Steven Conn, Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (2014)

Despite the United States' wealth and power, American cities lag far behind those of Europe and Asia. Is the country simply biased against urban life itself?

Every so often on the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, discourse erupts about the relative merits of Europe versus the United States. The arguments always seem to come down to the value of individual earning potential versus overall quality of life. "Amerifats" always to point to the large salaries earned in their country by software developers — or even Buc-ee's car-wash managers — and "Europoors" always counter that the high cost of living in the U.S. cancels out the difference in pay. The latter aren't wrong about everything being more expensive in America, in part due to a host of hidden costs of which they probably aren't even aware. But the former have a point about the almost comical difference between a decent American salary and its equivalent in even the most prominent European countries. There's really no comparison; the U.S. wins on that score.

In the eternal struggle between U.S. and Europe, I chose Asia. Yet if I couldn't live here, I'd certainly look into Europe first. That has to do in part with my not belonging to a highly compensated profession in any region of the world, but also because I find it increasingly difficult to stomach the prospect of living in an American city again. Los Angeles remains one of my main subjects of interest, but after nearly a decade of living in Seoul, where nobody demands money from you on the street and where every subway station has usable restrooms, I suspect I'd struggle to reacclimate. It doesn't help that the cost of rent, restaurants and the like, already burdensome when I left America, have since risen to what I've heard is the very edge of tolerability (to say nothing of other recent undesirable phenomena, like the proliferation of Fentanyl addicts).

Though I've defended U.S. cities in the past (even the likes of Oklahoma City struck me as pretty cool, in its way), I have to admit that they don't measure up to the global standard. Speaking recently at a retrospective of his films in New York, the Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To wondered aloud how a rich city could look so poor. One could always respond by insisting on the inseparability of its apparent dysfunction and its distinctive vitality — I've made similar arguments about Los Angeles — but the fact remains that neither New York nor any other American city has achieved the level of density that generates that kind of vitality while also remaining satisfactorily accessible, functional, and orderly. In the world's richest country, this obviously doesn't owe to a lack of resources; the problem must lie elsewhere, perhaps in the American attitude toward cities themselves.