How The Little Urbanist Was Born

Hello first readers!

It excites me to have come across an idea for a blog that will — I hope — inspire me to write on a regular basis: the intersection of cities, technology, and society.

The idea for The Little Urbanist was born at 12:12am a little while back while reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was fleshed out a few days later while riding a Peter Pan bus from New York to Springfield and, again, reading Jacobs.

SIDE NOTE: I’ve learned a lesson over the last couple weeks: reading a book sparks valuable daydreaming and brainstorming. A couple weeks ago I read some articles (here and here) that convinced me to read more, mostly by finding “hidden minutes” during the day. Before I started Jacobs’ book, I finished Robert Caro’s The Power Broker by committing to reading at least two pages every single night before bed. No matter how late my other activities — productive (schoolwork, socializing) or otherwise (online video, articles about sports, dating apps) — kept me up, I’d read at least two pages. And still it took me about nine months to finish that tome. So with Jacobs I began to bring the book with me on the train and pick it up at home in the middle of the day. The first goal is clearly being accomplished as I’m reading many more pages per day. But I didn’t expect the side benefit: my mind wanders when I read, and it wanders to really good places. Places like an old friend I want to communicate with, a high priority to-do I forgot about, or an idea for a new blog. My mind doesn’t wander like this when I’m on the computer. My attention certainly strays, but it strays based on stimuli in front of my eyes, not in the back of my mind, and these screen-delivered diversions are usually not high priority. This realization seems really important. We all know that it’s good to read, but I’m starting to understand better why.

Now, back to the blog. For months I’ve been searching for a written outlet. The handful of times in my life when I’ve written things I’m proud of have led to three good outcomes:

• helping me process an important experience or idea and thereby increasing my understanding of myself and the world
• feeling productive in a self-actualizing way when I hit “publish”
• generating recognition and feedback (a feature of this blog is going to be honesty about my subjects and myself, such as acknowledging my own vanity)

Since moving to New York City for graduate school, I’ve thought about blogging. But I didn’t know what to write about. Or more specifically, what not to write about. Focus is important, and I didn’t want to start something that lacked an identity or a potential audience that could be bound by some common interests.

The rest of this post explains the genesis of The Little Urbanist — how a mix of place, experience, and education led me to write about cities. Really, it’s a story about my upbringing.

I have moved more than anyone else I know. On the first day of class this spring, my Professor Alain Bertaud (former chief planner for the World Bank) asked us to introduce ourselves by saying our name and listing every city or town we had lived in for six months or more. Most students had between two and five. I had sixteen. Here they are in chronological order, with plain text meaning a small town under 12,000 residents, italics indicating towns between 40,000 and 80,000 residents, and bold showing cities, ranging from St Louis at 320,000 people to New York City with eight million:

Boston, MA | Arlington, MA | Snohomish, WA | Chester, CT | Seattle, WA | Los Angeles, CA | Harrison, ME | Woodbury, CT | Granby, CT | St Louis, MO | South Hadley, MA | Holyoke, MA | Somerville, MA | Elsah, IL | Medford, MA | Brooklyn, NY

They say we are formed by experience, right? They should probably say more about how our experiences are shaped by place. In my life, those experiences have occurred in a tremendous variety of places. I’ve lived 14.8 years in those plain text small towns, 8.6 years in the italic medium-sized towns, and 5.9 years in the bold cities. Travels abroad and seasonal work mean I’ve spent at least one month in 24 different places.

The states where I’ve lived

The path through all these places follows a rough progression: a childhood spent outdoors in small rural towns; a young adulthood in college, traveling abroad, and in gritty, post-industrial Holyoke; and a late-twenties move to the Big Apple. This mix has left me with the need to have quiet time in nature; a love for the kind of community that can exist only in towns that are neither large nor small, built on connections both incidental and intentional; a desire to be surrounded by human diversity; and an appetite for the stimulation of a metropolis.

Meanwhile, I’ve grown up as a member of the first digital generation. That small town, outdoors-oriented childhood made me slower to adopt the first wave of digital technology — I didn’t own video games, didn’t get my first cell phone until 10th grade, and didn’t get a smart phone until 2011–but I did build webpages with 90s-era free hosting sites like GeoCities (oh God). And after college I really started becoming a technologist. I was an early adopter of Twitter, which I knew was a sign of things to come even if I didn’t really know how to use it. In 2011, at age 23, I founded a web-based startup that used technology to help college students develop careers in sustainability. After the startup closed I worked in digital marketing. In 2016, I moved to New York City to study data science applied to cities and finally began learning to code. And this year, I started deepening my knowledge by interning at Urban-X, a city-focused startup incubator, where I research emerging technologies.

I love the Internet the way I love humanity. People are flawed, they have weakness, they fail, and they harm one another, but we’re still better off with people in our lives. The Internet is flawed, it has weakness, it sometimes fails to achieve its original purpose of creating connection, and it can harm us by making information abundant but truth unclear, but we’re still better off with the Internet in our lives. Digital technology is less and less something that we can choose to avoid or that we incorporate into our lives only by choice. It’s becoming a part of humanity itself, a central building block of society the same way people and ideas are building blocks of society. To contend with our flawed humanity we have always discussed society in ways that help us understand and improve it. In the modern age we must include technology in the discussions we have about politics, economics, psychology, social justice, romance, and everything else.

Cities are in many ways the front lines of this mixing of the human and the technological. We can access the Internet just about anywhere now, but only in cities are we confronted with technology every day whether we like it or not. Cities especially are where we have the Internet integrated into our physical environment and where we will see more and more of this in the coming years. Cities are also where fundamental technological change often happens first. In cities entrepreneurs can find concentrated groups of people who will test out new products and tell their friends if the experience is good or bad. Cities support such a diversity of people and tastes that new ideas can take hold within small groups and survive either by staying niche or scaling up to become a presence in the wider society.

My love for cities is just like my love for the Internet: it’s about people and their variety. Cities are humanity’s habitat. They’re not our only habitat, but they support our species in all its forms, often with different forms side by side, better than any other environment. In Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs quotes Harvard professor Paul J. Tillich on how the diversity of cities affects the people who live in them:

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Since the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition, it serves to elevate reason to ultimate significance…There is no better proof of this fact than the attempts of all totalitarian authorities to keep the strange from their subjects…The big city is sliced into pieces, each of which is observed, purged, and equalized. The mystery of the strange and the critical rationality of men are both removed from the city [by these totalitarian authorities].

In my experience, many smaller cities that are far from the size of a metropolis also provide “the strange”, even if they don’t always “elevate reason to ultimate significance.”

In The Little Urbanist, I plan to write about cities large and small. I’ll write about the technologies driving change in cities and the impact these changes have on us. I’ll use myself as a lab subject, observing my own thinking, behavior, and day-to-day life as I make my way in New York City while studying and using technology. Meanwhile I’ll continue to reflect on the similarities and differences between this metropolis and the many places I’ve lived before. I hope that this blog will make you think, that you’ll relate with it, and that you’ll let me know when you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

Adrian Dahlin