what kind of message does Richmond send?
Paul Graham’s Cities and Ambition is a take on the message that great cities send in “a hundred subtle ways”, the vibe than uniquely identifies that city. While our lil’ city is hardly the center of much, is it possible to identify a Richmond message? From Graham’s essay: The surprising thing is how different these […]
Paul Graham’s Cities and Ambition is a take on the message that great cities send in “a hundred subtle ways”, the vibe than uniquely identifies that city. While our lil’ city is hardly the center of much, is it possible to identify a Richmond message?
From Graham’s essay:
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.
[…]
I’d always imagined Berkeley would be the ideal place—that it would basically be Cambridge with good weather. But when I finally tried living there a couple years ago, it turned out not to be. The message Berkeley sends is: you should live better. Life in Berkeley is very civilized. It’s probably the place in America where someone from Northern Europe would feel most at home. But it’s not humming with ambition.
In retrospect it shouldn’t have been surprising that a place so pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of life. Cambridge with good weather, it turns out, is not Cambridge. The people you find in Cambridge are not there by accident. You have to make sacrifices to live there. It’s expensive and somewhat grubby, and the weather’s often bad. So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.
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John Murden
John Murden covers Church Hill, the Fan, Carytown/Museum District , Northside, and random Richmond stuff for RVA News.
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