Evaluating Cities

What's important to me?

1. Convenient, public, social spaces. The fabric of a city is defined by the elegance by which

I was talking to Lisa yesterday, and she suggested that I could "just get a car and drive to places".

I don't even consider this a possibility. Why not? Why don't I want to own a car?

Ownership and maintenance of a complex vehicle requires additional reliance on people I have adversarial - rather than amicable - relationships with. If I have a bike or something, I can be friends with the people at the shop and they can help me develop the knowledge I need to fix my bike; if I bring my car into the shop with some complex diagnostic issue, Ford Motor Corporation or Tesla or BMW has to decrypt their hardware and undo their proprietary locks on my system before digging into the guts, and they can't tell me how to do any of this, so I'll have no agency. I'm dependent on them in an unfriendly, predatory way. We don't have a proper covenant of the right to repair for many objects, so I must avoid every hole I can prevent myself from getting trapped in in that respect.

Also the car is a private space. One of the most important things in my life is the elimination of private spaces. This is why I love coffee shops. I love people and want to do things for them, and private spaces are traps: you spend more money to have spaces by yourself. this is an etirely separate article i am getting distracted

public spaces are incredibly powerful because optimizing for random interactions by far is the highest value practice i have right now, and continuing to do this seems incrediblt useful

the most powerrful tool you have at your disposal is your ability to interact with and inspire otherp people, and everything you should accomplish should therefore be for people in two ways: your work should empower other people to do new things and think in new ways, and it should inspire people to be able to accomplish those things themselves. (this is mostly a note to myself) in other words, it should both make the complex seem very possible and allow people to do complex things very possibly at the same time. that to me is beauty

Also, the fabric of a city transforms immensely when the road is not the primary vehicle of navigating a city. It is hard to explicitly evaluate this. This seems similar to social policies like legalizing alcohol outside and 24H parties in Berlin. This makes Berlin a city like no other in the world, aside from the other historical reasons; new classes of socialization and environments are exposed when we can do new things and have the places to do them.

2. A creative scene. I like cool people and spending time with cool people and having cool conversations. I want to feel cool and listen to cool music. Now that I have this environment in Boston I refuse to rely on the internet as a crutch for interacting with these people; if I can choose to live wherever I want I will chose to live with them in real life.

3. People who work passionately and work hard. This goes hand in hand with the other, I suppose? How do I distinguish this from Point 2? I'm not really sure yet. I will continue to think....