Not long ago, I was listening to an opening keynote address at a conference about how to make our cities better. I go to a lot of these kinds of things, and you tend to hear the same phrases again and again about how urgent it is that we [slow down car traffic/build more affordable housing/insert much-needed prescription for making our places livable and lovable here.] But this time, for some reason that probably had something to do with jet lag and a catering table that was running low on black tea, one particularly commonly-repeated truism stuck out at me:

“Doing this work isn’t sexy.”



Huh, that was weird, I thought. This particular keynote was about reducing traffic fatalities on our streets. Why was anyone talking about sex?



The next panel I went to was about making transit accessible in underserved neighborhoods. I heard another version of the same phrase.

“This isn’t sexy work.”

And again, at another panel.

“Making our streets more accessible to the blind isn’t the kind of big, sexy project that wins anyone an award.”



I started to play a little game of bingo with myself. Of all the lectures, conferences and simple conversations I took part in about how to make our cities safer, or more resilient, or more beautiful, or more whatever, I estimate I heard someone say the word “sexy” roughly six dozen times in about six months. More accurately, people talked a lot about “unsexiness”—specifically, the “unsexy” work of doing the very things that I, personally, think our cities need most. Simple road maintenance. Planting street trees. Creating access to fair-rate mortgages from local banks. Making it safe for a kid to ride a bike down their neighborhood street.

At 32-years-old and roughly a decade into my professional writing career, I’m lucky to have two proud parents who still read most of my published work like I’m a teenager who just won my high school’s annual essay contest. So I want to say two things up front: 1) Hi, Mom! and 2) I swear, I never thought I’d write an essay about sex for Strong Towns.

I never even noticed that the word “sexy” was such a large part of the average urbanist’s vocabulary until recently; I’m positive it’s come out of my own mouth in a conversation about something as innocuous as zoning regulations. But there’s a concept called the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, which means, roughly, that once you start seeing a thing, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere. And once you grasp what a problem this particular word is for our places, you may never want to say it again.

What We Talk about When We Talk about “Sexy” in Our Cities

When people say the word “sexy” about cities, they usually mean one of three things.

Often, they just mean that a feature of a city is beautiful, and specifically, beautiful in a way that is sleek, aesthetically original, and usually, meant to be ogled from afar rather than admired up close. Think of the supermodel in the stunning couture gown designed so that the wearer cannot physically sit down in it, her body and face and hair all airbrushed to unattainable perfection; then think of the starchitect-designed building plopped down in the middle of a city block with no reference to the surrounding neighborhood whatsoever. My partner likes to joke about the building his alma mater, Cooper Union, built on Astor Place shortly before he enrolled. It is gorgeous, a marvel of reflective steel and dramatic curvature, and at a certain time of day, when the sun hits it at just the right angle, the glare it creates is so bright that you literally cannot see it at all.