Cities with no character

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm not simply talking about how a place looks, I'm talking about its history, style, identity...what makes it undeniably that city.

 

Yes, I got that. Which is why I used the example that I did; not only were the new industrial towns and cities seen as being 'all the same' (most people still think that Dickens was writing about Manchester - which says it all), but they were very new. Most were little more than villages before the industrial revolution and even the ones that weren't were usually just small towns with a market.
Of course, the tendency in all things has been towards standardisation and there's no doubt that there's something 'unusually' true - or less false than is the norm - in claiming that these sprawling new service cities are 'all the same', but they still do have character, of a sort. Though I essentially agree with you on this - it isn't a character that I like or have much time for.

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There's actually a very that all things relating to the human experiance are a form of culture.

[memphis]

Most of the suburbs around began as "independant" small towns. They all try to promote their tiny historic districts, which, of course, bear no resemblance to most of the modern town.

[angus]

conformist individualism

? 

Jumbo shrimp?  pretty ugly?

I nominate Shanghai as well.  Spent a good bit of last summer there.  Lots of places where there used to be serious character--whorehouses, opium dens, and rickshaw pullers congregating and fighting over fares--now given to the brand-marked likes of McDonalds, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart.  Progress, the call it.  Funny, though, we yankees always like to point out how progressive development ruins a place.  Folks being put out of the slums that their ancestors have occupied for five hundred years.  Yet when asked whether they'd rather live a life of nomadic goat-herding and not knowing from where your next meal comes, or a life of white collar anonymity with a decent chance of getting your children into a decent university, most of the nouveau bourgeoisie choose, with some alacrity, the latter. 

Character is great, so long as you have that nice, suburban, mama and daddy to pay the bills while you're visiting it, secure in the knowledge that someone will come and get you and take you back to Peoria just before you're sentenced to rot in a Cairo dungeon for pissing on the wrong sidewalk.  At least that's how I remember it.

[opebo]

No I prefer to live in the character, angus.  Thailand is, strangely enough, not completely destroyed yet, but it is rapidly being destroyed.  Another few years or so.. thats all.  By the way, I'm especially gloomy as I'm accomplishing my annual visit to the Worthless Place just now.

[angus]

No I prefer to live in the character, angus.  Thailand is, strangely enough, not completely destroyed yet, but it is rapidly being destroyed.  Another few years or so.. thats all.  By the way, I'm especially gloomy as I'm accomplishing my annual visit to the Worthless Place just now.

News here about thailand is grim, but it's good you're still thriving there.  I never
made it to Bangkok, but I watched American Gangster last night, and it made Bangkok,
circa 1969, look like an interesting place indeed.

But I get the question.  I too was immediately drawn in by the visual appeal of the
pointy-spired cathedrals like those in New Orleans and Quebec each time I visited
those cities.  And the exotic Spanish missions of San Antonio and Santa Fe, and
the WASPy brownstones of Boston, and the intense, forbidding, massive concrete
jungles of Manhattan.  Those are places I recall fondly, not only for their
architecture but also for their people, brashly confident in their culture, as has
been point out.  Compare this to the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles, Houston,
Atlanta, and Columbus, Ohio. 

I guess the point was that some places have an "interesting" vibe.  Others seem
more to be the sort of place you just want to pass through on the way to someplace
interesting.  I can vividly remember being 19 years old and being asked, by a
bearded and smelly stranger, whether I wanted to buy some "good acid" during
my first visit to New Orleans.  And I have to admit that the prospect of such
a procurement was much too intriguing to pass up.  But I also think that this
is a highly subjective ranking.  One person's cool is another's terrifying.
One person's boring is another's security.  Some places are better at hiding
their seamy underbellies, while others are better at marketing it. 

Two-for-one, mang.  That's the hawkers call in Tijuana.  Check it out, ese.  TJ
definitely has character.  I once watched a woman give a big black dog rim and
hand in a seedy TJ bar.  Misspent youth.  It cost me five bucks.  Well, it cost each of
us five bucks, my three homeboys and I, but I can't imagine a Boston hooker
doing a dog for twenty dollars.   Or a Houston hooker, for that matter.  Doesn't
mean Houston doesn't have character.  It just has a different sort of character. 

Small towns are like this too, by the way.  Compare Sonoma, NM (home of
the teal green arches and beautiful desert landscapes) to Leominster, MA
(home of what was once the largest cellulose nitrate plant in the US); or
compare Poughkeepsie, NY (a delightful, picturesque place) to
Needles, CA (a place where sandy tumbleweeds blow across the streets.)
Much of this is superficial, you must admit.  Architecture, and the like.
In fact, that's most of it.  There's also the Jacob Elazar aspect.  And,
of course, density of population.  But overall, it's still a very subjective
sort of measure.  One cannot with any objectivity say that this place has
character while the other does not.  Character comes in many forms, and
an apparently underappreciated character is the serene one. 

Bangkok would seemed delightful maybe in my twenties to mid-thirties,
before the wife and child came along and made me rethink my priorities,
but alas, as a boring old family guy I generally place school quality, crime
index, clean air and water above "character."

[opebo]

News here about thailand is grim, but it's good you're still thriving there.

Well the only thing grim about it in my opinion is that the Army hasn't mowed down those awful little red shirts, and the nice royalist government looks likely to fall.  God I hate democracy.

Bangkok would seemed delightful maybe in my twenties to mid-thirties,
before the wife and child came along and made me rethink my priorities,
but alas, as a boring old family guy I generally place school quality, crime
index, clean air and water above "character."

Two points about that - I dread the kind of boring existence you lead being forced on me even more now than I did when I was young, and secondly the Bangkok of 1969 or even 1989 is rapidly disappearing.  In other words the goal of eliminating that which the single man would want out of life is very nearly being acheived.

The way I look at it, I could get laid by attractive young girls when I was 25 even in a boring semi-suburban environment - there is no way I can do the same at 40 and I can only assume it will even be much worse at 50 or 60.  The point is that we need the character to have enjoyable lives.  I can't imagine a world where a 40, 50, or 60 year old man has no hope of f`ucking a '18' year old girl as being a world worth a damn.

[Vepres]

Something that really bugs me about the US in particular is the intense growth of cities with no character and nothing real to them.  They are cookie-cutter cities, often providing everything they should in shell form.  They have the stuff on the surface, but nothing behind it.  They are chain cities with exploding populations.  I think it's a sad reflection on our society when we collectively go through the motions blindly and without regard for what it is we're even doing.  The suburban mentality is coursing through our country's veins to a point where it seems almost Stepford-like how cities and their suburbs spring up and could pass for any other city.  You can drive through and have no idea whether you're in Texas or California or Florida because it all looks and feels identical.  I'm mainly accusing 5 major American cities of being pointless: Houston, Charlotte, San Jose, Phoenix, and Jacksonville.  They're just huge globs of people doing indiscriminate jobs in indiscernible cities.  Is this even a bad thing, or am I just nitpicking?  What does this say about our culture in the US?  I'm interested to see if this bothers anyone else.

I may be stretching it calling this political debate, but I think it's an important political development to note within the last few decades.

They don't have character right now because they haven't had enough time to develop one.

[pbrower2a]

Indianapolis, anyone?