I was born in New York City, grew up in Washington, DC and went to college in Boston. I now live in Madison, Wisconsin, the smallest city I’ve ever lived in, but it has the things I love about cities, like walkability, independent bookstores and cultural events. During the height of the pandemic and now, I’ve noticed a number of new neighbors moving here from Brooklyn, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Still, others are going farther afield and off the grid to tinier towns with more land and little traffic. One of the many stories to watch in coming years is how this time changed our sense of place, where we want to live. If we can work and go to school from anywhere, where do we want to be?
For many, that will always be the big city. I’m watching with relief and gratitude as I see my birth city of New York come back, and I’m eager to visit some big cities again soon, which re-energize me in a different way from visiting remote places.
In this week’s show, Anne and Steve visit Africa, and bring you voices like Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole, who talk about what cities mean, and “How Africans Are Building the Cities of the Future.”
Cole tells Anne and Steve:
“Cities are places where you more easily find the people you can have these conversations with. It is the experience of cosmopolitanism, which is maybe the fourth definition of home for me. Restaurants, clubs, bookshops, shopping malls, traffic. Crazy people on the street. High fashion. Cities as a kind of problem-solving technology. If there's 60 million of us in the same place, then we have to use resources in a way that makes sense in such a compressed space. Lagos is the capital of Africa. Don't let people in Cairo, Johannesburg, tell you different. It's all lies. Lagos is the place.”
You can hear more of this ongoing series, from TTBOOK and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, at “Ideas From Africa.”
–Shannon