Today, a short field note. One of the seemingly little things that accumulate.
For several months, the bench in front of our apartment was not bolted into the ground. This had been the case since March when the falleros on our block unbolted it in preparation for Las Fallas celebration and never bolted it back in.
Sort of annoying, but ultimately no big deal.
Because the bench was in need of some love—and, in my opinion, needed to be replaced—I decided to do something I've never done before in my life (that I can recall): I sent a letter (via email, er, actually, an online form) to City Hall.
I'm actually sitting on the bench as I write this. It's not new, but it is bolted to the ground again with its arms and legs repainted. The city requested images by email the day after my complaint. Two or three weeks later, it acted.
In the past, I never would've complained. It was a mix of not wanting to be that person (I didn’t go into urban planning because of those people) and being conditioned in California to believe that the cities where I lived—San Francisco and LA—would’ve laughed at me as they ignored me. Whether or not that’s true should be left an open question. If I’m going to rail on people stereotyping places like Spain with little, if any experience, I probably shouldn’t do likewise in reverse.
That said—I know what I know.
Quality of life, particularly in Los Angeles, became so low during my tenure there that I didn’t have it in me to complain. In LA—and in other parts of the US—much of the disrepair and interpersonal public hostility reflects segments of society that have simply given up.
Toward the end of our run there, Los Angeles felt more every man, woman, and child for themselves than ever. Everything from people running red lights long after the signal change and thoughtlessly turning into crosswalks to trash all over the streets amid scant maintenance and crumbling infrastructure illustrated a top-to-bottom failure of government and society. It’s a wonder that the place still managed to not be the absolute hellhole the American right attempts to portray it as.
That’s the crazy thing about American cities these days—they’re bad, but they’re not nearly as bad as Fox News makes them out to be. It’s unfortunate that straddling the middle ground as I do seems to give the right more ammunition, but seldom results in actual change from people who might actually give a genuine damn about cities.
And that’s really the thing—in Europe, there’s still respect for cities. Even though many people here aspire to the suburbs, there has not been systematic disinvestment in the center. In dozens, if not hundreds of cities across the continent, the infrastructure is above average or considerably better, the innovation is so good it bewilders many Americans, and there’s a vibrancy in the air and a sense of safety on the streets that I seldom experienced in the United States.
Maybe that explains a significant part of the reason why I complained and why the city responded.
Integration after you move abroad might be at least partly that simple. You stop treating public space as scenery and start acting as though you have a stake in what happens to it.
The bench is still old with some graffiti. But I’m sitting on it now, and it doesn’t move.
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