Stop saying that making our cities better, safer places to live isn’t “sexy”
Not long ago, I was listening to an opening keynote address at a conference about how to make our cities better. I go to a lot of these kinds of things, and you tend to hear the same phrases again and again about how urgent it is that we [slow down car traffic/build more affordable housing/insert much-needed prescription for making our places livable and lovable here.] But this time, for some reason that probably had something to do with jet lag and a catering table that was running low on black tea, one particularly commonly-repeated truism stuck out at me:
“Doing this work isn’t sexy.”
Huh, that was weird, I thought. This particular keynote was about reducing traffic fatalities on our streets. Why was anyone talking about sex?
The next panel I went to was about making transit accessible in underserved neighborhoods. I heard another version of the same phrase.
“This isn’t sexy work.”
And again, at another panel.
“Making our streets more accessible to the blind isn’t the kind of big, sexy project that wins anyone an award.”
I started to play a little game of bingo with myself. Of all the lectures, conferences and simple conversations I took part in about how to make our cities safer, or more resilient, or more beautiful, or more whatever, I estimate I heard someone say the word “sexy” roughly six dozen times in about six months. More accurately, people talked a lot about “unsexiness”—specifically, the “unsexy” work of doing the very things that I, personally, think our cities need most. Simple road maintenance. Planting street trees. Creating access to fair-rate mortgages from local banks. Making it safe for a kid to ride a bike down their neighborhood street.
At 32-years-old and roughly a decade into my professional writing career, I’m lucky to have two proud parents who still read most of my published work like I’m a teenager who just won my high school’s annual essay contest. So I want to say two things up front: 1) Hi, Mom! and 2) I swear, I never thought I’d write an essay about sex for Strong Towns.
I never even noticed that the word “sexy” was such a large part of the average urbanist’s vocabulary until recently; I’m positive it’s come out of my own mouth in a conversation about something as innocuous as zoning regulations. But there’s a concept called the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, which means, roughly, that once you start seeing a thing, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere. And once you grasp what a problem this particular word is for our places, you may never want to say it again.
What We Talk about When We Talk about “Sexy” in Our Cities
When people say the word “sexy” about cities, they usually mean one of three things.
Often, they just mean that a feature of a city is beautiful, and specifically, beautiful in a way that is sleek, aesthetically original, and usually, meant to be ogled from afar rather than admired up close. Think of the supermodel in the stunning couture gown designed so that the wearer cannot physically sit down in it, her body and face and hair all airbrushed to unattainable perfection; then think of the starchitect-designed building plopped down in the middle of a city block with no reference to the surrounding neighborhood whatsoever. My partner likes to joke about the building his alma mater, Cooper Union, built on Astor Place shortly before he enrolled. It is gorgeous, a marvel of reflective steel and dramatic curvature, and at a certain time of day, when the sun hits it at just the right angle, the glare it creates is so bright that you literally cannot see it at all.
Designed by architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis, 41 Cooper Square houses The Cooper Union’s Albert Nerken School of Engineering. Image Credit.
The second feature of the “sexy” city project is that it is a great feat or dramatic accomplishment, a credit to someone’s genius vision. That person, often, is a single person: say, the mayor who brokered the deal that brought the buzzy tech company to build a campus in town, and seemingly single-handedly employed a new local workforce, while also luring a brand new creative class to live within their borders. (Whether that ratio tilts towards the locals or the newcomers never seems to get mentioned in the above-the-fold articles; ratios are not sexy.) Similarly, all the coverage of how electric autonomous cars built by Elon Musk and his ilk will single-handedly end climate change and traffic fatalities absolutely reeks of our cultural bias towards this particular breed of sexiness. What is more thrilling, on the surface, than the stratospheric reach of human ingenuity, what we can do together with impossible amounts of steel and money and deal-making prowess? What is sexier than a grand vision?
And it goes without saying, of course, that “sexy” projects are almost universally expensive. I have heard my cyclist friends describe four thousand dollar carbon fiber bike frames as sexy; not so much a $50 camo-print Huffy that you can buy at Walmart. As every cocaine-encrusted advertising exec in an 80’s movie ever said, after all, “sex sells,” and when we sexualize an object, or a building, or a even a way of life, it is clear to everyone involved that we are applying a marketing tactic—and often, it’s designed to seduce you into buying something you can’t really afford.
Should We Reclaim Sexy?
So, here’s the thing: the kind of projects that keynote presenters at urbanist-leaning conferences call “unsexy” are often beautiful, too. And yes, they are often works of genius, even if that genius might be borne of a collective community rather than a single European auteur in an Icelandic wool mock-turtleneck and Lucite-frame glasses. And while they are not often expensive—that’s a good thing!—they do have enormous value, and usually pay dividends for their places that beat the “sexy” projects hands down.
A block lined in mature street trees that are lovingly tended to by neighbors who care is objectively beautiful, even if you can’t hang a plaque on it saying that your front yard maple was designed by I.M. Pei.
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An example of a “desire line.” Image credit.
A desire line in the grass is evidence of genius—the genius of an entire community who recognized, in a way that the people who built their roads didn’t, that there was a better path to get where they needed to go.
Opening a pop-up shop to activate a vacant storefront for a night costs a heck of a lot less than giving a big-box store a ten-year tax abatement. But as Muskegon, Michigan showed, they can often be the first step to creating a stable retail ecosystem that will create community wealth for generations.
And I’ll take it a step further: I might even argue that “unsexy” projects are very sexy—sorry, Mom, sorry—if we just shift our definition of the word itself to one more consistent with the kind of sexiness that most mature adults in healthy relationships actually enjoy.
Because let’s be real: most of us find our partners beautiful not only when they are trussed up in formal wear and begging us not to kiss them lest we smear their lipstick or muss their hair. If our relationships are meant to last, we usually find that we are attracted to our loved ones then, but also when they are curled in bed in their pajamas, or when they’re covered in mud from walking the dog in the rain when you were laid out with a cold, or simply when they age and their beauty shifts into something subtly new and surprising to us. When we challenge ourselves to appreciate and even covet the smaller, less flashy projects in our cities—the tended-to wildflowers in the boulevard median, the bike rack placed right where we need it—we enter into an intimacy with our places that requires that we care for them in all kinds of new and ever-dynamic ways as they change over time. That kind of care, as we’ve written about countless times here on Strong Towns, has an immeasurable impact on the resiliency, prosperity, and sense of community in our places.
And when it comes to the implication that “sexy” projects must be grand gestures, I’d argue that some of our so-called “unsexiest” objectives as Strong Towns advocates would actually revolutionize our places—and the fact that we feel the need to downplay that is a really big problem.
When I hear someone say that we need to fundamentally redesign our streets to slow down car traffic if we want to save tens of thousands of human lives ever year, and then apologize that such an idea isn’t as “sexy” as replacing SUVs with autonomous Teslas, I want to scream until I am dead. When I hear someone say they recognize that we need to rethink the fundamental financial incentives that put huge tracts of land in cities like mine into decline and shut my neighbors out of decades of intergenerational wealth because it is virtually impossible to get a small mortgage on a house in North St. Louis—but gosh, that might be too hard, because mortgage finance reform isn’t “sexy” (?!?)—I want to throw myself into a proverbial volcano. (Not literally. Mom, I’m fine!)
Something is seriously wrong with our conversation about cities if even the most dedicated urbanists I know feel the need to deride projects that seek to accomplish revolutionary goals by humble, low-cost, bottom-up means, even if they know those humble tactics are more effective, easier, more urgently needed, and often, more accessible to actual neighborhoods today than the big, “sexy” alternatives.
I think there’s a larger problem with our dominant culture’s incredibly narrow definition of sexiness, but that’s a subject for another essay on another site. But until we somehow radically change our dominant cultural associations with that word to instantly evoke a sexiness based on acts of care, thoughtful appreciation, and the hard but wondrous work of sustained intimacy, we should probably not be calling city projects “sexy” and “unsexy” at all. Call the projects we term “unsexy” today what they are: the most vital things we can do to make our places strong.
Now get out there and french a street tree, tiger.
Top photo via Creative Commons.
If there's a single document that reflects the spirit of our work and the essence of the Strong Towns movement, it's the "Don't Be a Jerk" Agreement that we ask all Local Conversation leaders to sign. As the movement continues to grow — and as Election Day draws near — we want to make this agreement public.