| |
 ZZ: Are you a Memphis native?
KJ: I'm a native of Memphis. Grew up there and left about 35 years ago.
ZZ: So what's the connection with your interest in cities? Did you grow up in the city?
KJ: Well, I believe that whether or not you like big cities is less a function of where you grow up, but more importantly something just inside you. It's like some people like to fish and some people like liver. Some people like different things, and I believe some people just are naturally attracted to the confusion and hurley-burley of a great city. I know that it would be a vision of Hell for me to be in Northern Vermont in a cabin by myself, or in a fishing boat alone. I really like walking on crowded sidewalks and in a variety of stores on both sides of the street.
ZZ: So is New York really a very different place than any other city?
KJ: I do think there are a number of ways in which New York is unusual in the United States, and in some ways, unique in the world. It's high-density. In terms of the number of people in a small area, it’s among the highest in the world, and far and away the highest in the United States. New York City is very much a place where people walk so that even visitors from Europe and Asia are astonished by the number of people on the streets of New York, the extremely high concentration of tall buildings. While you now see skyscrapers in Hong Kong and Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur and Los Angeles, and any number of other places, when you're thinking of tall buildings, there's New York, and then there's everywhere else. No other city even comes close to New York in its concentration. And so that gives a different feel, an overwhelming sense to the city. It's unusual in its heterogeneity.
This is, of course, typical of many great cities in the world today. But has always been true of New York, since it was founded 375 years ago. It has never had really a dominant majority. So that makes this mixed-up population -- that's really New York's heritage. I think the entrepreneurial spirit, the hustle and bustle in New York, is a special kind of situation. The fact that the city is a 24-hour city. It's the only metropolis really on earth where the public transportation system operates full blower in the middle of the night. If you go to London and you go to Paris or Vienna, you need to know when the last trains run because there's a moment. It might be midnight, it might be 1 AM and it might be 11 PM. But there's a time. And after that, nothing.
Well that's not the case in New York. So what you've got here is high density, high income, in the sense that unlike most American cities, the wealthiest people in the New York metropolitan region tend to either live or have apartments at the very, very middle, so that the social life of the metropolis at the high end is concentrated in the middle and not in Greenwich or Short Hills or Chappaqua or somewhere else. The fact that the density's not falling -- in most of the United States density is falling -- I think has made this a kind of a world cultural capital. You add everything together: the entrepreneurial, the heterogeneity, the high income, the density, and you get a kind of mix that has no counterpart anywhere in the world.
Next page | It's more exciting than Memphis ever was
|
|
|
|
|
On video: What's so different about New York?
|
|
Kenneth Jackson
;)
