From Frank Sinatra singing about the gleaming lights of New York to images of London’s iconic red phone booths and double-decker buses, the romanticisation of city life has been upon us ever since we cleaned up the slums of early industrialization.

To a certain extent, the images of cities we hold in our minds are justifiable. Cities, due to their monstrous populations, provide unique opportunities, economic success, diversity, and personal growth, to name a few. These value aspirations are agreeable to all, and they tend to be well packaged, it’s called the American dream in the US, the idea that through pure competence a city will provide you with all the opportunities you need. Of course, the US doesn’t own exclusive rights to the dream; they’ve just packaged it better. Irrespectively, the American dream remains but a concept as empty as the values we see in a city.

This has become increasingly apparent ever since I moved from Edinburgh, a capital city of just under half a million, to Toronto, surging at 2.5 million. A small city when compared to the global giants such as New York (8.2m), London (8.6), and Moscow (11.92m).

Trading the lush greens for the glass and concrete of high-rise condos has brought this reality into sharp focus. Aside from the overwhelming experience of walking amidst the masses, are the more profound rituals that accompany city life and impose themselves on the senses and mind.

Cult of rituals

First of which would need to be the daily 9–5. All the discussions on the workplace of the future and remote working fall flat when you witness the ballet of bodies vacating their living quarters to fill out empty offices, only to vacate them again in the evening to make their way back to their places of residence. Aside from the impeccable choreography of this migration, using the metaphor of a ballet is too generous as anyone who’s witnessed rush hour traffic on the roads or public transport systems knows there’s nothing further from grace than an over packed subway car.

The irony in this all is that large cities consistently suffer from housing crises. One cannot stop to admire the lack of rationality behind extortionate rent prices for homes that are to be empty most of the time, and “prime real estate” rented or sold to attract employees to house them for an average of 8 hours a day.

The solutions to this problem are either to increase government control over the ownership of properties, the slow swelling of the size of a city by adding more boroughs, or investing into areas of the city to make them more appealing, enter gentrification.

None of these solutions provide anything concrete in the way of fundamental change in the way a city is organized, nor do they stand to any philosophical or political critique. The first option will come at the expense of personal liberty, should someone who worked hard to purchase property not be able to determine what to do with it? The second will only present more logistical problems for governance itself, how do we move these people around? How do we pay for the new infrastructure needed? The last comes at the expense of the very values that we perceive a city to stand for, making living in a city exclusive and contingent to financial value, not a lot of diversity in that.

Not only is this type of social architecture politically and socially unsustainable, but it fails to answer an ever simple question, who is it all built for?

The ungodly creator

The creation of cities did not happen under the guiding hand of democratic representation or natural growth, it happened under the forceful crush of economic evolution. Industrialization created the slums for the worker, but for producers, manufacturers, and owners of capital, they needed something better than the manor house. Cities were built near exclusively for those who could wear the status of success. Offices to discuss trade deals, host the accountant, the secretary, the greasy palmed politician. Fast forward to today and the nature of work has changed to the extent that the worker has come into the office.

But remnants of the slums remain in our daily lives, sharing beds with your partner is an invention of necessity, one conceived in the slums, where are you going to fit more than one bed in a shack? As does the intentions behind the city of old, status.

A few months ago I visited a friend of mine in Frankfurt. On one on my first days there we went on a walk around the city. Walking around the buildings he would point out the offices of large multinationals, he then pointed to a building and exclaimed, Goldman Sachs have rented out the last two floors of that building there. What a waste of money was the first thing that came to mind. Naively, I forgot that the building, as well as the city, was built for the sole purpose of status, and now that the worker has moved into the office, this ideal of status in the corner office has witnessed an incredible transference. Incredible enough for organizations to discount the financial burden of sustaining it to satiate the status drive now found in its employees.

The reality of status in the city is that it is beyond the individual. Status in the city is about the collective, a communal control tool with a wrapper of individualism.

Mindless existence

Nothing captured this denial of the individual better than a conversation I had with a friend a few weeks ago. As we were walking around Toronto my friend exclaimed to me that she can only memorize streets when she is driving, not when walking. I found this peculiar and asked why? If anything the rote role of walking should help in that process. She replied, I need to be mindless when I walk, I don’t want to look at people.

This shocked me, walking is meant to be a mental stimulus not the opposite, but then I realized that when the only stimulus available are either the nameless bodies of thousands of others or the imposing skyscrapers, why would you want to be mindful? The only way to cope with all that is around you is to be mindless, and that is what a city requires of its inhabitants, it requires mindlessness, otherwise it would be impossible for you not to awake to the irrationality and destruction of this social prison.

With walking becoming absent of its therapeutic nature, why would anyone want to be outside? It’s this phenomenon that’s at the core of the high statistics of loneliness witnessed in cities. For if the only place to be by yourself is in an apartment, one with recurring stimuli of a confined nature, your only salvation becomes leaving this “prison” to socialise, and with socialisation come a greater loss of individuality, a trade-off the subconscious can manage much better than isolation.

Mindless walking does more than preserve one’s sanity; it also helps hide the apparent sores of a city, the homeless. It is only in a city where I can walk by a homeless man on the sidewalk and immediately next to me in the street is an expensive car with the music playing loudly. I don’t solicit this image to draw on a tried contrast of rich and poor existing in utter proximity, no, I draw on it to display the extent of the fiction of individualism and the rational dissonance it presents. One where the individual in the car can both believe homelessness is a result of city life injustice (non-individualistic), while also believing his practice of blaring music from his car to be a practice of individualism.

Consummation

The opportunities presented by the city are not opportunities at all, they are rationalisations, nothing but retroactive justifications meant to appease the isolated psyches we’ve developed.

The only success in a city is not to embrace its diversity, sores and all, it’s to ignore it. The perception of self-discovery in a city is not through being an individual, it’s through shedding that in favour of the collective group to gain access to status. Finally, success built on the corner office is also but an illusion, for although once may have succeeded, it was only at a game prescribed by the city.

Living in a city means subjugating oneself to its rituals, it means abandoning the philosophical quest for understanding ones Being and becoming nothing more than another body in the “faceless city”, a cliché that has well-earned its place.