*to Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Κυνόσαργες

Tuesday 26 August 2014

Utopia, The City


Turns out More's Utopia was Copenhagen.  Never been.

My perfect city could be made of a combination of others, and I'm wise enough to base it only on those I've been to:
- Vancouver's geography
- Toronto's seasons, tree cover, diversity and employment opportunity
- Montréal's je ne sais quoi and affordability
- London's museums and history
- Lisbon's architecture and people
- Bangkok's temples and river
- Singapore's food
- Hong Kong's ordered chaos
- Tokyo's transit, density, dining and drinking culture
- Osaka, because Osakans aren't Tokyoites
- York's and Québec's extant walls
- Xiamen's Gulangyu, a car-free ex-foreign concession island with lived-in pre-Pacific War poly-European architecture

No use for Washington's imperialism, Ottawa's tedium, Chicago's Mid-Western boredom (but maybe its waterfront), Taipei's legacy of deluded grandeur (apart from The National Palace Museum), a single thing from LA, or much from cities under a million.

Tokyo wins most, but the climate and the concrete hurt its standing badly.  Toronto nearly as many, but fuck it's uncool.

2 comments:

  1. I need a few years in a log cabin in Alaska before I can start to think about an ideal city...

    ReplyDelete