Urban

Back to the City from Suburbia

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Suburbia

"Goodbye, Suburbs" (single page view) is a great article on how some urbanites who move to the suburbs cannot but help moving back to the city, for all the right reasons.  Here's a video to accompany the article.

Loneliness...

Once settled, Ms. Hillen, a stay-at-home mother, embarked on a fruitless hunt for companionship. "Out there, you have to work at being with people," she said. "In a year, I got one play date for my kid. We joined the Newcomers Club, and the day we put our house on the market, they finally called. You'd go to the library for a reading and there would be no one there." She added, "You're a lonely, desperate housewife with nothing to do."

Even the playgrounds were desolate. "And on the rare occasions there was somebody there and you struck up a conversation," she said, "they would literally move away. And they didn't encourage the kids to play together. We were so shocked."

Lawns...

I go home and there's, like, people doing their lawn every five minutes. They seem like normal people but they spend, like, hours working on their lawn.

Kings and kingdoms...

Every day when I came home, I would say to myself, 'I really am a king and this is a castle, and who do I think I am?'

Charming suburbia...

"You go to these little towns and they are very charming and sweet and have all these cute little shops," said Brian Lover, who put his West Orange, N.J., house back on the market just three months after moving there. "But I think when you live in these areas full time, those neighborhood shops aren't so cute. And those neighborhood restaurants that look so great, you know how bad they really are."

The sucking suburbs...

With their baby in tow, the couple stalked the parks and Gymboree classes in nearby Montclair, figuring "that's where we'll find the city people and the cool parents," Mr. Lover said. "But there wasn't anyone we could find a core to. It was all air." As for the city people they'd hoped to meet? "They were city people, not anymore," he said. "The suburbs have some way of sucking the city out of you."

A New Kind of Urban Christian

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Tim Keller's article from Christianity Today is up: "A New Kind of Urban Christian."  A must read if you are urban or not.  I've also added it to my Keller resource page.

(HT: Justin Taylor, who emailed me in order to shame me since he found it first)

A few blurbs...

Once in cities, Christians should be a dynamic counterculture. It is not enough for Christians to simply live as individuals in the city. They must live as a particular kind of community. Jesus told his disciples that they were "a city on a hill" that showed God's glory to the world (Matt. 5:14-16). Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city, an alternate human culture within every human culture, to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways.

[...]

This is the only kind of cultural engagement that will not corrupt us and conform us to the world's pattern of life. If Christians go to urban centers simply to acquire power, they will never achieve cultural influence and change that is deep, lasting, and embraced by the broader society. We must live in the city to serve all the peoples in it, not just our own tribe. We must lose our power to find our (true) power. Christianity will not be attractive enough to win influence except through sacrificial service to all people, regardless of their beliefs.

[...]

So we must neither just denounce the culture nor adopt it. We must sacrificially serve the common good, expecting to be constantly misunderstood and sometimes attacked. We must walk in the steps of the one who laid down his life for his opponents.

Alternate Cities & Cultures

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Once in cities, Christians should be a dynamic counterculture.  It is not enough for Christians to simply live as individuals in the city.  They must life as a particular kind of community.  Jesus told his disciples that they were "a city on a hill" that showed God's glory to the world (Matt. 5:14-16).  Christians are called to be an alternative city within every earthly city, and alternate human culture within every human culture, to show how sex, money, and power can be used in nondestructive ways.

Tim Keller in "A New Kind of Urban Christian," Christianity Today, May 2006, p. 38.

Exurbs Expanding

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Census: Americans are Fleeing Big Cities...

Americans are leaving the nation's big cities in search of cheaper homes and open spaces farther out.

Nearly every large metropolitan area had more people move out than move in from 2000 to 2004, with a few exceptions in the South and Southwest, according to a report being released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

Northeasterners are moving South and West. West Coast residents are moving inland. Midwesterners are chasing better job markets. And just about everywhere, people are escaping to the outer suburbs, also known as exurbs.

Here in Woodstock, IL we have layers in our suburban/exurban community.  We are our own city where older local residents used to know all the families of Woodstock and where they lived.  Many of them are in their 70's and 80's and the city is changing shape. 

We are growing rapidly with city dwellers leaving to find affordable housing.  Right now we have people in our church who were born here and will die here in the next few years as well as people who have just moved in to get a more "country" feel.  Others are moving in and occupying large houses in large, new housing developments and have plenty of money.  Most newcomers want less crime, better schools, better marriages, a better retirement, more time for recreation and to generally be left alone.

These are challenging times.