The good life can be urban
The following is from a participant in a book club that discussed Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. The participants were all born in China and educated in the West.
American society’s vision of lifestyle is still heavily dependent on this outdated American Dream: everyone should own a detached house with a front and back yard, white picket fence, and one or even multiple cars of their own. This individualized, anti-public understanding of the “good life” makes it hard for people to imagine, let alone accept, lifestyles based on public transit, shared spaces, and urban density. So we can understand why American rail infrastructure always struggles to move forward—it’s not just technical and budget issues, it’s cultural and imaginative barriers.
I was talking to a professor at Columbia—one who’s knowledgeable, well-traveled, worldly person. He told me how impressed he was by Beijing’s public safety: at 1 AM, he saw a woman in fur and jewelry walking alone on the street, eventually taking the subway home without any worry. He cited this as positive evidence of modern urban life.
I politely reminded him: if you want to use an example to illustrate good urban safety, you should really mention Tokyo or Seoul instead. Because these cities are equally safe, but they’re less likely to be misunderstood as depending on “authoritarian order” for maintenance. When you use Beijing as an example, in the American context, it easily activates this “authoritarian scratch” — people who are culturally inclined to believe order can only be achieved through strongman rule will instinctively equate urban safety with authoritarian governance. They’ll think only highly centralized power systems can achieve clean, safe, orderly urban life. This imagination further reinforces their pessimism about democratic countries’ inability to govern cities well, providing psychological support for rationalizing some kind of authoritarian governance logic.
But this is actually a very dangerous misreading. We have to dismantle this binary thinking: cities can be both safe and free; public life can be both efficient and democratic. This kind of life exists not only in Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam, Zurich, but could absolutely be realized in America, provided we first culturally change our assumptions about what “ideal life” looks like.