(2025-07-15) Arnade How To Build The Perfect City

Chris Arnade: How to Build the Perfect City. Ben Hunt says: Chris Arnade is one of my favorite humans, and we’re delighted that he’s agreed to let us republish some of his public notes from his excellent substack — Chris Arnade Walks the World — which you should definitely check out, along with his book Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. I bought a copy of Dignity for each of my four daughters … it’s that good.

Chris: I was very flattered to be chosen as the keynote speaker at the Strong Towns 2025 conference in Providence. I’ve been an admirer of their vision [ed. note — me, too!], which is to make our cities more livable, and who they are, which is a mix of academics, engineers, city management professionals, and then most importantly, engaged ‘normies’ who take seriously the last part of the “Think globally, act locally” bumper sticker.

share an edited version of my talk, which is my larval attempt to try and build a “grand unified theory” of urban planning

A person independent of all community seems to be one of the end goals of modern liberalism (in the philosophical sense), but that is a contradiction of human nature.

The ancient Greeks also understood this, and so when Plato wanted to explore what justice was, he found he had to ask what is the perfect city, because you can only understand that question within the context of how we live.

what I see as a truth so fundamental as to effectively be tautological. There is no such thing as a human without a community, and all cities are a reflection of that.

My work in the US got me labeled the “McDonald’s guy”, because I highlighted their importance, especially in otherwise destitute neighborhoods, where they serve as community centers. (third place)

The lesson I took from that wasn’t that McDonald’s was particularly special, but rather since it had committed to being everywhere, it was often the only functional semi-public space available for many, and so it became social, because that’s what people want.

...evidence for a stronger version — which is that human despair is no longer primarily a result of economic destitution; rather it is due to a lack of functional and healthy communities.... building healthy cities is currently more important than building a stronger economy, and so getting our urban planning right is now more than ever a societal health issue.

While I don’t want to open Pandora’s box regarding the Covid-19 era, it did provide us with a real-time example of what happens when people are denied community. My theory, which I’ve been suggesting since the lockdowns began, is that the spike in crime, protests, and other anti-social behavior in the months and years immediately following was a manifestation of that despair.

If they don’t have access to healthy communities, they will find unhealthy ones. That was one of the lessons from my work on addiction: when traditional forms of community erode (family, faith, place, and yes, bowling leagues), people will gravitate toward drug traps, bars, and gangs, like water running to the lowest point

Most people don’t think very often about questions such as “What makes a city livable?,”

they reveal their preferences in how they behave.

Yet if you ask people directly what we should build, the result will often be like the episode of the Simpsons, when Homer, the everyman, is given license to build his dream car, which ends up being an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink disaster.

City planning is a real-life game of SimCity, a top-down process that most people don’t want to, and can’t be bothered with, and so it’s handed off to a specialized credentialed class

I respect expertise; what I don’t respect, though, is out-of-touch, removed, and bubbled expertise.

The “I know better” attitude of experts becomes dangerous when it comes with a physical and philosophical distance from the consequences of their decisions

If you want to understand a place, you need to walk it.” (walking)

All policy is downstream from culture.

The citizens’ default behavior (in the aggregate), is a reflection of their culture at the thin and thick level, and acts like a guidebook everyone carries in their back pocket, gifted to them at birth.

Cultural constraints limit which policies can succeed, meaning successful urban solutions in one city may fail elsewhere, making it difficult to extract universal planning principles.

As an example, I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the secret sauces that makes a city walkable and/or livable is density, and localized distribution. That’s why I chose the cover photo, from Seoul. While the building is ugly, it represents a density that supports plenty of small businesses. (population density)

Japan, where I just returned from, has both, partly because they have mixed use zoning

While I believe we should advocate for more mixed-use zoning, I’ve listened to enough Americans to know that will be a close to impossible sell. Americans are fearful of shared spaces because they don’t trust each other, and compared to Japan they are correct not to.

Americans don’t self-regulate to the degree Japanese do... So when we do build shared things, they have to be made asshole-proof, and end up being designed to protect against the worst. I’m looking at you, La Sombrita.

The result is a self-fulfilling process, where we provide fewer, and more banal, shared spaces

….mixed zoning plays out very differently in a low-trust society than it does in a high-trust one like Japan, because it doesn’t mean a more alive city, where children can walk safely, but one with more problems, dangers, and crime. There is a fine line, which is all about public trust, between vibrant alive streets, and squalid, fetid, and lurid ones, and Japan is on the right side, and we (the US) are on the wrong side of that line.

PS: Culture isn’t the only explanation, there are also powerful corporate interests that benefit from the status quo, including major chains like McDonald’s, Walmart, and Amazon.

I don’t want to sound like a culture fatalist, because urban planners are not only playing SimCity—they are also playing SimCulture. That is, while I believe culture precedes policy, there is a feedback loop, and policy does change culture.

How does a culture change? Mostly through persuasion. Japan, which is now famously seen as the shining star of cleanliness, hasn’t always been that way. Only sixty years ago, post-war Japan didn’t have this reputation, and it was seen as lagging behind Western countries.

if you forget to throw away your soda can in the 7-Eleven, you’re liable to have to carry it for a few miles, because there are neither garbage piles nor bins to add it to, and nobody, I mean nobody, litters in Japan now.

Astute readers of my generation should add, “We also had a similar campaign in the US in the 1970s. The crying Indian ad being an example of it, and we are still a dirty culture.”

that campaign worked⁵. We are a much cleaner country now. In my childhood, people had no issue tossing bags of garbage out of cars (like in the ad), and the subway cars of NYC were rolling galleries of vandalism.
We certainly didn’t reach Japan’s lofty level.

Why can you change some cultural traits, and not others?
While I have some very speculative ideas, I’ll save those for another post.