Urban Philosophification
I sometimes find myself engaged in a discussion of “do I miss NYC” which sometimes turns into “why don’t you miss it?” or even “I know you miss it, but you won’t admit it.” I don’t give it a lot of thought, most of the time, really, unless I’m asked, and that does happen even now more than you might think. I suppose I would if we’d ended up in some dismal suburb, but even at that I might not, having spent my early years in the hundred acre wood (without the imperialist subtext of the Milne stories, of course – more like the inanity of Peanuts). I spent time in and around farmland and out in the Midwest, traveled to Europe, met people from all over the world, studied other cultures, etc., and NYC is pretty much an aberration as cities go. NYC extends well beyond Manhattan, of course, but nobody much thinks of it that way. Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx are just dense suburban extensions (as are the near reaches of New Jersey and Connecticut for that matter) of the city proper, which is a macrocosmic city forced into a microcosmic scale by confining it to a (relatively) tiny estuarial island. Paris may have the Île de Cité, but the majority of that is taken up with tourist destinations. NYC’s central island is larger and contains the majority of midsized to large businesses as well as a sometimes overwhelming density of housing. Most cities in my experience are sprawling constructions, especially if they haven’t been culturally or commercially superseded by time or their neighbors (cf. New Orleans), having started from a central point but grown well beyond it, eventually developing ancillary “center” points. This can have a dismal effect on a city’s starting point. Downtown Los Angeles, for example, is very nearly a wasteland outside of business hours, and hubs of activity of one kind or another have taken up position around it, each operating as a distinct urban environment for the area residents. Similarly, however, the original center and its outpost locations can equally thrive. Atlanta is a possible example; Sydney definitely is. Perhaps it’s my understanding of this that’s colored my experience of having relocated across the globe. Parramatta and Chatswood operate as remote branches of Sydney city center, and the suburbs that string themselves along the access routes offer distinct tendrils of enterprise and culture characterized by the populations having driven the overall pattern of growth. You can go as far as you like, or not, in availing yourself of what’s on offer. Sydney, like other cities, presents its idiosyncrasies as well. Over Christmas and New Year’s, Sydney offers a distinct experience from any comparable period in NYC, but what sometimes doesn’t get taken into account is that there is no worthwhile comparison to the northern hemisphere. It’s high summer here, school’s out, the ocean is warm and inviting. Nobody stays home, nobody goes to town. We’re all on holiday, and we like it. Now think about what’s summer in the city up north. Different in kind, if not in detail, isn’t it? Just like the weather. My first year in Sydney presented this as a remarkable experience, but this year it was only lacking in normality because we had our first international visitor in and therefore sought to overcome the entertainment limitations we perceived. It turns out, naturally enough upon reflection, that we overestimated those, as Bondi and similar excursions were more than sufficiently engaging. Well, this is what other Sydneysiders do, as do other visitors to this country at this time of year, so I don’t know why we should have been surprised. The uncertainty principle of quantum physics (whatever; what, I’m a scientist now?) asserts itself philosophically: what is observable in time makes space indeterminate and so forth. Christmas in NYC is not Christmas in Sydney, etc. The Fourth of July is not paralleled by Australia Day. But why should I want it to be in either case? Just so that the experience I have is familiar or that more restaurants are open when I feel like going out for a meal? There is actually very little requirement of me to adjust my expectations. Just like moving here in the first place. Adapting to life in Sydney has required no more than learning to know where what I want is, not in having to learn what what I want is. I say kilometres and think miles, speak of temperature in centigrade rather than Fahrenheit, but that’s not very different from most born Australians my age. I have my cross-cultural temper tantrums, to one extent or another, just like anyone else would (and there’s a television serial out of Britain, called “A New Life Down Under” about just that, with a group of English ex-pats moaning over their problems adapting to their new environments: whingers, all of them), but don’t you just hate those people who come from one place to another and believe their prior experiences are the template for all future experience, who arrive in a place and believe they should be able to behave, to think, as if their presence in a place confers ownership, without taking responsibility? If I’m going to live in Sydney, don’t I have to participate in the city? I did in NYC, and although there were enough people there who didn’t, there were plenty of us who did. Listen, just because you can get a bank to loan you the money for a home or to open a business, that doesn’t privilege you above all others in the neighborhood, just like there is no privilege in having tourist dollars to spend versus spending your daily wage. There are some things I’d like to change. I’d like Sydney to be more pedestrian-friendly, for one. The infrastructure is there, the attitudes are not. I expect that will change, however, over time as the population increases and the sprawl can’t keep up. The inevitability of urban life in this and many other respects is that all these people cannot live together so closely unless civility prevails, although I’ll admit that this is paired with the inevitability of some level of conflict, too. Sydney is just not as accustomed yet to a densely urban life as it is becoming, but it will be: it’s inevitable. One of the factors that have made Australia such a distinct place is that it has always been separate, an isolated continent whose dominant culture existed at such a physical distance from its roots and has been so desirous of retaining a connection that it has foisted off change even while it has been forced to accept it. This is not the same place Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes and their ilk refuse to live in, although you can still find that place here. Australia’s position in the Pacific, in Asia as a cultural region, is much more acknowledged than it has been, and that’s having an inevitable effect, and not just in population density and disparity. In many respects, this is where East meets West, and it may well be the place where that scale of change begins to spread across the rest of the world. I feel like I may be getting in on the ground floor.