#urbanite

László Moholy-Nagy Hungarian, 1895–1946 "7 am (New Year's Morning)", 1930 Berlin, Germany

* * *

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

special shout out to @urban-trek-thru-middle-earth and @billybutchersbabe for helping me with the definitions!

Reblog away and tag other Urbanologists, Urbanites and Urbabes!  

This is what much of the Guardian columnist’s argument amounts to – nobody who knows what’s good for them (read: enlightened urbanites) would voluntarily find themselves in a place that is more defined by farms and tree lines than by whether there’s a Pakistani-owned mobile phone shop or Starbucks around the next corner.

[...]

Of course, everyone preferring high trust, tightly-knit communities of people whose cultural background and customs you can actually relate to must be the dreaded r-word. I’ll freely admit – I too wish to live in a monocultural community, especially at the point in my life when I will be raising children. And the smug worship of the other professed by the author and others like him fails to grasp the essentials of why this is a choice the vast majority of humans on this planet would make.

The assumption that Britain’s (or Europe’s) native population is a bland, white uniform mass with nothing to offer to a child discovering the world not only forgets, but deliberately erases the great variety of local cultures, customs and walks of life their culture has to offer. Propagating the idea that like me equals bad, or is at the very least lacking, sets up a child for a lifetime of identity crisis and desiring a wholeness that only the stranger can possess. 

[...]