I love seeing people without—as far as I know—urban planning backgrounds make points that come straight out of urban planning.

You often see this happen when an American spends a considerable amount of time living in Europe.

When you study planning, you have a lot of this context—even if it’s not lived context—already.

So, when you finally make it to Europe and spend some time, living there doesn’t feel like an adventure.

It just feels like it makes sense.

In his video, Baur discusses how living in Europe has ruined the United States for him.

He can’t go back.

After nearly 16 months in Europe—including this month in Paris—I concur.

If for some reason—and I hate even speaking these words—I could no longer live in Spain, I would not go back to the United States.

There’s just no way I can imagine living there again.

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I didn’t come to Europe looking for a different political system or lifestyle experiment.

I came because I knew everyday life would work differently here. That the daily routines I love—that we all rely on so much—would require less effort. I wouldn’t have to hack, then still fall short of the type of city life I’ve always wanted.

In the US, you live how you live because you have no other choice. If you don’t subscribe to the prevailing car culture and everything it entails, you’re rendered a second-class citizen in most parts of the country.

None of the shortcomings of America—in isolation or relative to Europe—are a reflection on most Americans. You’re simply a product of the system you live inside. While you can hack the system to your preferences, you ultimately have no choice but to accept it. That is—if you opt for as content and optimistic a life as you can have.

If you hit the point where the upside of leaving outweighs any benefits of staying, maybe you explore a move. With your head on straight, this can work for a lot of people.

Quite a few people arrive in Europe and realize they’re more American than they thought. And that’s okay.

But—for many—once you experience a city where:

• you walk most places

• kids move independently

• public space feels normal

• streets move slowly

• daily life is outside

It’s hard to return to a system where:

• every trip requires a car

• public space feels hostile

• everything is spread out

Not because you hate the United States.

But because the contrast becomes impossible to ignore.

And—I’m telling you—having an urban planning background or a history of living in and putting up with American cities helps.

You arrive with the context most Americans lack.

You don’t leave the United States because you suddenly dislike the country. Any discontent has likely festered for decades.

It definitely did for me.

Spain didn’t give me my urban planning perspective or anti-war, anti-right wing penchant. I’ve had those things since arriving in San Francisco in 1999.

You leave because once you experience cities that work differently, the friction of the old system becomes impossible to ignore. And the irony dawns on you—the US organizes everything with the stated goal of removing friction. Then, even as it fails to achieve that goal, it runs around beating its chest as if it has experienced unprecedented success.

That’s nothing but bullshit.

So in many ways, Europe is better. Not perfect. But—from what I’ve seen and experienced, particularly in Valencia—it’s a better place to live.

The basic mechanics of daily life—how people move, meet, and exist in public space—simply make more sense.

And once that becomes obvious, it’s very hard to imagine going back.

I’ve been publishing this newsletter consistently for a long time. Writing it takes real time and energy, and like most independent work, it only survives if readers support it.

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Bicycles.

So much so that I worked at a bike shop in Southern California while studying urban planning.

At the shop, we had a balance bike or two in stock. We kept one out and always tried to entice the American helicopter parents who frequented the store to buy it instead of a set of training wheels to “teach” their kids how to ride a bike.

In the center background of that image, there is a balance bike—two wheels, no pedals.

As we watched the kid in blue ride through the plaza, he was picking his feet up off the ground for seconds at a time and, periodically, letting his left or right touch the ground for a second—for balance.

Of course, he has no clue it’s happening—he’s just having fun—but he’s learning how to balance and how to ride a bike.

It’s a European thing. Or, at least, that’s how we tried to sell it to these American parents. Even with that cachet, most didn’t buy it. They wanted training wheels.

It’s funny because we actually had their—and their kids’—best interests in mind. We made an extra commission on training wheels, but nothing more than the standard on balance bikes.

Balance bikes are just better.

Yet, Americans are intent on making the process of learning how to ride a bike another in a long line of anxiety-producing moments for their children. I’m guilty as charged. I didn’t know better about this—and many other things—when I was raising my now 22-year-old daughter.

With training wheels, you’re not learning how to balance. You’re not really learning anything. The build-up to the moment when you take the training wheels off is so intense—so momentous—that it invariably gets delayed multiple times.

Then, the day comes. Nerves are high. Your kid watches as you remove the bolts of the training wheels with a wrench. They get on the bike while you hold the back of the saddle, keeping them steady until you nervously let go.

The kid wobbles—you can barely call it balances—and usually ends up slowing to a near stop, tilting to one side, and letting the bike hit the ground as they keep themselves up with their dominant leg.

Then, they use the bike without training wheels a lot like a balance bike. With a few hours or days, they learn how to balance and—for the rest of their life—it’s just like riding a bike.

The balance bike approach removes most of the drama from the entire process.

Kids fall occasionally, but they get back up. And because they were balancing all along, the moment when they finally ride a real bike with pedals barely feels like a milestone.

There’s no big reveal.

They were basically riding the bike the entire time.

That approach reflects a broader cultural difference you notice quickly in Europe.

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That’s the heart of Los Angeles right there.

And a freeway runs through it.

The drivers in that traffic—which is usually worse—will choose an exit, maybe from the 101 or one of the other freeways connected to the 101.

Then, they’ll proceed to drive in freeway mode through the city to their destination, which is often one of the largely residential enclaves that surround the urban cores scattered throughout the LA area.

Everything is designed to rapidly move you through space and time when traffic isn’t an obstacle.

You have a destination and everything between you and that destination is in the way.

I bring up Jane Jacobs a lot. That’s because she’s important.

Her ideas could actually make America great again. But not many people have a real interest in doing that.

From an urban planning perspective, Manhattan is about as good as it gets in the United States of America.

Jacobs deserves far more credit for this than she receives.

In the 1960s, highway builder Robert Moses planned to slash a ten-lane elevated freeway through the heart of SoHo and Little Italy. He called it the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX). To Moses, these weren't neighborhoods; they were just blight standing in the way of a car pipeline.

Jacobs led the grassroots insurrection that killed the project entirely in 1969, effectively saving Manhattan from making the same mistakes that plagued cities through the US, including San Francisco.

The defeat of LOMEX saved the historic, cast-iron loft buildings of SoHo and transformed New York’s approach to urban development away from massive highway projects and toward preservation.

Manhattan avoided what ended up being Los Angeles’s fate and present legacy.

When I was a kid living in Upstate New York, I didn’t think twice about taking the Robert Moses Parkway between my hometown of Niagara Falls and neighboring Lewiston. Years later, when I studied urban planning in San Francisco, I discovered how destructive Moses and the things he built were.

Most people don’t think twice. There’s no reason to think twice. When you grow up American, few people encourage you to think twice—especially if you’re from a working/middle class background.

So we ignore features of the built environment that profoundly impact—and, all too often, degrade—our day-to-day experiences and overall quality of life.

Given how freeways dominate and dissect the landscape throughout Los Angeles—and many other cities—it’s no surprise what happens when cities attempt to calm traffic away from them.

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Over the last month I’ve been writing about the systems that shape everyday life in cities—parking lots, street design, risk culture, and how children and old people move through public space.

The point of the series isn’t nostalgia or culture war.

It’s to show how the design of a place determines the way people live.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve looked at:

• The long lines that form in American drive-through systems
• How neighborhood food systems disappear
• The geography of everyday life
• The hostility of parking lots

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Today, we consider Costco.

Why does Costco even exist?

To service small restaurant owners and similar businesses.

Why do so many members of the non-restaurateur American public regularly visit Costco?

It goes back to the built environment and the culture it produces.

To be fair, this dynamic has crept into Europe. But—like with parking lots—it’s not a prevailing part of everyday existence across the continent, particularly in cities.

The United States is Costco’s dominant market with roughly 643 warehouses, whereas Europe remains a developing frontier with only about 40 locations across the UK, Spain, France, Sweden, and Iceland.

Costco is treated as a novelty American export in Spain, not a daily necessity. Here’s hoping it stays that way.

In the US, the vast majority of stores are located in suburbs to accommodate massive 150,000-square-foot footprints and surface parking, though they have successfully infiltrated some dense city centers.

Conversely, European locations are almost exclusively suburban or industrial (e.g., the outskirts of Madrid or Seville) due to strict historic city planning and the inability to secure large plots in city centers. While the US market is saturated with a mix of suburban and rare urban stores, the European strategy relies almost entirely on driving destination traffic to industrial fringes where land is available.

To operate in dense, land-constrained cities like San Francisco, Costco utilizes a multi-story "infill" design rather than its traditional single-floor warehouse. These locations feature parking garages (often underground or on the roof) stacked directly with the retail floors, connected by specialized cart escalators that lock shopping cart wheels in place as customers move between levels. This allows Costco to maintain its massive bulk inventory in a smaller geographic footprint by building vertically instead of horizontally.

I’ve been to the Costco in San Francisco and—to put it kindly—the surrounding area is not pedestrian-friendly.

The idea that a city like San Francisco would allow, and that people would put up with this so close to its dense urban core is nothing short of tragic. But that’s another story for another day that exists in a very specific context.

The broader Costco story takes place in suburbia and has almost nothing to do with Costco.

Because driving ended up largely inefficient, people bundle tasks.

Weekend errand blocks, endless route planning, and classic Costco runs.

Americans don’t run errands. They process them in soulless batches.

The Costco run is the purest expression of this system.

You drive twenty minutes, circle a parking lot the size of a small airport, and push a cart through a warehouse filled with industrial quantities of everything—olive oil, paper towels, frozen chicken, cereal, batteries.

Then you load it all into the car and drive home to store it.

Not because you need it today.

Nothing’s fresh. Food from Costco bears zero connection to anything except the generic Kirkland name.

But people do huge Costco runs because it’s inefficient to come back tomorrow.

Americans have giant refrigerators.

The refrigerator isn’t just an appliance in the United States.

It’s infrastructure.

It exists to support the long-distance logistics of everyday life.

For the record, we have large refrigerators in Spain, too. In fact, when we needed a new fridge, our landlord got us a big one. We have next to nothing in the freezer compartment and keep the main fridge barely half-full.

Other than keeping a few things on hand in case of an extended emergency, we don’t stock up on things. We shop locally almost every day, including 3-4 weekly trips to the neighborhood municipal market.

It’s a completely different way of life made possible by a sane and logical approach to city planning.

Simple as that.

In the US—and in European suburban enclaves—Costco solves distance and inconvenience.

Costco is a symptom of American geography.

Humans have no choice but to adapt to bad systems that remain widely accepted.

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It’s not a fluke.

People walk or drive by things every single day and probably never think twice about how what they’re seeing profoundly impacts their life.

It’s so easy for people to dream about living the rest of their life by the beach, opening a bed and breakfast in the countryside, or escaping Trump via Europe.

But that’s all head-in-the-clouds nonsense—until you have a solid understanding of exactly what you’re leaving behind and why it makes logical and psychological sense to leave it behind.

And by solid understanding, I don’t only mean that you sat with yourself, then manifested your desires. I mean that you’ve looked at the concrete elements of where you live that directly influence how you live. Then you sat with them long enough to understand why they matter as much as—if not more than—anything else on your mind.

This is the real value of all this—learning how to make sense of where you live, why it feels the way it does, and whether it’s working for you. That’s what April has been about—and what May will continue to explore—by dissecting the seemingly mundane elements of cities that dictate how life actually feels and functions.

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Today, I further explore—in detail—the practical and psychological meaning behind these two different ways of life.

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I haven’t driven a car since December 2024.

We’re talking more than 16 months.

Think about that for a second.

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Over the last month, I’ve been writing about how cities shape everyday life—parking lots, street design, risk culture, and how people move through public space.

And most of what I’ve been writing lately comes from living in Spain and traveling through Europe—seeing how different systems influence preferences and behavior.

This piece connects to that—but from a slightly different angle.

It’s about the stories Americans tell themselves—and the ones they ignore.

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I’m obsessed with two points in American history.

And even more annoyed that we barely talk about them anymore.

I bet they don’t even get taught in school.

Number one — the murder of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 in Los Angeles after he won the California primary.

Kennedy likely would’ve gone on to win the presidency.

Had that happened, the United States would likely more closely resemble the social democracies of Europe. Or, at least, it would have had a fighting chance without the pock marks on history that are Richard Nixon and — with any luck — Ronald Reagan.

But it wasn’t just RFK.

It was —

• Medgar Evers 1963 June

• John F. Kennedy 1963 November

• Malcolm X 1965 February

• Martin Luther King Jr. 1968 April

All murdered over the course of five years.

Coincidence? I think not.

Every single time I watch a documentary about this period in American history, I cry.

I also shed tears of a different flavor whenever I watch the PBS documentary called Taken for a Ride, which chronicles the General Motors streetcar conspiracy.

Most Americans have no idea that any of this happened.

I likely wouldn’t know had I not fallen in love with cities in 1999 and later enrolled in an urban studies program in 2002 at San Francisco State University (SFSU).

In what was the major’s introductory class — URBS 401: Dynamics of the American City — you watch Taken for a Ride.

And you’re instantly taken back.

The documentary explains how General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and other companies helped dismantle electric streetcar systems across dozens of American cities while promoting buses and, ultimately, the private automobile.

Several of the companies involved were eventually convicted of antitrust violations in 1949.

The punishment?

General Motors paid a $5,000 fine.

One executive was fined $1.

This is the forgotten history that helps explain why places like Manhattan are exotic anomalies to most Americans. And why they fetishize European cities on and after vacation.

It explains why I was chauffeured back and forth in a car every morning when my school, the bowling alley, and the baseball field were just a few blocks away.

It deflates the learned myth that Americans “just love their cars” and associate them and the open road with “freedom.”

If there’s anything I disagree with Springsteen on, it’s this bullshit idea that we’re born with this innate love for the private motor vehicle.

Babies don’t come out of the womb favoring pink or blue on the basis of their genitalia.

And, as they get older, they don’t count the days until they can get their driver’s license because the desire lives in the brain’s mesolimbic pathway — a system designed for autonomy and movement, not for any specific piece of machinery.

Society has simply hooked our drive for agency to the car.

We could have picked something else. Or General Motors could have.

From here in Europe, the contrasts become impossible to ignore.

In Paris — where I’m spending April — the outgoing Mayor, Anne Hidalgo, took the bicycle and infrastructure to support cycling and shoved it down the population’s throat.

She did a good thing with her “power” and — ultimately — the people joined her to say no to cars.

The newly-elected Mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, appears set to continue her incredible work. The first thing he did after winning the recent election is get on a bicycle.

In a city that voted last year to pedestrianize 500 more streets.

All it takes is one look around this city.

Bikes are cool. Everyone rides them.

The young, the old, the hip, the awkward. Women in heels. Men in suits.

You’re not a loser if you ride a bike to get around in Paris — that’s the right kind of social conditioning. If we’re going to indoctrinate people, we might as well do it on themes that are good for the individual and the larger society.

When you’re in a part of Paris where the car still dominates or isn’t put in its proper place, you immediately notice.

Everything feels more tense. The sidewalks don’t just feel — they are more crowded. Cars block crosswalks.

You remember just how inefficient and inhuman a physical environment built to service the automobile is.

And you instantly think — I hope they get to this part of the city soon.

Paris is a perfect example of what’s possible. If they can put people, bikes, and public transportation first here, it can be done anywhere.

But it starts with the people.

In the United States, most people don’t look back on what ended with RFK. They don’t question the myth that the country’s size — or the supposed preferences of its citizens — created car culture.

Instead, they idle in the Starbucks drive-thru, double park in front of the bank, or circle the Trader Joe’s parking lot and convince themselves they’re living in the most advanced society in the world.

That kind of complacency didn’t appear overnight.

The turning points came decades ago.

1963 to 1968.

And before that, the dismantling of public transit systems and the triumph of the automobile.

Those decisions reshaped American cities, daily life, and eventually politics.

Donald Trump didn’t kill the country. He’s simply operating inside the system that emerged from those choices — a broken nation he now stomps across.

A nation where spectacle replaces substance.

Where bullying passes for strength.

And where the deeper forces shaping everyday life rarely become part of the conversation.

Until Americans start looking honestly at the events that shaped their cities and their politics — and the systems that dictate their look, feel, and function today — nothing fundamental will change.

The country will keep arguing about personalities.

While ignoring the structures that changed everything.

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Actual butcher shops.

You walked in. The butcher stood behind the counter. You asked for what you wanted and they cut it for you.

Today, they're between dead and zero.

I wonder how that dynamic has changed where you live.

The place where I was born and raised—Niagara Falls, NY—is dead. It’s not a stretch to say that there’s “nothing” there—sadly.

In other places where I’ve lived before Spain—particularly San Francisco and Los Angeles—butchers and such have become amenities. They’re luxury items. They’re few and far between and generally cost-prohibitive. You’re more likely to find a vegan butcher than a mother and daughter behind a produce stand who will be honest with you about blueberries.

Local food economies no longer exist across much of the United States. Where fragments remain, they’re usually a patchwork of relatively expensive or inconvenient options you have to hack together. Sort of like trying to be car-free in most American cities, towns, and suburbs.

And the two inefficiencies actually tie together.

I remember driving through the Finger Lakes in Upstate New York in 2023.

Beautiful country.

Some semblance of a real system still exists—just not where most Americans live.

While driving, we stumbled upon a roadside produce stand operating on the honor system.

No cashier.

No card reader.

Just vegetables, a handwritten sign with prices, and a metal container where you dropped cash.

Super cool.

But the moment also illustrated the problem.

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I’ve been publishing this newsletter consistently for a long time. Writing it takes real time and energy, and like most independent work, it only survives if readers support it.

If you’ve found value in this series on how cities shape everyday life, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll find a list of every installment in this series at the end of today’s article.

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Blueberries—arándanos—are my favorite fruit.

In Los Angeles, they were prohibitively expensive at the “farmer’s market.” So, I’d only buy them “fresh” on sale at the supermarket or frozen from Trader Joe’s.

I have to say—I loved those frozen blueberries. I’d often take a handful, smash them into a near-empty jar of peanut butter, top everything with Greek yogurt, granola, and honey, and enjoy a healthy snack.

Everything tastes better cold, particularly when it doesn’t come fresh.

Throughout my long, sordid history with blueberries, I’ve never tasted blueberries like the ones I buy here at my neighborhood municipal market.

Like pretty much all produce I buy there—I never really knew what fresh or flavor meant until now.

Blueberries here are typically in season in spring through early summer.

As with other produce, the stand I go to several times a week in the market often doesn’t have them. When they do, I sometimes ask where they’re from. On the occasion that they’re not local, they tell me.

When they don’t have them, I don’t buy blueberries. I don’t go to another stand. I don’t resort to the supermarket.

Because I know—based on an accumulation of experiences and conversations with them—that if they don’t have blueberries, they’re either too expensive, not good, or not in season.

And I trust that judgment.

“They” are the mother and daughter who run the stand every day. On the weekend, another daughter—and I think a son—joins them.

One day, I noticed red leaf lettuce. They don’t usually have red leaf lettuce.

I said I wanted it.

One of the daughters told me that “it’s a gift from my father.” He had some left over from their farm, so they brought it to the market.

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If you grow up in the United States today, this kind of relationship with food—or with the person selling it to you—barely exists anymore.

When I was a kid, my hometown had three or four butcher shops.

Actual butcher shops.

Now, you’re more likely to find someone in a supermarket wearing a white coat behind a counter labeled “meat department,” but they’re akin to a rent-a-cop standing near the door.

The product arrives boxed, pre-cut, and standardized somewhere far away. The person behind the counter isn’t deciding what’s good today. The system already decided that weeks ago.

That’s the difference.

In much of the United States, local and regional food systems collapsed decades ago.

Supermarkets replaced neighborhood food economies. Convenience replaced seasonality and removed quality—freshness. Bad agricultural practices killed flavor.

Now, consumers optimize.

If one place doesn’t have blueberries, you go somewhere else. If they don’t have them either, you open DoorDash or Uber Eats.

Eventually, someone somewhere will have blueberries. Even if they traveled 7,000 kilometers to get to you.

It’s like being in a relationship with a blow-up doll.

Neighborhood markets in Spain operate on a different logic.

If the fruit stand doesn’t have blueberries, there’s usually a reason.

They’re not good that week.

They’re too expensive.

Or they’re simply not in season.

And instead of solving that “problem” by searching for them somewhere else, you just come back another day.

That shift changes your relationship with food and with your community.

It changes your relationship with the people who sell things to you—from everyday purchases to that one-off buy you spent time anxiously researching.

You’re not optimizing a transaction.

You’re participating in a system.

One built on proximity, pride, familiarity, and trust.

When a place works that way long enough, you stop expecting everything, everywhere, all the time.

And you start trusting that if something isn’t there today—

there’s probably a good reason.

Previous installments in this series:

I’ve been publishing this newsletter consistently for a long time. Writing it takes real time and energy, and like most independent work, it only survives if readers support it.

If you’ve found value in this series on how cities shape everyday life, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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During my last two years or so in Los Angeles, I conducted an experiment.

More often than not, when I went to the supermarket, I’d look for the longest line.

Then, I’d get in it. And stay in it.

No peeking over into other aisles, assessing how much was on the conveyor belt or in people’s carts so I could make a quick calculation and switch lanes.

This wasn’t in preparation for our move to Spain—that would only perpetuate the myth that everything here moves slowly and inefficiently.

This was a personal experiment. A way to work on one type of patience.

Many Americans—myself included—have a sense of urgency.

Americans are trained to find the fastest line, avoid waiting, and to optimize everything. Freeway lane switching, boarding groups at the airport, making a beeline for the express checkout, productivity hack culture—it’s everywhere.

Americans waste an enormous amount of energy trying to reduce wait times.

In the end, they still wait all the time, improvise constantly, and optimize nothing. Yet, much of the population holds onto this badge of honor that it’s the most advanced, convenient, and efficient society in the world. Holding that belief is akin to accepting the Nobel Peace Prize from someone else as you wage war.

The seemingly counterintuitive part about Spain is that—no doubt—many people here don’t seem to be in a hurry. But, at the same time, most things I do in my daily life actually run far faster and far more efficiently than they did in the US—the grocery store, the bank, bureaucracy, plumbers, crossing the street or crossing town.

And the reason might just be that people aren’t always in a hurry.

I notice it in myself.

When my sense of urgency takes over—this need to get something done fast for no reason other than to get it done fast—sometimes whatever I’m doing doesn’t get done well. So I have to go back and run through it again, correcting errors I made in haste. Searching for anxiety relief—or some semblance of control—through urgency often produces the opposite effect.

A lot like stress (read the story at the link after you read today’s), not all patience is the same.

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When I lived in the United States, I remember regularly telling my wife about things I saw during the day—someone screaming at a store employee, a driver losing their mind in traffic, a confrontation in a line somewhere.

But when I try to recall one specific incident now, I can’t.

And that’s part of the point.

None of those moments were memorable. They were normal.

Now, we just sit back at the gate and barely look up from our phones when a disgruntled traveler is expressing a beef with the gate agent.

Since living in Valencia, I almost never see the public displays of bad behavior that have become trademark of America—or of one very specific country in North America.

When I watch them in a viral video—whether it’s another “Karen” (do we say that anymore?), a brawl breaking out in a discount store (or at an airport gate!), road rage, or the latest shooting—I almost forget that the source of dysfunction is the country where I was born and that I called home for 49 years, 5 months, and 15 days.

Since living in Valencia, I almost never see that kind of behavior.

In 1 year, 3 months, and 6 days.

This is not to say Americans are bad people. I mean, I’m American. My entire family is—though my Dad was born in Canada.

But it is to say that Americans live inside a system that breeds stress and anxiety, which breeds hostility and—sometimes—overt aggression and violence.

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Sidewalk construction! Sounds so boring. It’s the type of thing that never enters the minds of most people when they’re walking around.

But this isn’t the most boring Substack ever! Bordering on nerdy maybe, but hardly boring.

Because we get into the seemingly mundane that matters when you consider where you live or where you might like to live.

My background gives me a slightly different lens on where we live and why. It’s a trajectory that started when I officially fell in love with cities in 1999, followed by six years studying urban planning and design, and nearly three decades of writing about them.

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If you’re a monthly, annual, or founding subscriber and would like to lend additional one-time support, you can do that via Stripe below.

Your support helps keep this work independent, allows me to continue writing about life and urban form on the ground in Spain, and expand my writing to cities beyond Valencia—such as Paris all this month.

In fact, May’s stories will focus on France!

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I remember walking on NW 23rd Avenue in Portland.

It started to rain. A drizzle strong enough to qualify as light rain.

That’s how it rains in Portland, Oregon!

And when it does—when you’re walking on NW 23rd and it starts to rain—you’ll notice that most people don’t do anything.

They don’t leave their outdoor café table. They don’t open an umbrella.

Maybe—just maybe—they zip their fleece or pull up the hood on their Patagonia.

People still ride bikes and run errands. They live life.

The Portland I remember is a little bit like the San Francisco I lived in.

Weather didn’t dictate the terms or pace of life. I mean, maybe a little, but nothing like it does throughout much of the rest of the country.

I have a few theories on all of this and thoughts on how it connects to what I’m seeing and living in Spain.

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Despite the trademark that “it rains all the time” in Portland or that San Francisco is foggy, these places don’t really have extreme weather.

They have strong defining climate characteristics that often leave out other common elements that pop up frequently and often unexpectedly. Like, for example, it’s often quite windy in Portland and, especially, in San Francisco.

Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.

Any bad weather in places like Portland and San Francisco establishes itself as the baseline. If that’s normal, it’s nothing new and you have no choice but to do what you do regardless of what’s happening—or what ends up happening—at any given time weather-wise.

In places with extreme weather—I don’t mean isolated and sporadic extreme weather events; I mean extreme seasons—it’s a whole different game of ball. When winter comes in the Northeast, you really have no choice but to change the way you do life and, sometimes, change plans on account of the weather.

In places with seemingly perfect weather—I’m talking cities like Los Angeles where, apparently, it never rains and it’s always sunny—I’ve observed an opposite effect. Any little change in weather produces a sensitivity that I have to say turns people into babies of the spoiled brat variety. A little drizzle and people flee from outdoor seating as if a tsunami is rapidly approaching.

It’s the perfect weather paradox.

When conditions are ideal most of the time, people begin to expect them to remain ideal all the time.

Any small disruption suddenly feels intolerable.

You see it in LA. A few drops of rain can feel like a civic emergency. Outdoor plans get cancelled and traffic becomes even worse—life pauses.

It’s interesting because cities in Southern Europe technically have what many Americans would also call perfect weather.

You could say we have “perfect” weather in Valencia.

Warm, sunny, Mediterranean.

But the reaction to weather here is completely different.

A cool evening doesn’t empty café terraces. A bit of wind doesn’t stop people from walking across the city. A drizzle doesn’t send people scrambling indoors.

Unless it’s really coming down, people adjust.

They grab a jacket, shift their chair slightly under the awning, and keep talking.

Life continues.

This difference might seem trivial, but it reveals something deeper about how societies organize daily life.

In much of the United States, comfort and convenience are treated as fundamental requirements. Systems are built to eliminate friction wherever possible. And even when they don’t actually make life easier, many people—including quite a few outside the United States—still cling to the myth of American convenience and efficiency.

Drive-through banks, pharmacies, and coffee!

Always a place to park your car—often for free.

Indoor malls. Climate-controlled everything.

The goal is simple: remove discomfort and perpetuate the myth that your nation is a well-oiled machine—even when the evidence increasingly shows the opposite.

And when controlled conditions morph into a little bit of unavoidable discomfort—bad weather, a longer walk, a slight inconvenience—it feels like something has gone wrong.

Cities like Valencia, Barcelona, Rome, or Lisbon operate on a different assumption.

Life will involve small amounts of friction. You can’t engineer yourself out of it. And why would you want to do that anyway? The more infrastructure you create to accommodate American-style comfort, the bigger the machine you have to manage.

Soon, you’re just playing Whack-a-mole on endless inconveniences and calling it progress.

And once you start building a society around eliminating discomfort—a large part of which is a focus on the private automobile and private space—something else happens.

Life migrates indoors.

Errands in climate-controlled environments. Socializing inside restaurants, houses, offices, and shopping centers. Public space becomes something you move through rather than something you occupy.

Weather becomes the gatekeeper.

If conditions aren’t perfect, people simply stay home.

In cities where people accept a little friction, the opposite happens.

The threshold for participating in public life is simply lower.

And that difference has enormous consequences for how cities feel.

When people require perfect conditions, sidewalks empty, streets stay quiet, and public life shrinks. In many places, that has already become the baseline—a direct result of American society’s obsession to engineer comfort and convenience.

Yet, the futile effort persists.

In cities built to accommodate people in public under a variety of conditions, daily life simply continues outside.

When people tolerate imperfect conditions and the goal isn’t to anticipate and eliminate them as if they’d be a public emergency, public space actually exists and stays active almost all the time.

The city never really shuts down.

Over time, this becomes self-reinforcing.

The more people remain outside, the more comfortable everyone feels being outside. Streets stay lively. Neighborhoods feel safer. Public space becomes the shared living room of the city.

And it starts with something surprisingly small.

Not expecting the weather—or life—to be perfectly comfortable.

In some cities—and especially—in suburbia, there are parts of town where they don’t even exist. It’s a slap in the face to anyone who dares to be a pedestrian.

I’ve walked, hugging the curb where mailboxes are planted in the grass, one too many times in environments like that.

It’s a lonely feeling.

Everything is designed for the car driver and the homeowner.

There’s the street, with the receptacle at the end of your driveway for the mail. After you get your mail, you go through the garage back into your kitchen. From that kitchen, you do a double take anytime you see someone on foot through the window.

They look out of place. They could be dangerous.

Where sidewalks do exist, they’re a form of placation.

Something needs to be there, so they skimped. Sort of like a lame salad as the only vegetarian option on a massive, meat-fueled menu.

But you actually have it a lot better if you’re a vegetarian in an American city or suburb than if you’re a walker.

Consider how most U.S. cities feel on the sidewalk.

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She didn’t step outside nervously or check the street first. She just walked out the door, found a bench, and sat down.

After a few minutes, it dawned on me. I also didn’t think twice that she was in the neighborhood—sitting on a bench—after dark. In Los Angeles, it never would have happened.

She has the sense not to sit outside her apartment—or our old one—in LA late at night. Even during the day you have to be careful, especially as a young woman. Hell, even as an old man I was often looking over my shoulder.

The Valencia reality is made possible by a number of things—virtually no guns, considerably less violence than other societies, and the always-present eyes on the street.

And also: actual places to sit. They’re few and far between in Los Angeles.

Urbanist Jane Jacobs coined the phrase “eyes on the street” decades ago. In neighborhoods where daily life happens in public—people walking, sitting at cafés, chatting on benches, heading home from dinner, taking evening strolls—there are always informal observers. Not police or security guards, just ordinary people going about their lives.

That constant presence creates a subtle form of social supervision.

Streets feel safer because they’re active. When many different people share the same space throughout the day and into the evening, the street polices itself.

So it’s no surprise that in addition to an endless number of young people like my wife’s daughter—alone and in groups—you see a mix of people that would just look weird in many other places.

Every single day and night when you go outside, you see kids playing after school—then, often again—late at night, older people sitting out or strolling, and families lingering.

A diverse mix of ages, ethnicities, and purposes.

It all comes back to something we discussed last week that bears repeating:

The mixing of everything.

Most often cited—the mixing of uses. Of course. Residential, commercial, offices, public services and public space.

But also—

The mixing of locals and tourists. The mixing of people from Valencia, elsewhere in Spain, Latin America, other parts of Europe, from Asia and Africa, the United States, and the rest of the world.

The mixing of ages—kids playing soccer, riding scooters, and running around the plazas and streets. Adolescents alongside young parents, old(er) parents like me, single people of all ages, and—maybe most important—seniors. Everyone is present, accounted for, and looked after by the built-in eyes on the street.

The mixing of establishments—cafés, bars, and restaurants that range from inexpensive “old man” bars to higher-end cocktail bars, from classic Spanish bars and cafés to coffeehouses that could easily be part of the landscape in places like Brooklyn, from €6 almuerzos to €15 menús del día to several hundred euro meals at Michelin star restaurants.

When this kind of mixing sits at the organic and engineered heart of urban planning, you almost have to try not to create busy and vibrant streets and plazas.

If you ever wonder why the United States—by and large—doesn’t have the type of street and plaza life as Spain, it’s because of the car—absolutely—but also because, in most of the country, you’re not allowed to really mix anything.

And when you try to mix uses—and, sadly, even people—there’s often staunch opposition, even in some of the nation’s best cities.

The mixing of everything makes everything else possible—safety, proximity, easier access for seniors, very little helicopter parenting.

The real benefit of this kind of environment is better urban design that makes for livelier streets and a different way of living.

In places like Valencia, nobody is pushed out of the public realm because of their age, their schedule, or their stage of life. Everyone simply occupies the city together.

That does something powerful to the way a society functions.

It reduces fear and isolation. It makes daily life feel less controlled and more free.

When children can play outside, when young people can sit on a bench at one in the morning without anyone worrying, and when older people remain visible in the life of the neighborhood, the city loses its hostility and feels like a place you belong.

That’s the real promise of good urban form.

Not just better streets or better plazas.

A society where everyday life happens together—and diversity isn’t just a buzzword.

We’ll be in Paris for the entire month of April.

The idea is to treat the city the way we treat Valencia: work in the morning, then walk for hours and pay attention to why Paris works—the bikes, bars, restaurants, cafés, the people, the urban form, the culture.

I’ll be taking notes and will publish a Dispatches from Paris series in May.

If you’re not subscribed—or want to add extra support to help expand my work to cities and systems beyond Valencia—it’s appreciated.

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Walking through my neighborhood in Valencia never gets old.

Almost every time I head out—even for basic errands—I notice something new.

And that’s because I have options.

Constant opportunities to turn left or right. There’s always another café, another bar, another plaza.

Walking around feels free and flexible—not like you’re just hoofing it to your destination.

That’s one way to define walkability.

Having constant choices—to keep going, turn, explore—might seem insignificant.

But they’re one of the most important reasons some cities feel alive while others feel dead.

And it comes down to one factor that people often overlook—or fail to acknowledge in the first place.

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We’re going to do our best to pretend we “live there,” even though that’s not really possible because we live someplace else.

But the plan is for me to work in the morning and for us to walk many kilometers each day throughout Paris.

In May, I intend to do a dispatches from Paris series constructed from notes I take during our time there.

Subscribe now to ensure you don’t miss any of that. I’m excited about April.

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I love café culture in Paris.

When Paris cafés set and reset their terrace seating they don't do it the way the do in Spain. I only have a couple halfway decent images from Paris to illustrate—you’ll have to wait until April for the good ones.

But—to start—these are representative examples of how it's typically done in Spain.

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What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.

—William H. Whyte

In Valencia, plazas are rarely empty.

In the United States—and many places around the world—they often are.

That isn’t a shot. It’s just reality. And there are reasons for this, rooted in urban planning.

At the end of today’s post, there’s a video I’d love for you to watch. It’s part of some of the most influential research ever conducted on public space. But—obviously—not influential enough, as we see city after city continue to make the same mistakes.

Plazas across cities like Valencia work for several reasons.

All of them trace back to one thing.

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My first reaction—internally—was: I can’t imagine living there.

But then I caught myself and responded with something different in writing.

“Well… it’s a college town. That’s cool.”

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that reaction says something interesting about American cities.

In the United States, college towns are one of the last places where something resembling normal urban life still exists. Some, not all. And—as I recall—on the ground in terms of urban form.

The last two paid subscribers to my newsletter live in college towns—Ann Arbor, Michigan and State College, Pennsylvania.

College towns—and the areas surrounding universities in larger cities—have a lot going for them that the rest of the country could learn from.

They tend to offer high walkability, dense downtowns, historic architecture, and vibrant public spaces. They prioritize pedestrian-oriented environments, often featuring a mix of housing, retail, and cultural amenities.

If you asked the typical American why, what do you think their answer would be?

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This essay is the larger argument behind those observations.

It explains why daily life in the United States often feels unnecessarily stressful—and why it doesn’t have to.

In much of the United States, stepping outside your home means entering an environment designed for stress.

Six-lane roads.

Cars accelerating through crosswalks with a sad disregard for everyone’s safety.

Massive parking lots fronting retail — whether suburban-style development or the LA strip mall model.

None of it feels unusual if you grew up inside it.

It also didn’t happen by accident.

The US didn’t create the mess that is its prevailing urban and suburban environments because it’s so much bigger than Europe or because “Americans love their cars.”

Just like you’re not born to wear pink or blue, you’re not born with the innate urge to crave the so-called freedom of the open road that only four wheels can supposedly deliver.

The American dream is little more than a parable used by marketers — in the government and in corporations — to tell a story about the American people. For better or worse, the chapter about cars and trucks had serious staying power.

Environments shape behavior. And in the middle of the last century, the US went all-in on prescribing an environment that prioritizes separation.

As much of the rest of the world — particularly across Europe — makes it more difficult to drive and favors human-scaled planning, the US seems more intent than ever to continue its failed experiment.

But it comes at a cost.

For years, Americans have called car-centric development a conduit for convenience. It’s anything but.

In fact, the predominant American way of daily life creates unnecessary friction and a cultural hostility that the people living inside it often struggle to explain.

What Americans consider normal is actually the product of decades of planning decisions. Across much of the world, it looks abnormal — if not downright cartoonish.

Why would a society choose to make day-to-day life so inconvenient and unhealthy — for the individual, not to mention the planet — then kick and scream in the face of what has become an objective reality?

The answer isn’t cultural preference. It’s policy.

The American landscape didn’t emerge organically or in the spirit of an old Western movie or 1950s sitcom. It was engineered through zoning codes, highway construction, parking mandates, and decades of planning decisions that prioritized cars over people.

Those planning decisions didn’t just shape streets and neighborhoods.

They shaped how Americans move through the world — and how they relate to one another.

What Americans call convenience has actually turned into a major pain in the ass.

I’ll never forget this one because it perfectly illustrates the inanity.

During the summer of 2024 in Los Angeles — about six months before my wife and I moved to Valencia, Spain — we were driving home from the beach.

We decided to stop at Trader Joe’s.

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