Metropolis: place or idea?

What is a metropolis?

A settlement of millions. A collection of symbols and ideas that sprawl beyond the physical location.

Which comes first, the place or its symbols?

In universal time, the place. The metropolis emerged in an opportune site, usually by a river or sea-port. People who grow up there, get to know the site before the symbols. They start with its parks and playgrounds, and move on through its brick institutions. Its monuments, be they skyscrapers, squares or statues, are familiar rather than emblematic. Locals have to learn that there’s common narratives attached to these scenes, usually from others who have been taught to revere them.

For outsiders, the idea comes first. In sentences, snapshots and song-lines they catch a drift of a place that is in every sense bigger than home. A place where they ought to belong, because they’re more ambitious or quirkier than their province will allow.

What’s the relationship of the idea to the location?

It depends on who you are. Whether you’re at the centre or at the margins. In Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments, the historian Sadiya Hartman describes how young black women, who migrated from America’s rural South to the Northern cities at the turn of the twentieth century, entered a ‘poor imitation’ of the places they had dreamed of. Poverty and discrimination locked them out from the ‘real city’ of freedom and opportunity. So, they had to invent another city, one which put them centre stage, and pioneered innovations in music, dancing, and most of all, living. It was a compromise between the fantasy of the head, and the hard reality beneath the feet. It was a fluid city, shaped and reshaped by the opposing forces of insiders’ visions and outsiders’ prejudices.

Newcomers who don’t face institutional discrimination, also sense that they are missing out when they arrive in a new city. It seems that everyone around them is busy with some secret agenda, and they’re not sure how to play along. The city I always seemed to ‘miss’, whenever I visited, was New York. The New York I ‘missed’ was the street photographer Bill Cunningham’s city—a place of colour-coordinated humans in choreographed shapes, dodging snow and jumping puddles. Cunningham’s city had a grammar and a sprightliness that the real place, with its concrete miles and stress-hardened faces, lacked. Had Cunningham’s city gone, did I not know how to find it, or had it never existed? Was it an invention of a selective eye and a cutting table, used to trick soft-headed people like me into an idea of New York?

If a metropolis is an idea of a place, what happens when the nature of the place changes?

Is it still your city if it’s a gutted shell of the place you knew? If the things you signed up for when you moved there are gone? The pandemic has led to periodic closures of the eateries, drinking holes and entertainment that compensated city-dwellers for long working hours and high rent. With these distractions gone, urbanites are exposed to the visual poverty of endless brick, concrete and glass. Suddenly, eight hundred pounds for a room in a flat shared with strangers, seems like a sham. The address that once made it permissible has become an arbitrary code of letters and numbers, with no relationship to the day-to-day. You’ve become exiled from your city, whilst still being in it.

Then there are the exceptions—classic cities that have more atmosphere with fewer people. Paris, in July 2020 was as empty as a film set when I passed through on my train journey from San Sebastián to London. It was as close as it’s ever been to my idea of Paris—spaciously inhabited, as opposed to inundated with tourists like me. For nostalgic, introspective types, Paris needs only a sprinkling of people to be Paris, because the trees and statues and river talk loudly enough amongst themselves. In less crowded streets, you can better hear them. Still, having the city meet my ideal was a cruel pleasure, because it came at the cost of people’s livelihoods. The city can’t run at optimum capacity; it needs to be overrun in order to pay its bills.

So where have our cities gone?

Into the ether. Metropolises are now mediated through podcasts, social media and box sets. More than ever, their tentacles reach far beyond their geographical bounds. They are less a collection of static monuments, than a lifestyle and a way of thinking. They are the progressive, outward-looking colour on the map. They manifest in a storm of pounding feet during times of protest and street-dancing.

Can these idea-cities eclipse more modest settlements?

Yes. Metropolises are media obsessions, and you only have to live somewhere else, and switch on the news to realise this. The headlines will gloss over your little town, and gravitate towards larger settlements: Madrid or Barcelona. London, Washington, Beijing.

I noticed that during the US election, maps only featured the names of cities—glowing blue dots in a sea of red negative space. The red on the map was rural and anonymous. I couldn’t help making a connection between being unmarked on a map, feeling ignored, and voting for the populist who promises to recognise you. In the service of sparing the world from future Trumps, couldn’t mapmakers find a way to account for non-urban populations?

If the metropolis is a mentality, does it ever leave you?

No, although your metropolitan ways soften over time. Your perceptions change to fit your surroundings, with or without your consent. Having moved from London to San Sebastián, a small Basque city, in Northern Spain, I’ve experienced this firsthand. I hope that I will always have a Londoner’s open-mindedness, even as I live in a place that is in some respects less diverse. While San Sebastián is less racially mixed than London, its linguistic and cultural variety is more prominent. There are Basque people whose ancestors have been living here for millennia, alongside more recent migrants from Spain, and all parts of Latin America. In addition to the native Euskera, I’ve heard at least fifteen dialects of Spanish in this town, alongside smatterings of English, French, Russian and Arabic.

However, having lived away from a metropolis for two years now, I’ve begun to be critical of the customised nature of city lifestyles. Pre-pandemic, city dwellers, including myself, had tastes that resembled those of fussy toddlers. We could, and did, choose to only eat certain foods, wear certain clothes, and hang out with certain people in certain venues. When we travelled to less globalised places, we would complain about not being able to have a coffee with the right sort of milk. Is such fastidiousness a desirable trait? In addition to exacerbating divisions in society, having a curated approach to life is rigid and inelegant. While as a Londoner, I thought that an individual’s choice was paramount, now I’m more appreciative of flexibility and resilience.

Moving to a beach town, has also made me see style differently. Fashion hubs are often flat, landlocked regions, with a limited range of weather. The plain urban backdrop yearns for humans to decorate it, with conspicuous outfits and made-up faces. Whereas here, surrounded by sea and mountains, the human figure seems less prominent; it feels uncomfortable to draw attention to yourself. Still, while beachside living has made me sceptical of trends, I’m not immune to them. Two pairs of sea-green leggings later, I’ve succumbed to the global athleisure pandemic.

Do you miss out by not living in a metropolis?

It depends on your life-stage and income. For the young, living in a metropolis can be a dream ticket to the discovery of self and others. However, after a while, factors such as pollution, high prices and big distances can be wearying. Not to mention the frantic drill-march of optimisation, which constantly tries to sell you a better version of yourself. You may be ‘better’, but are you happy? The answer to this question will likely change over time.

As San Sebastián is a tourist town, with a range of international festivals, there have been many encounters with big-city folks who come to visit. I enjoy being ‘visited’, because it affords me a metropolis' scope for people-watching without having to live there. This September’s film festival was one such opportunity. Hollywood and the rest of the film-making-world came to our masked, rainy town, and it was a welcome, if surreal distraction from the pandemic. On one occasion, an actress, who was the only cast member available to introduce a film, stood on stage alone, in a gown that was cut-out at the sides. Her unseasonal nakedness, her count-every-bone thinness, were spectacles in themselves. You could see people in the audience turn to each other and whisper; it was the kind of thinness that you only see in hospital wards and big cities. It was the kind of thinness that you wouldn’t want to become an expectation or trend.

So, I’ve gone for a middle way. I have the metropolis visit, send me work, and play between my ears while I do the housework. Then I go outside, and put my feet in the ocean. I know that I’m lucky, but in the aftermath of the pandemic, I think there’ll be even more of us in self-exile from the city. As the metropolis become less a place, and more of an ideas hub; as more work goes online, there’ll be more chances to branch out from the urban centres. The result could be radical - socially, politically and environmentally, but that’s the subject of another essay.