modern city life is bullshit. It's not organic. It's controlled by developers and politicians that hoard land and use their city's real estate as a store of value for oligarchs that don't live there.
Your local underground art & organizing space is part of a developer's plan to artwash a neighbourhood as part of their plan for gentrification.
Spend all day commuting and working and competing with consoomers that will do whatever it takes, compromise anything, just to stay in the city. All for what? Access to better bars + clubs for 2 hours of fun oblivion at the weekend? Access to theaters and galleries you don't have time to go to? Access to interesting people? Cafe life at the weekend or something?
fwiw, living rural is difficult if you've lived in a city for a long time. pay is much shittier, it's difficult to integrate, it's conservative. People are less open, imo. But the massive increase in time and agency must count for something. Please tell me it means something lol.
City life, as it's developed, is a tourist facade, and buying into it is supporting the ghouls that control the markets. The same ghouls that keep an apartment in the city, but would never live there.
Disagree. It’s one thing to commute from the suburbs or across neighborhoods to a city center. Another to walk to work within your arrondissement.
It’s one thing for FIRE industries to gentrify and displace, another for public agencies to invest and develop the neighborhood alongside its residents.
Cities and socialist urban planning centered around micro districts represent a promise of consolidating the living space and activities efficiently and holistically. It sounds like you don’t hate cities, but the car-centered, neoliberal conception of cities in the US and elsewhere.