The Unbearable Sameness of Cities
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2018
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Oriana Schwindt joins City Journal contributing editor Aaron Renn to discuss Schwindt's seven-month-long journey to municipalities near the geographic center of every U.S. state, and what she found there: the curious "sameness" of American cities. Schwindt chronicled her travels in a recent article for New York.
In gentrifying neighborhoods across the country, visitors are practically guaranteed to find high-end bars with expensive cocktails, coffee shops with tattooed and bespectacled baristas, new luxury housing in all-glass buildings, and maybe an Asian-fusion restaurant. "The reason so many of these joints feel harvested from Brooklyn," Schwindt writes, "is because they are."
While urban aesthetics are important, coffee shops and micro-breweries are no replacement for serious infrastructure investment and economic development.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is Erin Renn, Contributing Editor at City Journal, and I'm pleased to be joined today by freelance journalist |
| 0:23.2 | Oriana Schwent. Howdy, howdy, howdy. Thank you for being here. You are my new hero. And the reason |
| 0:29.1 | is that you wrote an article, it was actually in New York Magazine, called the Unbearable Sameness of |
| 0:37.0 | cities that hit all of the themes that I've |
| 0:40.6 | been pounding for so long and did it in just such a great way. And the article went viral. |
| 0:47.1 | But before we talk about your article, it came out of a very interesting travel journey that you did |
| 0:53.9 | when you went to all 50 states. |
| 0:57.6 | So tell me about what you did first and kind of how this project came about. |
| 1:02.9 | Yeah, the New York Magazine piece was sort of the apotheosis of a journey I started last end of April was when I went to the first stop on this trip. |
| 1:16.0 | I decided to go to the cities and towns closest to the geographic center of each state |
| 1:21.5 | and talk to as many people as I could in each place and write a sort of profile of each place, |
| 1:29.4 | sort of, you know, how Sufian Stevens was supposed to do an album based on each state. |
| 1:33.8 | I wanted to do a nice, big, long profile of each state, of the center of each state. |
| 1:41.5 | And I kind of failed in writing like really nice, long, big in-depth profiles |
| 1:48.1 | simply because I didn't quite have the time. But I went over the course of seven months to |
| 1:54.1 | these cities and towns. I hit every single state, including Alaska and Hawaii. and, you know, just kind of, the project |
| 2:04.5 | just kind of, I wrote all of the pieces because I had people backing me on Patreon and they got to |
| 2:10.9 | read all the stories. I put some up online to sort of bring people in, but it was only an audience |
| 2:16.1 | of about anywhere from 90 to 100 people. I had a budget of about people in. But it was only an audience of about anywhere from 90 to 100 people. |
| 2:19.1 | I had a budget of about 900 bucks a month to do this. I stayed each in, I stayed in each city |
| 2:25.7 | for three nights. Thereabouts were a couple that were more, a couple that were less, |
| 2:31.5 | because of safety reasons. And I just, no one cared. Yeah, there were, there were more, a couple that were less because of safety reasons. And I just, no one cared. Yeah, |
... |
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