Vital City at three
At Vital City, we are an optimistic bunch. We believe in the glory of cities, even if that glory may be dimmed from time to time. We have faith in institutions, even if they may not always operate as well-oiled machines. We think there is a galaxy of ideas that could make the world hum and spin for the betterment of all, even if sometimes they need to be translated and adapted in order to mesh into the mechanics of how cities work. We know that good governance, while hard, is within reach. And we think that speaking civilly and trying to understand views we may not agree with is not simply a nicety but essential to ensuring that democracy long endures. It is that democratic and pluralistic discipline that makes cities electric and binds us all together, through habit and practice, in a web of connection, order and creativity.
We are thinking about all this a lot these days, as we are celebrating Vital City’s third anniversary. But if you detect an elegiac note, you aren’t wrong. It’s in our ears as we survey our current moment.
Here’s what we think is happening: we have turned — slowly in New York and suddenly in D.C. — from institutions that run according to laws and regulations to fiefdoms governed by the whims and desires of the men in charge. Government has become personal. In its starkest representation, a malign symbiosis between New York City’s 110th mayor and the 47th president of the United States has accelerated the destruction of mores and laws.
In New York City, we have a mayor who demonstrates that he does not know the difference between what is for him and what is for the city. In Washington, we have a president who has no sense that the “art of the deal” is utterly at odds with the notion that government exists to ensure the well-being of its people, even (or especially) if there’s not a dime to be made.
When government is personal, when the neutral principles of the common good disappear in favor of self-interest (even if, for the sake of politesse, the self-interest is dressed up as “I am you”), we know we have descended into Hobbesian times. Without the regulating influence of principled governance and the social contract by which we accept common norms, we find ourselves plunged into a war of all against all.
On the national stage, the president revels in humiliating America’s friends and betraying its allies. And in New York City, the mayor has played the city and its people, turning the government into a bazaar for his cronies, who searched for “crumbs” to enrich themselves. Together, the mayor and the president have managed — through an unsavory deal to get the mayor out from under criminal charges in exchange for unswerving adherence to the president’s wishes — to roll a bowling ball through any semblance of responsible and proper city governance and to smash up the long-standing barrier separating politics and prosecution. The deal is just a synecdoche for a broader destruction of neutral principles in favor of personal desires.
By surfacing new ideas about how to improve cities, by providing public access to data, and by offering a home for thinkers across a broad political spectrum, we believe that Vital City can help buttress liberal democracy in its hour of need.
We are indeed in a different and more perilous moment than we were when Vital City was first founded. The words of the famous Yeats poem are particularly resonant now: “Things fall apart: the centre cannot hold.”
But anarchy has not yet been set loose upon the world. While things have changed significantly, there are several throughlines that connect the state of affairs three years ago to our current situation. Then and now, Vital City seeks to occupy what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once called the “vital center,” providing a touch base for both the governed and the governors. Governance is about something different than self-interest. A social contract is different from a “deal.” There are ground truths, and we seek to uncover these ideas and live by them every day.
The people who live in New York and other American cities are bound together by laws tethered to principles and by mores that wrap us tighter through repetition. While elections are key to democracy, between those quadrennial events, laws and norms provide our daily guide. The work of government is crucial to our well-being, and so is our civic culture. Culture is inchoate and there is no “toolkit” for creating or changing it. But it encompasses all of us, all the time – and it is what backlights and animates how we live together (and how well).
At Vital City, we believe that American cities are engines for advancing liberal democratic values. Indeed, our cities are valuable laboratories, allowing us to test our ability to live together in close quarters and manage our differences productively.
Vital City was created to provide practical solutions, rooted in evidence, to urban problems. By surfacing new ideas about how to improve cities, by providing public access to data, and by offering a home for thinkers across a broad political spectrum, we believe that Vital City can help buttress liberal democracy in its hour of need.
We offer this compendium of some of Vital City’s greatest hits in honor of our third anniversary and the principal themes that have animated our fledgling enterprise: safety, place, governance and culture.
Thank you for your time and interest in our work.