I realize that a lot of the pieces I publish here are fairly long, and I like to mix in shorter pieces with more singular points in between the essay/magazine-style pieces. I like these “analogy” pieces where I try to look at familiar issues differently, and hope other people do to.

One such analogy, for example is bookcases with density. As I put it on social media:

A bookcase is density. More books in a fixed room means more, and taller, bookcases.

At its most basic, that is precisely what a city is.

Obviously this is very simplified, but the point is that urban density is a specific instance of a general thing, which in other instances can be observed, and unfolds, with absolutely no political valence at all. Obviously how you organize your house is different from how we organize our communities (I said it’s simplified, after all). But I think, for me anyway, this analogy kind of demystifies the idea of cities/crowding/etc.

But today’s piece is a different analogy, what I call the moldy bread analogy.

Let’s say you grew up in a home where the bread was always stale or moldy. For whatever reason your family bought a lot of it, maybe always from the discount rack, maybe bought more than you were likely to eat, whatever. When you went to eat bread in your home, it was never good. This is also obviously simplified, but imagine that was your total experience of bread. You would—logically—conclude that that’s what bread is. When you grew up and heard people talk about how delicious a nice fresh loaf of bread is, you would think—again, reasonably—why do they love this stale moldy garbage? What’s wrong with them?

I’m curious whether you get what analogy I’m making, but it’s that this is how a great deal of American suburbanites grow up viewing, and learn to view, cities. They learn to see the problems with American cities—sometimes exaggerated, but definitely real—not as problems which afflict American cities but as inherent attributes of cities in general. They’re the poor moldy bread kid having no conception that there is such a thing as bread, apart from the substandard bread they grew up eating (or not eating).

I want to stress that this is not claiming people who disagree with me on liking cities and urbanism are in thrall to “false consciousness.” Nor do I mean it to imply that everyone who really understands cities will necessarily like them. (Not everyone likes good bread, after all!)

My point is about recognizing and avoiding the fallacy of mistaking an attribute of a specific instance of a thing for an attribute inherent to the thing itself.

Related Reading:

No Pain, No Game

The Men’s Room Analogy

Planet Fitness Is Entry-Level Housing

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