The Vital Pleasure of Existing in Public

People eating outside in downtown Sarasota, Florida. (Source: Flickr.)

When I announce, "OK, let's put your shoes on!" to my not-quite-2-year-old on a Sunday morning, she usually asks, "Downtown?"

I treasure our morning excursions together. I wrote last year about our walks around the neighborhood, which opened my eyes to all the little ways in which people practice placemaking in their own yards and homes. But on weekend mornings, if we're not visiting a playground or the beach, it's downtown we head to more often than not. We typically do a loop along Main Street and down to the main waterfront park. 

Here's why I love taking my kid downtown. On one Sunday morning not long ago, in the span of an hour-long walk, we saw all of the following: 

• Restaurant staff setting up their outdoor dining area in preparation for the day.

• Sunday brunchers smiling and laughing over food.

• A busking musician.

• A school-age kid celebrating a birthday in the park, whose parents handed my daughter a spare balloon.

• A TV reporter interviewing a city staffer about an upcoming project.

• Circus performers practicing their ropes act on spectacular banyan trees.

• The homeless who congregate in a small plaza with a fountain. They always enjoy meeting my kid, I think in part because she is unreservedly friendly to them in a way adults rarely are.

• Churchgoers filing into the oldest church in town to the chiming of bells, while a priest sits and reads by a small fountain with a statue of Saint Francis.

• Cops shooting the breeze over coffee.

• A teenage couple on a bench swing, having what appeared to be an intense conversation about the state of their relationship.

Sarasota, Florida (Source: Flickr.)

We waved hello or exchanged verbal greetings with some of these people, but most we just observed from afar—in my daughter's case, with intense curiosity. It's like her very own live Discovery Channel documentary: the human in its natural habitat. She loves to take it all in.

COVID-19 first exploded in the United States three weeks before my daughter's birth. The changes that the pandemic thrust upon my life have been completely inextricable in my mind from the ones that parenthood wrought.

Long after Florida mostly reopened, we stayed pretty locked down as a family. I don't mean paranoid, but we've certainly chosen to err on the side of caution, given the uncertainty around possible long-term side effects of even a mild COVID case, including in children. So she's simply never had certain social experiences that she normally would have by her age. She hasn't seen the inside of a grocery store or a restaurant. We don't have big parties (though she knows our close friends) and she's not in day care.

What my daughter does have is downtown. It's her window to the world.

When asked what it means to me to be an urbanist, I think about this often. One of the most fundamental differences between an urban place and a non-urban one has little to do (directly) with the density or height of buildings or the width of sidewalks or anything material at all. It has to do with the extent to which people go about their lives in public or in private.

With the growth of suburban life, many of the activities I listed encountering downtown have retreated behind closed doors. The joggers and weightlifters and yoga class participants have gym memberships. The birthday parties happen out of public view, or in spacious parks you have to drive to, where everyone has come with a purpose in mind and is keeping to themselves. There are no street corner buskers, because there is no audience. The cops are chatting in the station's break room, not at the coffee shop. There are no bells to be heard driving by a church campus at 40 miles per hour.

In non-urban places, transportation, of course, is overwhelmingly in private cars, from within which we experience each other more as annoyances than as compatriots.

When my daughter is older, I will be glad for the way rubbing shoulders with her fellow humans helps my little human build empathy and understand difference. In adults, I believe this experience is central to cultivating civic virtue. "You can't feel 'em if you can't see 'em," in the words of Kirk Whalum. It's from seeing each other that we get the sense of shared destiny that makes for the kinds of places people will work to improve.

Sarasotan kids playing outside. (Source: Flickr.)

There's a class dimension here. Public life is a leveler, but it's also a divider between those who can choose to opt out of it and those who cannot. It's no coincidence to me that on a sunny Saturday afternoon in my city's poorest neighborhood, you will see dozens of people hanging out on streets and sidewalks, front porches and patios and stoops. In my city's richest neighborhood on a similar day, you'll be lucky to run into five people. That rich neighborhood, by the way, has no public playground. (It does have kids, but I presume many of them have their own backyard play sets and even swimming pools.)

Urbanism is a lifestyle choice for the well-off, but a necessity for the poor. Which is why they so often practice it in their own ways, even in places whose built form you wouldn't ever deem "urban."

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For me, urbanism recharges something in me that I need recharged, especially during a pandemic and during the exhausting and somewhat isolating work of raising a young child while working remotely. I know a lot of people wouldn't think to take their toddler toddling down the sidewalks of Main Street—why not just go to a park?—but I enjoy nothing more than showing her other people living their lives in parallel with our own.

It’s the passive mingling with strangers that is a key part of urbanism. It's not like being at a mass event together, like a music festival or sporting event. This is about people all living very different lives, separately but at least partially in view of each other. And once you've had a chance to live somewhere where that happens, there's a sort of unbearable loneliness to existing in places where it doesn't happen at all.

The experience I'm talking about is not substituted for by literally knowing your neighbors. I understand that suburbanites, accused of living in soulless places, frequently retort that they know and are friendly with all their immediate neighbors (and that this is true for suburbanites more often than it is for urban apartment dwellers).

And it's not even about serendipitous interaction. What I’m talking about is simple observation. It's feeling, "We are a community because we are bearing witness to each other's lives." Even when the part each one of us plays in that is incredibly small and not intensely meaningful by itself.

I have heard many times that New Yorkers experienced this powerfully after 9/11. The briefest glance on the street or the subway could convey, "I see you, and you see me, and we've been through something together."

My daughter is of course too young to have any sense of the pandemic that's been raging since before she was born. (Though masks are interesting to her, and I've watched her try to make sense of the rules: Who wears them, when, and why?) We'll tell her about it when she's old enough to understand. But between now and then, I hope she can already start to cherish the sense of loose, easy connectedness that I cherish from the simple act of taking a walk in public.

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