City life shouldn’t be this hard. For decades, justice-minded planners and policymakers have elevated and celebrated urban heroes who refuse to give up. We’ve venerated lifelong city residents who stood firm as developers tried to bulldoze their neighborhoods, seeking to preserve a flourishing urban existence for their children. These stories remind us that we, too, can find the strength to resist powerful, unjust forces that allow a handful to dictate daily life for the rest of us. Successful urban planning and policy, however, should take that load off their shoulders.
Cities are created over generations, and many past legacies have not yielded urbanism built to overcome twenty-first century challenges. From the housing shortage to transportation congestion to climate change, efforts to enact more just and sustainable urban systems are more critical than ever. The stories that make up this issue explore the people and projects fostering social and physical resilience in increasingly unequal and ecologically threatened places.
This issue’s theme, “Resilience,” includes some of the unimpeachable characters we must continue to praise. We’re interested in the imaginative vision that drives these efforts, the processes to realize them, and the lives behind them—both the planners and communities who believed in their city’s potential.
We need to celebrate path-paving figures like David Wojnarowicz, as Rocco Praderio does in his inspiring retrospective, and recognize their willingness to take bold risks. There are also plenty of quieter, unsung heroes of our urban space, like the neighbors cleaning trash from their streets in Rebecca Odell’s joyful piece, or locals quite literally paving a new path shown in Sebastian Sopek’s entrepreneurial essay. We also must rethink how we live within our tangled web of urban connections, from our relationship to the tourist economy, as seen in EJ Katz’s urgent piece on Barcelona, to restoring long-lost ecosystems, seen first-hand by Megan Diebboll in her compelling oyster update, to future-proofing one of the city’s most precious resources, its buildings, as Noah Wharton’s feature thoughtfully explores. People across diverse contexts are working to reconcile our economic and built environment with our ecological one, as recounted in Dana Debari’s richly-reported story on the New Jersey buyout program and Marley Kinser’s harrowing coverage of the Eaton wildfires, so that all present and future generations have the opportunity to fall in love with cities. Doing so requires balancing an electric, imaginative vision with the pragmatism and patience to navigate the complexities of the incumbent system, like skaters in Taylor Richards’ eye-catching photo essay did to express themselves in their home city, and working across disparate interests to achieve something greater, as coalition members were able to do in Jilly Edgar’s forward-looking piece on thermal energy networks. Through it all, we must reject the nihilism of our time’s existential challenges, as Isabella Geeding captivatingly urges us to do in her painting.
Our peers are entering a job market and life in cities that are hostile to a happy future. So what’s encouraging is how these pieces explore a new vision for our lives; one where we don’t have to fight back all the time. It would warm our hearts to see nothing but a city of softies, not hardened by their circumstances but happily embraced by urban spaces built just for them.
