from inward substance. It requires you to ask things like, “Where can I find a point of agreement with this person?” and not “Why is this person so wrong?”

I’m not an advocate in the sense of an activist, but I guess I am in the sense of being a representative for ideas that I’d like to actually see implemented in the real world. And when you’re doing more than just blathering, you need to think about how people are hearing you and what real-world effect, however small, your words might have.

Now, there’s bad, confusing diplomacy, or at least what looks that way to the ordinary person—the kind where two sides agree on a statement, but the statement actually means opposite things to them. Infamously, for example, the “one-China policy”—with the disagreement being over which of the political entities in question “China” was!

But then, for example, there’s the dialogue between the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox churches, which split in the first centuries of Christianity over their differing doctrines on the nature of Christ. For centuries, this division over a core doctrine continued. About 30 years ago, however, the two bodies had a series of ecumenical dialogues, and many members of both churches now understand their doctrine to be and to have been in agreement, and that differences in language obscured the underlying compatibility. This isn’t universally accepted, and the schism has not formally been healed. But isn’t that interesting? Isn’t it hopeful?

Language can be so powerful, and words and ideas can be so tightly tied together, that sometimes—sometimes—we truly only think we’re disagreeing.

At the very least, some of the discussions I’ve had about housing/urbanism/development/cities have made me realize that 1) many people who seem “against” urbanism want a lot of the same things, but have a different idea of what those things do or should look like or 2) they really don’t know what urbanists want, or 3) they take the language some of us use to mean something most of us don’t mean by it.

For one example, take big cars. Urbanists don’t like big cars. But many people say they want big cars, and they’re buying them. But what do they mean by that? What’s the point of a big car? What does it represent? What people often mean is that they want space. Why? For large grocery runs. Ikea trips. Kids and their friends. Packing for vacations. How often is that full capacity used? Maybe every day. Maybe a few times a year.

So what if the land use pattern and the proximity of businesses made it easy to make smaller, more frequent shopping runs? In many respects the big car is an answer to navigating a pattern oriented around the car. When people bristle at the idea of walkable cities or reducing reliance on the automobile, they’re often just indicating that they don’t have a mental image of what life in that pattern actually looks and feels like. Maybe they still wouldn’t like it. Fine. But we have to explain it.

For some people, “full urbanism” and “full suburbanism” are the same thing: both want the same basic set of conveniences, and have very strongly pre-conceived ideas of the form those conveniences take. This is why you don’t make fun of big cars. The average person rightly thinks you’re making fun of the reasons they want the big car.

In this vein, I’ve noticed how my writing has become precise. I find myself crafting analogies and metaphors that are sensitive to the partisan leanings of the audience I’m addressing. Sometimes I feel like a politician workshopping a press release. I try to make my arguments as objection-proof on technical or spurious grounds as I can. I also try to think of ways to break through the preconceived ideas many people have about this set of issues.

For example, in a tweet comparing urban renewal to a revolution, I originally wrote “the suburban/automobile revolution is at its core…” But I thought that was a tad too strong, so I changed it to “has at its core.” And that idea of comparing it to a revolution—that’s a way of seeing it that most people have never thought about. The idea that urban renewal was closer in kind to the French Revolution’s reign of terror than it was to the triumph of free enterprise? That urbanism isn’t about engineering society to be more equitable or climate-friendly, but about restoring a break in continuity with our properly urban and rural American heritage?

In a piece where I analogized urbanization to the Eucharist, I described the Eucharist as the idea that a piece of bread could “convey, contain, or become” the body of Christ—covering, as far as I understand them, the Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic theologies of the sacrament.

And in both of these, you can see how these analogies sidestep all of the partisan ideas that urbanism has picked up. Here’s another one: when I talk about traffic safety and motorist misbehavior, I say things like, the car is a tool, not a toy. Operating a vehicle is a grave responsibility—like handling a firearm. Always treat a gun like it’s loaded, and always keep your eyes on the road. I’d like to think this doesn’t set off the same “this guy hates cars” radar with conservatives as, well, “ban cars.”

I use a lot of “effectively” and “close to” and “in essence.” I did that when the internet was ragging on a young woman upset at her long commute. You know the arguments—work hard, save money, buy a better place down the road, be happy you have a job, quit whining, etc. That’s the cultural narrative we have for characterizing young people’s relatively minor complaints about adult life.

But I looked at it differently: “The notion that asking for a job within reasonable distance of a decent place you can afford to live really is ‘whining’ isn’t saying that people have to put in the work. It’s very, very close to saying that they don’t even have a right to work.”

I wonder if some people don’t see the argument I’m making. I’m suggesting that our whole frame for understanding things like “nice place to live” is wrong. Economic opportunity is not an amenity—it’s a necessity. Places with economic vitality also tend to be “nice places.” So when we tell people that they’re “entitled” for wanting to move to high opportunity (and therefore high amenity) places, we’re effectively saying that people don’t have a right to access jobs and opportunity. “Effectively” isn’t a hedge, exactly—I’m really not arguing that people mean this. I think our narratives are so off-base that it never occurs to them that they’re in effect saying this.

As a writer addressing a politically mixed audience, I have to think about what the same words and analogies mean to different people, and the connotations of certain words or phrases. At worst, this can make you paranoid—you can begin to think that everybody is speaking with concealment, that there’s no plain meaning to words. I find myself speaking very carefully even to people I know in real life, because it’s second nature from being online and on social media for so many years to always think, “What’s the worst way someone could spin what I’m about to say and potentially get me in trouble?”

So I do the sort-of-agree: when a conservative urbanist said to me, for example, that we should arrest the fare evaders instead of spending money on “diversity,” I said something like, “Well, you know, you can do more than one thing.” Which thing? “Can,” not “should.” I’m Twitter-proofing my small talk. Help!

But on writing for different audiences, for example, if I compare speeding to fare evasion to a conservative audience, what I mean is, “speeding is actually a serious matter that should be punished.” But lefty urbanists might read that as downplaying speeding! I wrote once, we ban pedestrians on interstates and nobody thinks it’s a war on walkers, so why is banning cards in the hearts of cities seen as a war on cars? In came someone to say that highways do constitute a war on walkers! (I don’t think they said “constitute,” which is the way I would have put it to leave a tiny bit of room for ambiguity, like the Vatican II line about the Church of Christ subsisting in the Roman Catholic Church but possibly not being it…)

It’s also intellectually challenging to talk with people who think very differently. To be respectful to them when you think they’re reasonable but they say something that feels unreasonable. And to talk frankly with them without worrying that simply conversing with someone who someone else might find crazy is somehow a mark against you.

I’ve run into people who agree with a lot of the particulars of what I write about, but who also believe “15-minute cities” are a nefarious plot, or something like that. I don’t think they’re crazy. I think they’re interesting. I think they’re promising. I think it’s interesting that even people who are primed to dismiss all of urbanism as a commie plot actually like a lot of the specific, localized, on-the-ground aspects of what actual urbanists want.

I assume that most of the people who subscribe to this skepticism have never actually had a conversation with a self-identified urbanist, and that to them all of this is abstract, far away, and politically tinged. I’m sympathetic to these folks because, while I never thought cities were prisons, I very easily could have grown up being a typical suburban NIMBY simply by osmosis. If the only urbanists I ever ran into were smug and condescending, I probably would be today.

It’s challenging and fun to be in the middle of this, to be carrying on semi-public conversations and dialogues, to try to convey the underlying arguments and ultimately the things we urbanists want to people who have little experience or context for any of these discussions about housing/zoning/land use/transportation.

We urbanists can be fooled by talking to each other a lot, and seeing our issues popping up and often winning in local and state politics. It can feel like the people who disagree with us have studied the issues closely and chosen their views. But urbanists have to remember that most people have never heard most of what we talk about before.

They’ve never heard terms like “car storage” or “traffic violence.” They have no idea that zoning has a racially problematic and paternalistic history. They’ve never considered how much of the noise in cities is caused by cars. They assume that of course bicyclists are a nuisance or the bus is for poor people or new construction is bad. But they may not really believe that, because they aren’t even aware there’s any other viewpoint to have.

In many respects urbanists hold abnormal views compared to the average American. It’s incumbent on us to give people the best first impression of our ideas.

Hope I do so here!

Related Reading:

Have You Ever Seen A City?

A Brush With Death

Beethoven Hammer

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