Location: Salt Lake City, UT

Over the past 6 weeks, I’ve been traveling the nation, exploring our cities, getting a sense of their people and character. What has struck me most is that the American city is alive.

Having grown up a suburban kid in Minnesota and spent the past 10 years in rural towns, wilderness settlements, and mountains hideouts, both here and abroad, my impression was that cities were dark and vacant, lacking vitality. I imagined them as unclean, chaotic, and crime-ridden.

While driving home from Colorado through Wyoming last week, I was listening to a BBC News interview with Davi Kopenawa, a shaman of the Yanomami indigenous people of the Amazon. He was visiting London to compel international leaders to take action to mitigate global climate change and prevent further deforestation of the rainforest his people call home. “How do you find it here, in the city,” the reporter asked. He replied that he couldn’t imagine how anyone could live amidst such overcrowding, mired in chaos and fear, far removed from vegetation, where darkness never truly falls and the stars do not shine bright.

I was once of this mindset, too, and I can still relate to it. I was accustomed to the tranquility provided by standing atop a craggy mountain and seeing no sign of civilization whatsoever. Or, cycling down roads with no cars in sight, following ribbons of asphalt towards the horizon, hearing only the whir of my wheels and the rhythm of my crank and gears. I was delighted, too, to recognize friendly faces around town, in the grocery store, at the post office. Altogether, it gave me what I thought was a broad, yet calm perspective of the world. I loved the simple life, with the uncontrollable chaos of nature the only undetermined variable in it. Yet, there was always something missing: the dynamic influence of other people.

As I said, I grew up in the Suburb, which is a habitat of its own, a place all to itself, no matter which city it surrounds like lamprey. One might mistake the suburbs of any city for any other in our nation, and soon, the world. They lack the character and feel of community provided by the drawn out, randomized process of historical expansion so important to the vibrant character of our cities. Instead, the Suburb is the very physical manifestation of capitalism, of pursuing one’s own “individual interest,” of having your own tiny plot of land, an all-exclusive compound, with its manicured lawn, playground, and pool, fortified from robbers, outside interference, and neighbors’ stares by security walls and privacy shrubs.

When I moved to Norway at age 15 to attend a ski gymnasium, it was also partly motivated by escaping the vacant black hole of suburban life. I found a paradise: not only kids my age who loved and lived skiing and biathlon, the homeland of my grandfather, and freedom from parental control, but also a society that valued communal space and a lifestyle connected to the nature around it. Seemingly it took only 4040 miles to get to heaven.

Such places are held as mythical for many who abhor the descent into lazy affluence American and other post-developed nations are experiencing. Escaping to the hinterland, to the forest and the mountains, far removed from the problems of cities and suburbs, to create our own utopias seems like a solution. “People just won’t listen. They don’t GET it, that they live like ants,” we say in haughty dismay, “so let’s venture out and start anew.” So, too, did I resign myself.

Resignation, however, is not the hallmark of social progress. Solving the problems that make us cringe is the only solution (obviously). We can make all the sustainable utopias in the wilderness, but such retreat different from white flight from cities and suburbanization only on the merits of good intentions. It is escaping what you wish not to see instead of working to change it for the better.

So to the cities I’ve ventured. Now I am seeking the city that best suits me, that already shows potential and progress towards the integrated urban-wild utopia of my dreams, where I can get my mountain and backcountry skiing fix without driving too far (or driving at all), but still ride the bus to grad school classes, walk to the grocery store, and find like-minded (at least open-minded) people all in one accessible, sustainable locale. One devoid of lawns.

{  I hate lawns  }

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