Sublime

A lucky few, larger cities—some of the heroes of this book—have already attracted so many well-off people into their downtowns and close-in neighborhoods that these places are in danger of becoming social monocultures. Despite their wealth, these can also be detrimental to street life, since yuppie overachievers tend to spend less time in the publi

Perhaps even more than their late-nineteenth-century equivalents, these workers today—whose daily tasks involve knowledge, design and creativity—experience a world that can be reprogrammed and remade, and so they naturally extend these ways of thinking to the society around them. While their relative privilege cuts them off from others, the nature

L’amélioration de la qualité de la vie par le travail exige deux stratégies complémentaires : l’une consiste à restructurer l’emploi afin qu’il possède les caractéristiques des activités autotéliques (comme la chasse, le tissage à la maison ou la chirurgie), l’autre est de permettre aux travailleurs de développer une personnalité autotélique (comme

All of these thinkers opposed bigness and prescribed a greater humility about one’s unavoidable ignorance. No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organical

The fourth quality of a well-tempered city is community—social networks made of well-tempered people.

People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in

The little shop owner thus shared a common fate with other property owners in the city. It was not a zero-sum game, where one benefits only at the expense of others. I’m not suggesting they all lived in harmony, but they had a lot of selfish incentives for altruism.

In a work context characterized by cost-cutting, competition, and a strict regimentation of work, such that everything, from dress codes to toilet breaks, is regulated and enforced through multiple forms of surveillance, focus on affect and interactivity in worker-management and worker-customer relations is more conducive to the interiorization of

Tools, in other words, have an optimal, a tolerable, and a negative range. Tolerable overefficiency also disturbs a balance, but a balance of a subtler and more subjective kind than those discussed before. The balance here threatened is that between personal cost and return. It can be expressed more generally as the perception of the balance betwee