My dear fencing partner Olga shared with me a Financial Times article on the developments that cities are going through. The writer, witty and well informed, jumps from one fact to another, meanwhile sketching the view that the urban space used to be fought for in financial terms. That fight, intensified in the aftermath of COVID19 might be switching weapons, it might be moving towards other measures of status than mere money. The idea being that you used to pay for space in a city, but nowadays you rather convince the space owner that your presence is valuable in itself. I would, in good sport and with a smile, wish good luck to the writer in convincing any space owner in the overheated house market of Utrecht, Amsterdam or any other big or small city of The Netherlands, of any other status measurement than hard valuta. Perhaps in other countries is different, but in these low lands cash is still what gives you access… to living space and the rest of all the other things you need to live.
And yet the article got me thinking. Is it really so that the space in cities is even more wanted after COVID19? Writing the election program of my party Groenlinks for the elections next year, we have been trying to make sense of the outwards migration of people with higher acquisitive power, whom seems to be moving now more than before towards the small towns where, not only the same money gets you more space, but also where there is more quiet and peace. I am not convinced of the relevance of such outflow, but along the past years quite few from our friends have indeed quit Utrecht for smaller places. Perhaps there is a flow that mobilizes a more affluent group of people into the cities and a part of the middle class into the countryside? That would be a pity. And eventually, not sustainable. Cities are attractive as they are precisely because their diversity. Cities are places of encounters and surprises. The moment that cities will become an uniform enclave of the affluent, not even the affluent will want to stay.
The reason that we end up reading the disquisitions of Simon Kuper (How the fight over space status will redefine city life) in FT was that Olga and me keep on sharing our fascination for the change and the stagnation that we see in the cities and the places that we have lived. Perhaps Kuper is right and eventually cities will defend themselves against the abuses of the plain cash. Indeed he notices Amsterdam reigning in Airbnb’s, a great source of income, development that is heatedly discussed in Utrecht, and that follows the pitched battles of Barcelona on that kind of tourism. In Utrecht we greens are going to push for the building of more social housing, to relief the pressure on the housing market and add economical diversity to the future newcomers of our city. But I am skeptical towards the power of politicians to really bend demand. It keeps on being true that people want to live in the city. A great deal of my friends that have gone, have actually gone to live in places in reasonable reach, literally increasing the city real size. It does not matter that they believe to be living in a suburb. In one generation or two, that would be just another neighborhood of the city.
And for me that is a constant. Cities might change, but we humans keep on wanting to live in them. The ones of us that can’t afford housing in the center will buy in the outskirts, which will be eventually assimilated into the greater, ever growing, city. And that is good. People is meant to live together, is meant to bounce into each other, is meant to sparkle after the encounter in pleasure or in botherness. As I heard from Olga, a city is a place of friction, where (I myself thought) we rub with each other and become harsher, or smoother! in the process.
I’m definitively not going anywhere.