I don’t know where I picked it up, but someone somewhere, once said something along the lines of:
“A city isn’t just a big village.”
And it is ever so true.
Update: It was Jane Jacobs.
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This is Binary Bonsai, the online journal of Michael Heilemann — a Danish expat Interface Director at Squarespace, ex-Computer Game Developer and Film Lover — coming to you out of New York. It contains thoughts on games, interface design, movies, books, science fiction, Star Wars and various other subjects as befits the author, who is available for comment on Twitter.
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I wonder what made you bring this up? Has it something to do with Oksbøl and some more sausage wagons and petrol stations?
Deep…
Rask, hehe, no not exactly :)
I just liked the implicit simplicity with which that ‘quote’ outlines a very complex relationship. Be it companies, communities, blogs, cities, clubs or the line in front of the cinema…
In my particular case, I’m concentrated primarily on blogs and companies in particular. As I tackle working with a growing blog / community of sorts as well as working in, what is by now a rather large company / corporation.
if i apply your rule to “my” city, it does not hold. basel is really just a village, which grew out of its clothes…
that said, there are exceptions to every rule. at least i guess… ;)
Well the ‘saying’ doesn’t say that the origin of cities aren’t villages. Rather it says that, while both a city and a village is a settlement of humans, they operate under entirely different conditions.
A simple thing for instance, would be that in a village everyone knows each other, at least by reputation. Rikke is from one such village here in Denmark. Whereas in a city, they do not. This changes the conditions with which people interact and how the community is run.
In a small community for instance, where everyone has a personal relationship to each other, ramifications for your actions are equally personal. If for instance you’re a troublemaker in a village, you’ll be known as a trouble maker, and might hinder you somehow. In a city on the other hand word can’t travel as far and wide, so there is perhaps more room to be a trouble maker… (just a quick example).
The bottomline, is that a group of X people operates in a certain way. A group of X times 10 operates in an entirely different way; it has to.
Well, no matter what, your post-incrementing, so you are essentially just saying…
What you probably meant was…
And City and Village can very well be equal to each other, even if Village is incremented. What if Village was 5 and City was 6. Then even …
… would really say …
… or in other words …
… which is false.
Artists.
what about a town? ;p
Wasn’t it Jane Jacobs in the Life and Death of Great American Cities who said that?
Bjørn, I’m going to have to kick your ass. You know that, don’t you?
Andrew, it might very well have been, though that couldn’t have been where I picked it up. Though how you know, I’ll never know! :)
“What if Village was 5 and City was 6.”
Then ( ( Man Village ) && ( TheDevil City ) ).
What happened to my double equals?