I choose the city . . .

• Because I want to live--and I want my children to live--in the society of the future, rather than the society of the past. The future is multicultural, global, and heterogeneous; the suburbs offer monoculture, isolationism, and homogeneity. Why would anyone choose to live in a place that is 97 percent American white? Can children thrive if they grow up in a social and cultural backwater?
• Because I believe in a community of shared responsibility, in which those who are more fortunate help those who are less so. Despite its limited resources, the city at least tries to be this kind of community. Think of the City Mission, Friends of the Night People, the downtown YWCA, and dozens of other social agencies. The suburbs have community, too, but it is a different sort of community--the community of the cul-de-sac, the community of the country club--built on exclusion rather than inclusion.
• Because I believe in living life with a sense of adventure. The suburbs are peopled with cowards, those who fled from the challenges and rigors and anxieties of diversity and difference to harbors of safety. Still cowards, they are afraid to come downtown. Can flight be described as a moral choice? Is this the lesson that suburbanites teach their children: that fear is the basis for a satisfying life?
• Because the city is a place of elegance and beauty, designed with human beings in mind. The suburbs have no elegance and not much beauty; they were designed for cars, not people; for isolated private enterprise, not public life. The suburban culture that produced the intersection of Sheridan Drive and Niagara Falls Boulevard is aesthetically bankrupt. What kind of person trades Elmwood Avenue for the pre-fab, mirrored, muzaked interiors of suburban shopping malls? Can a child learn to interact with th e world from the back of an Explorer? The suburbs are ugly. Even the driving is better in Buffalo. Am I missing something?
• Because in the city I am surrounded by history, touched by the noble legacy of my culture: by the refined elegance of Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building; by lingering signs of the Pan American Exposition; by the incredible vision of Frank Lloyd Wright; by the ornate splendor of Shea's Buffalo; by the grace of Edward Lupfer's Peace Bridge; by the soaring optimism of City Hall; by the haunting hulks of 19th century grain elevators; by the lore that surrounds the Canadiana; by historic neighborhoods. The suburbs will be old someday, too. But what will be there to preserve? Which big-box store will be saved for posterity? Around which of those office parks will preservationists of the future rally?
• Because the city has physical integrity. It was built with real plaster, solid oak, beams 6 inches wide, and by craftsmen with skills. The simplest corner bar has palpable authenticity. In the suburbs, the doors are hollow (take that as a metaphor), and the corner bar has been replaced by national chains with the "old-timey" feel. Will you tell your kids about the good old days at Fuddruckers?
• Because the city is stimulating. It is alive--alive with ethnic groups and new immigrants, people of color, the young down on Chippewa at midnight, the poor and downtrodden (and even some of the rich), the avant-garde at Hallwalls, the mentally ill, the Chevy worker on the graveyard shift--and those who live in it are alive. The suburbs were created as a haven from all that stimulation, all that life. They are its antithesis. The suburbs are a living cemetery. Count me out.

Updated November 7, 2005