@louis I’m not sure. Again, this is an insight of me 30 years ago rather than now, an adolescent in Baltimore, drawn to the center of a dangerous city which became an icon of freedom from a stultifying suburban life (which I have now reproduced in the Sunshine State). 1/

@louis At that time, cities—especially Baltimore City—were not expensive. Everything was owned, sure, but a lot of it was dilapidated, underutilized rather than exploited. Culture could take root in spaces otherwise going to seed. 2/

@louis Cities seem mostly dead to me now, for the reasons you point out. I lived 8 years in San Francisco, but there was no art scene, no culture, in the sense I admired and aspired to as a kid in Baltimore. It was all too upscale, galleries of expensive shit, an opera and a ballet but nothing reminiscent of the punk scene that made mosh pits of random spaces back then. 3/

@louis In Baltimore back in the day, there was an upscale art scene, but also a downscale, improvisational one, thriving in the cracks. And the two were permeable to one another. Symphony people drew nourishment from popup galleries in condemned warehouses converted to artist colonies. 4/

@louis (In my recent SF years, the only hint of culture like that came from Oakland. The Ghost Ship fire both brought it to my attention, and I suspect signaled the end of it.) 5/

@louis I still yearn for that archetype of freedom, one that comes from the fact that, under some circumstances, in a city, all of space and attention and interaction can be cheap and at the ready, even though everything is owned. 6/

@louis But I concede in practice it’s hard to find now. New York, “the greatest city in the world”, is a museum to itself. It is too expensive for actual culture to thrive, except maybe in rough or immigrant neighborhoods in the boroughs. The whole thing is like Broadway, a once vibrant cultural form endlessly and expensively reproduced as commercial activity. 7/

@louis Success in a capitalist sense — “efficient” exploitation of owned properties, maximizing the rents captured at the expense of the surplus of the users of spaces, the inhabitants of cities, have rendered cities currently oppressive. Your critique does hold.

But it was not always and everywhere thus. It does not have to be. /fin