I have always been a city dweller. When I came to Vienna to study after having spent my childhood in the countryside I felt like coming out of exile. The lifestyle especially as a student appealed to me. You walk and observe interesting, diverse people. You go somewhere, you see culture, that is somebody’s effort to make the world appealing to fellow humans. You sit down to enjoy food and drink and generally talk, unrealistic, detached, inventive or romantic talks where two people casually evoke entire new worlds just by reinforcing each other's enthusiasm in just the right way, like music. That’s what city means to me. I later found out that this concept has been introduced in the renaissance, that Florence might have been the first European city after antiquity which corresponded to this description and Florence with it’s famous peak of creative inhabitants became my favorite city for this reason. Then I moved from Vienna to become an adult and basically never liked simply living so much as I did back then. It took me 10 or more years to understand that what I was missing was talking to people and the background which makes it probable and enjoyable to meet them. It’s not that I haven’t lived in cities in the meantime, Paris having been one, many smaller ones, but the cities have been different. Paris is my personal anti city, if I were a hateful person I would have become the new Beaudelaire to spew incessant venom over that mismanaged mess that is Paris, that potential going down the millenia old sewer pipes causing a wave of deception that even has it’s own name in Japan: the Paris syndrome. In order for a city to become this ideal meeting place, many things have to work in concord over many years. For once, there is a certain critical size, which while tied to other factors might be the main indicator for the breath and diversity of content you can hope to encounter in it. Size and history maybe where with smaller cities and illustrous past you can hope to find specific people while the bigger it becomes, the more varied the content. But then there is urbanism, policy, basic behaviour and culture, wealth. After leaving Vienna and living in France, I basically admitted that Vienna has maybe been a unique exception and also idealized by me as I have spent my student years there. When I started traveling again, I understood that it isn’t, that there is something particularly off about France and that my ideal city exists in various shapes and forms. Berlin for example, is such a city. Not everyting is perfect, you have drug problems, radical people, some of which violent, poverty and immigration issues, but they are confined to times and zones. Most of the city is actually incredibly pleasant, even beautiful and becoming even more so as whole districts are refurbished and rebuilt and newly designed. That is the wealth part playing out but also policy. Somebody had to decide, that the vast green space in the government quarter should be accessible by everybody, that you can have a picnic in front of the Bundestag and hear Beethoven's 9th from the belltower. Somebody had to trust the population to keep it reasonably clean or devise methods to maintain it so. It is a choice to leave one side of the Spree as a quite anarchic party beach while right on the other side you have a classical museum, a whole island in fact, dignified and haughty. Those are choices that make it so that when you go out into your city you can have a pleasant time with friends connected to the highlights of culture your city has to offer. Not all German cities are like this of course. Go to Frankfurt or Hamurg and the first 14 year old heroin addict at the train station asking for money will make your stomach turn so much that the banks or impressive harbor refurbishing just won’t feel right. Munich, arguably the richest city, is much colder and closed, you basically never feel welcome anywhere at first glance, which are choices made in politically totalitarian times. Of course everybody can make themselves comfortable in any city, the point being that pleasantness and openness can be designed. I like city life, though I couldn’t say why. Is it the knowledge that peak human achievement is happening around you? Is it the controlled randomness of people pattering about? Is it being able to partake in pleasure or satisfy your interests or feeling connected somehow to your culture, region or the world? One of my favorite games has been Cities Skylines, after the release of a Mod which let you walk through your cities from a first person perspective. Now you could build cities on a macro level, because thats what the game has been designed for, and also see detailed, realistic impressions of citylife that were the result of that. A simply plopped down park with some zoning around it now felt like a park in a real city, where children play, dogs bark and some iconic skyscrapers shine in the evening light around it. Random development of building became meaningful because at this scale they seem important and full of purpose, like of course there are commercial buildings next to the new business park. I actually sat in these parks so to speak, or a train or bus line for hours just watching the simulated pawns around me glitch through the terrain following logical paths and felt the same like in a real city. There is something beautiful in the process itself, city life is highly regular, with some small chaos to keep it interesting, again not unlike music and the interplay of different scales of human life and epochs of culture somehow operate like convolution, or averaging, where every glance gives you an appreciation of all of humanity, beyond your day to day life. And in some cities this is more fun than others. I just came back from Japan where I spent most of my time in Tokyo. In Tokyo I could see myself spending the rest o my life, just walking around enjoying innovative city scape just happening before my eyes like in a video game. The variations of Tokyo are legendary, might come from the fact that Tokyo is made up of 23 quite independent wards and multiple cities, has developed in different parts at different times and is run by a diligent culture. But this could just as easily have developed into a version of the Moloch eating people's souls, especially in a country where work is so highly valued and personal freedom is often forfeited for harmony or excellence. But somehow it became this infinite zone of pleasantness, where every building, especially those owned by big companies, are open to the public, where there are shops and bars and restaurants everywhere, on multiple floors, where 1 building can give you a day of discovery, where you have views and areas of calmness and the most densely frequented transportation hubs in the world in basically the same city block. Choices have been made. I now know that there are at least 4 cities in the world, where I love to spend time. I expect there to be more and don’t require them all to offer everything I could think of. If you go to Florence in winter, it is a town for getting to know friends or romance or just dream about the most impressive European art. I don’t need to learn Japanese there for example or listen to trendy club music. So cities can be very beautiul, even relaxing and give the best backdrop for connecting with people. But most of them are not. The most obvious difference to think about would be wealth but that doesn’t hold. Look at New York or San Francisco. Policy is the real issue and cultural differences as to how you perceive other people. Paris, for example takes it’s current form from a government that tried to protect itself against it’s people. Everything screams ostentation, nothing is friendly. The small alleyways and plazas, if they are not disfigured by cheap tourism, are in medieval parts of the city. Then you have the disfunctioning of public transports, poverty everywhere, crime, lacking funds to maintain buildings, bad living conditions even at high costs, a priority given to cars etc. that just make Paris a stressful place you just want to get out of as quicklky as possible, once you get to know her better. I feel cities express the probability of how likely you feel meeting a stranger will be a positive or negative experience for you. In some places, you are almost certain that it will be great, in some almost certain that it will be bothersome or worse. But those statistics are choices, as people can choice where to spend their time. Why put up with badly run cities? Maybe because people don’t think they have this choice?