In search of the human-city
My skepticism about tourism and why I feel rushing through a new place in search of new experiences is a misguided act.
I.
We live in a global age, where plane tickets to almost anywhere is available provided one has the budget. With that comes the boom of tourism. I myself am no accomplished traveler, yet in my lifetime I’ve had the chance to travel distances that my parents can only dream of. However, I was always reluctant to travel, and until recently, I couldn’t really articulate why.
My resentment started from the tours I had when I was younger, among which I distinctly remember a two-weeks trip to the US when I was 16. None of our family having ever lived in the US, we opt for a guided tour service, treading many major US cities across both coasts: New York, DC, LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco. I was excited, but by the third day, while we were leaving New York for Philadelphia, I was already disillusioned, feeling as if I was simply going through the motions. I was looking at the itinerary, anticipating my arrival at famous landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the Central Park, actually arriving, feeling a mix of intrigue, novelty, curiosity and disappointment, rinse and repeat. Everything feels perfect and seamless, and while I certainly felt joy discovering these places firsthand for the first time, I struggle to remember any significant impression of them the moment I moved to the next destination.
From that moment onward to the flight home, there was a single question lingering in my mind: Have I ever really been to New York?
II.
I have since felt that most tourism, although well-intentioned, is often superficial and based on a gross misunderstanding.
Even before we start the trip, there are already factors dictating how we should go about the trip. There will be posts online recommending us where to go and what to expect from those places. The city, through its previous visitors, curates itself and present it to us. Here we are, looking at its most glorious moments, perfectly laid out in a narrative like the highlights of an Instagram celebrity. Maybe our colleague has recently been to London and has excitedly shown us a picture of them with the Tower Bridge in the background. Maybe London has popped up on our feed in an article titled “5 best travelling ideas for this summer”. Maybe a raving V-log on YouTube has ignited our curiosity with their ever-enticing call in the end to “experience it for yourself”. The more popular the destination is, the more curated these images are; therefore, most people would go about discovering a city in more or less the same way.
When thinking of conversations around travelling, too often I feel there is too much emphasis on the existence of experience. We hear people asking, “Have you been to Bali?”, to which the answer goes “Yes, it’s such a beautiful city!”. The result – that someone indeed has been to that particular place and has done certain things recommended – is more important than the process – how they experienced that place. As a result, most descriptions of travelled cities rarely go deeper than the superficial: London is beautiful, London is large, London is easy to get around. Very rarely do we hear “London is ambitious, London is gentle, London is haughty”.
The most extreme versions of travelling are committed by the serial backpackers, who hop from city to city, often recording their adventures into a highlight series. These people collect cities like stamps, checking off each one on their bucket lists. Too often, I think people are content with making it to a new city. “It’s for the experience”, they say, and being in the city, doing things in the city, already counts as an experience. I can’t help but feel those experiences must be hollow, since novelty wears off so fast. For example, surely I have tasted an authentic dish that tastes much better than the half-hearted version from my hometown, but once the serotonin wears off, it only takes the next exciting experience for us to forget how splendid those flavors were. But pressed for time as one is in this type of serial tourism, one must be content with the simple recollection that those food made one happy – there is simply no time to inquire how, or why it made one happy.
I am also saddened by the fact that in tourism, we are almost always visiting places for our own sake. By being in the photo we took of popular landmarks, eating the dishes we often heard about, getting a souvenir, we take away a part of the city for our personal enjoyment. The city is of no use to us if it doesn’t bring us that excitement. We justify this by thinking that we paid a significant sum for the trip, so we are entitled to “make the city work for us” in a sense. However, I think this line of thinking is really misguided, for a city is much more than a playground or a theme park, and using it purely as a device to gain personal satisfaction is both wasteful and disrespectful.
The fact that as tourists we usually look for ways to gain as much utility as possible from our trips, often by cramming as much destinations as possible into the limited timeframe available, means tourism often feels rushed. Trapped in the imperative to travel wider and wider, we get to know each place less and less intimately. That is, if we feel the need to know places at all.
III.
This is why I am skeptical of tourism. Visiting a city is often like making small talk with an acquaintance: we know far too much about its trivialities, and barely enough of what lies under the surface. We know where it works, how it looks like, what its past is like. What we don’t know is its personalities, what drives its action, what its philosophy on life is. We know Paris has the Louvre and the Eiffel and the Arc de Triomphe, we know how the crowded areas look. We can easily taste a baguette from a celebrated bakery in Montmartre or dine in one of the fancy fine-dining destinations. However, do we know Paris’ habits and its manners, do we know whether it loves us or not (being the “City of Love” that it is)?
Paris is a rather low hanging fruit for my criticism, being one of the most visited cities in the world, so it is unsurprising that it attracts a lot of tourists in rush. Many people dream of visiting Paris once in their life, enchanted by the promises of luxury and elegance that’s so well curated in media, just to be disillusioned by the reality. So much so that there’s such a thing as the Paris syndrome, suffered by tourists who had strokes upon discovering the disparity between the real Paris and the media Paris (?!). Which brings me to think: if there is such a big gap between a city’s popularized image and its actual image, how big is the gap between its actual image and the soul underpinning it? We can easily see what the city is made up of, but this would be akin to seeing individual DNAs in a human. Together the DNAs make up much more than their total; together, the city’s streets, houses, people, arts, make up much more than their total. With a city, as with a human, seeing is not knowing.
I know this is a bold declaration. A skeptic might wonder what the point of all this pursuit is, whether a city has anything more than its façade. Maybe in looking at the makeup of a city, we already knew all of it, and any attempt to dig further is futile. I am hopeful, however. Clearly there is some merit in anthromorphizing cities since many civilizations have been speaking of places in the masculine and feminine. Furthermore, given the sheer prominence of cities in the arts, music, and literature, one is compelled to believe there must be something in cities, something beyond the realm of its physical existence, that has infatuated so many talents.
Maybe some places don’t have personalities. One prime example is a resort island, where there’s nothing but the beaches and the white sand and the idly lolling coconut leaves. The whole place is an artifice built with a single purpose in mind: for tourism. I concede that with these places, there’s nothing more than the Instagram highlights. The place is the Instagram highlight. While I personally dislike these places, I do think the tourist is justified in not putting in the effort to get to know them. However, truly soulless places are scarce – most places have an underlying culture, is inhabited by real human, and has some aspects which are not fully curated by a tourist-thirsty board.
In contrast, some places might be argued to have “too much” personality. Metropolitan cities, with tens of millions of people, are often too big to be generalized into one individual human-city. With so many features and characteristic on the surface, the underlying persona might be too diluted, too self-conflicting, too much of a yes-man. Maybe for these places, a more realistic proposition would be a human-district or human-quarter. The point still stands however, that seeing is not sufficient, and ordinary touristic attempts are often misguided.
The city-soul is abstract and hard to grasp, just like the human-soul. To me, seeking the human-city means understanding why a city is the way it is, why it presents itself the way it does, why it connects to us the way it does. Seeking the human-city is understanding whether Paris is beautiful because it is a haughty noble lady who spends hours on the vanity table or because it simply is born with grace but does not realize it; it is understanding whether New York looks bustling because it is a workaholic or it is just a bourgeoisie finding ways to legitimize his inherited wealth; it is understanding if Singapore makes you feel in awe because of its immense talent and intellect, or because of its overwhelming fashion and charisma.
IV.
Even if we are convinced that cities have souls, they never readily reveal them to us. To uncover a city’s heart is to engage in meaningful conversations with it, moving further than small talk. To do this we have to put down our egos: we must consider a city for its own sake, not purely how it can serve us and enrich our experience, like how conversations must move beyond transactional in order to build genuine rapport with a human being. We are no longer entitled to request a city to perform to us, to only focus on parts of it that we may enjoy while neglecting its shortcomings.
Acknowledging cities as humans also means acknowledging their autonomy, and the innateness of their characteristic. Just like human nature, the human-city nature is not always virtuous. There are cities who are great company, but there are also cities which are complete assholes. The same city can simultaneously be a best friend to one and an enemy of another. There’s really no point in forcing a city to conform to our touristic urges; the city is organic and independent of ourselves. Faced with the asshole-cities, maybe it’s best just to move on.
The search for the human-city requires us to perform certain sacrifices, like how we must compromise in relationships. There are shortcuts, however. Sometimes all we need to move past the small talk with a person is to be introduced to them through a close friend of theirs. For human-cities, this close friend can be anyone who have lived there for a long time and have had some attachment to it. However, it should be cautioned that consulting a person who has simply “visited” a city is not really engaging a friend. What’s worse, people, who have been to the city but who do not know it well, can only perpetuate surface level understandings about the city, derailing those who really want to know a city well.
Reading in advance about the cities is also helpful. Reading gives us a meaningful canvas beforehand on which the pigments of the actual city can settle, like how a bit of background research is always good for a potential date. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to let what we read impose too forcefully on our actual experiences of the city. For our readings are one-sided, in which we make many assumptions about the city; in order to get to know a city, one must be ready to shed those assumptions and wholeheartedly believe what the city is saying in conversation.
V.
It is discouraging to acknowledge that the search for the human-city is an uphill struggle and tourism is too often superficial. After all, there are too much to explore around the world. Is there any point to travelling if most of the times, all you get to know is the outward-facing personae? Yet, when you come to think of cities as human, it’s a reality that has been well documented: one can only be close friends with that many people. Travelling short-term to new places is like making new brief acquaintances. It can be fun, and it can be enriching, but it never should be the end goal to have many superficial connections, because the ultimate attractiveness of superficial connections lies in the possibility that one of them will become a close confidante. So, one can travel to many places, but the end goal is never travelling, it’s to hopefully get to know one place enough to fall in love and to return often. When I resigned myself to the fact that I would never be able to get to know as many cities as I can, I somehow felt invigorated by the possibility that I can get to know a city more profoundly than many other people, the same excitement that prompts people to go into highly niche PhD programs.
I do not claim to know many cities. The few cities I do know however, I want to document them in detail, give them an anatomy, speculate on their inner workings, just like a person I am close to. The reader reading these pieces, if you do know the city, might have completely different impressions from mine. And there comes the great part. Because one can never get to fully know a person who is not oneself, one’s best estimate is a composite of the person’s images in as other people – the more people there are, the more accurate the estimation. In this endeavor, you the reader, and I, we’re inching slightly closer to the true nature of a city. Maybe only then will we finally get invited to the private dinner parties of the human-cities, instead of marveling at their lives from their Instagram highlights.