Tim Keller discusses “City Theory” by summarizing several secular theories about what cities are and how they change. He draws some conclusions for ministry. Novelist and nonfiction writer Thomas Dyja suggests a city theory by telling the story of New York City, and offers insights into the role each of us plays in changing our city for the better.
Christianity is declining in the West. How will the church respond?
Redeemer City to City's "How to Reach the West Again" podcast takes the insights of author and pastor Timothy Keller's book of the same name—and explores them in greater detail with a host of guest ministry leaders.
Join us as we examine ourselves, our culture, and Scripture to work toward a new missionary encounter with Western culture that will make the gospel both attractive and credible to a new generation.
Brandon O’Brien: This is How to Reach the West Again, a podcast that aims to inspire and empower a fresh missionary encounter with Western culture. I’m your host, Brandon O’Brien.
For the whole of season two we’re talking about cities—what are they? What does the Bible say about them? How do we plant churches there? What does it mean to love our cities?
In today’s episode, Tim Keller gives a short presentation on “City Theory.” He describes a few schools of thought that theorize about what cities are and how they change, and he draws some conclusions for ministry.
Next I interview Tom Dyja, a novelist and nonfiction writer who has written books about two American cities—Chicago and New York. He offers great insights into what makes a city tick and the role each of us plays in changing it for the better.
But first, Tim Keller.
Timothy Keller: Hi. This is Tim Keller and this is a high level talk about City Theory. And so what we're going to do is spend a little time first of all looking at the trends that are actually happening out there, but then looking at some of what those theories are and how Christians should be developing their own understanding of how a city changes.
The first trend of course is enormous growth. That's going to continue pretty much this entire century. And what we're going to see is, just as in Europe, eventually what happened in Europe and in Australia was about 75%, 80% of the people live in the cities. That's happening in North America, it's happening in Latin America. Actually Latin America's pretty close to that now. It will happen also in Asia, and probably the last place where is Africa, where it's going to take longer there to get to that 75%, 80%. But eventually, by the end of the century pretty much everywhere in the world, 75%, 80% of the people will be living in cities. What's our ministry response? Our ministry response is the people of the world are moving into cities faster than the church is, and the church needs to move into the cities with the people.
Number two, there's going to be greater connection between the cities. That is to say the great global cities are going to merge more and more into each other all the time. They are extraordinarily connected by travel, by technology. More and more you're going to see the people that live in one great global city. They go to the same schools, they work for the same companies, very often they eat the same kind of food, they have a lot of the same values, and therefore a ministry response here, the second ministry response, which is very important, that is what City to City believes is that we need to stay together. That is, we need to stay connected, because there's overlap between successful, effective ministry in one city and effective ministry in another city. That is, if you find a successful urban ministry in Tokyo, that is something that people in Africa and Europe and Latin America can learn from because the great cities are so much like each other.
Number three. Besides the growth and greater connection, number three, there's going to be greater and greater complexity. Traditionally, cities started from a center that had the greatest density and diversity, that is to say of buildings and operations. So you had more people and you had a mixture of retail and workplace and cultural institutions and government institutions and residences. And you had it all there. And then radiating out from that center you had other sorts of community, some of which were more dense, some of which were less dense, some of which were more prosperous, some of which were less prosperous. But that's probably going to stop.
That is to say, in the future cities are going to get more and more complicated, more and more complex. You're going to have multiple-nucleated cities or multinucleated cities, meaning you're going to have cities in which you have more than one center, downtown business center. You're also going to find that the cities are going to become less and less predictable all the time. And what is the ministry response here? It won't be enough for you just to love your city, dear friends. You're going to have to learn your city. You're going to have to be constant students of your city. One of the dangers of living in a city a long time is you think, "Well, I understand it. I've been here a long time." When you first move to a city you learn a lot about it and then you think you know it. But cities are constantly changing, and therefore you have to be constantly a student of your city.
Number four, declining birth rates. What happens in cities is in general the birth rates go down in cities because it's expensive, because it's more complicated. So in general people in cities have smaller families or fewer families than people in the countryside or in the towns. And what that does mean for us as ministry leaders is that not only do we as churches have to support people who want to get married and raise their children in the city... We have to be very supportive of that. Not just assume that that can be done easily. But there's also going to be more singles in cities than in other places, and we have to be just as affirming of them. And that's not easy to do, to really affirm the singles and at the same time really affirm the family. It is not easy to do, and yet that is what we're called to.
And lastly, there's just going to be greater economic inequality. A shrinking middle class in most cities. It's still going to be very, very... It's going to be still, to a great degree, cities are going to be a mixture of rich and poor. And churches have got to be a way of building bridges so that the rich are using their wealth to benefit the entire city. Churches are going to have to really be committed to doing justice in their cities and in their neighborhoods.
Now, that's the trends. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about are the theories of how cities actually work and change. what's interesting about these theories is to study them so that we can come to our own understanding of how a city works. The Chicago School which was developed at University of Chicago basically sees cities as places where community falls apart. It's a pretty negative view of cities. And it's a place where it says people move to cities because they have to to get jobs, but then their communities fall apart. And there's not the same accountability you have in a small town or in a rural area. The critique of that is that there really is more community in cities than they would like to let on. But they're partly right, that cities can be places of less accountability. It's easier to hide in cities and to be alone and to avoid community in cities than it is in a small town.
The second school is the Critical Urban School, which basically is a Marxist school, they see the city as basically a place of oppression. A place where the rich go to make money, accumulate money, and to basically oppress everybody else. And I, having lived in New York City now for 32 years, 33 years going on, there's much truth of that. There are powerful people who really, in cities, are able to control so much that goes on. And yet it's an oversimplification to say the city is a place of nothing but oppression. There are ways for immigrants, for example, to come here and to start with very little and to develop themselves. So it's not as simple as the rich just keep the poor down and there's no way to advance. On the other hand, it's largely true.
There's the Los Angeles School that sees the city as just incredibly complex, completely uncontrollable, totally unpredictable, fragmented and fractured, and you shouldn't try to make it any better. You should just try to survive and enjoy how strange it is.
That's the one that I think, as Christians, we have the most trouble with. In some ways I feel like it ends up being a pretty selfish approach, which is to say kind of enjoy the chaos. Get to a place where you can munch on your popcorn and watch it and just try your best to create your own little enclave of safety. A little too pessimistic, I think, for most Christians, and yet there's something to it. I already mentioned that one of the trends is that cities are not that easy to control.
Then lastly, there's the Urban Culturalist School of Richard Florida and others who see the city as a place where you go to develop yourself. And it's very positive. They see it as a place where you come and you develop yourself and you build cities that really help... Cities of diversity and beauty and where great ideas happen. And this is where this is where the culture changes. This is where the future happens. Very, very positive. Again, it's partly right. It's just partly right. And a Christian needs to say, "None of these things are ways that cities actually function." We need to be thinking about, well, what is a biblical approach to this? And the answer is the Bible actually speaks to virtually all of these things.
So there probably is a Christian theory of change, a way of saying, "Here's what we ought to be doing in cities in order to help them in small ways to change for the better for the people who live in them."
One last thing, and it is very last, is I'm going to quickly read off a little list of what I consider urban skills. You cannot function in cities without these urban skills, and here they are: You need to be very culturally-sensitive. That is that you really need to be able to not assume or stereotype people of different cultures but be very open to them, very sensitive to them, appreciate all of them. Know how to do cross-cultural communication. Extraordinarily important.
Number two: You need to be able to teach people how to integrate their faith in their work because many, many people in cities come in order to work. That's where Richard Florida's right. A lot of people come to cities to make their mark, and you have to be able to show Christians in particular how they aren't here just to get better careers but to serve people through a Christian integrating their faith with their work.
Number three: You need to know how to do complex evangelism. There is no one size fits all in the city. You cannot evangelize the same way with everybody. That doesn't work. Number four: You need to understand the very difficult to define ability to connect with urban people. Urban people tend to be more ironic. Urban people tend to have higher production values. Urban people don't like slickness, they like authenticity. Urban people are open to change. There's all sorts of small ways in which there's an urban sensibility that a minister in the city has to learn.
And then lastly I'll just say this, you have to be extraordinarily, extraordinarily connected to your neighborhood. As a pastor of a suburban church I could assume my neighborhood functioned well. The local school was going to work well, that the local social services worked well. But you can't assume that in your neighborhoods, and you need to be deeply involved with your neighborhood. Nevertheless, these are all kinds of ways in which we have to be living out what it means to be Christian ministers in the city.
Brandon O’Brien: Today’s guest, Thomas Dyja, is a unique kind of student of his city. And he has a theory about how they work.
A novelist and author of two city histories, the first is called the Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, and the second is a book we're talking about today, New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess and Transformation. Tom lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and lived there during most of the history he reports in his book.
Thomas Dyja: Yeah, pretty much all of it. I came to New York in 1980 to go to college and outside of 18 months in Boston, I think, it's all been in Manhattan, and most of that on the Upper West Side, the same place for the last 25 years. So it comes from a certain amount of lived experience.
Brandon O’Brien: In the first part of our conversation, Tom offers a survey history of New York City over roughly the last 40 years, in four major turning points. In the second part of our conversation he explains how understanding the city’s past helps him better appreciate the present and form a vision for its future. Stay tuned to the end for a practical and hopeful vision for how all of us have a role to play in the flourishing of our cities.
Tom’s account of New York City begins at the end of the 1970s when many familiar NYC destinations looked very different than they do today. Times Square, now one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, was at the time the “worst block in town.” And Bryant Park, now home to beautiful gardens, free cultural programs, and a famous winter village was the haunt of drug addicts and other hopeless, forgotten New Yorkers.
Thomas Dyja: The city had gotten to a place and I think an attitude that was supportive, that the city was a place where you did whatever you want wherever you wanted it. Bryant Park was a really great example of that, it was horrible. It was a seedy, frightening place, it had been made that way to a certain degree by, of course, Robert Moses who renovated it in the '30s, so that it was an oasis from the rest of the city.
But unfortunately, that created a hiding place. It was cut off from the rest of the city. My favorite detail was reading Malachi Martin, who was a defrocked Catholic priest/exorcist, however you want to go with that, but he wrote that "Bryant Park was where demons went to look for lost souls." If you were ever around there in the '70s and early '80s, that's pretty believable. It was really awful. Times Square was, and certainly 42nd Street, women, really it was not a place for them to be, just not necessarily safety, but certainly in terms of comfort. These were dangerous uncomfortable places that were just handed over.
You had someone, one of the great inspirations for a lot of things I've been talking about, the movement to bring people back in, to open it up, was a man named Holly Whyte, who was an urbanist, a writer who wrote a book called the Organization Man and then he went on to be someone who was involved in getting Jane Jacobs to be able to write Death and Life of Great American Cities. He was an urbanist and what he said, which I think has stuck with me, is that cities exist to make possible the face-to-face exchange between people. So everything that he advised, and he was really central and people went to him on these early, Bryant Park certainly and Times Square, was how do we open it up? How do we give the city back to people really and make it a place where they come?
Because a lot of the problems, I think even when we look today at the kind of fear that exists, which is maybe not at the same proportion as the reality of it, is there are fewer people in the central business district of New York, it's just not as full as it was. We just don't have the same number of people colliding wonderfully, now we have more colliding uncomfortably, but we don't have those, kind of things where we feel like we're in a village. It's happening in other parts of the city, but it's not happening as much as in Midtown, because of the office thing.
So Whyte is really I think being validated through the troubles we're having in Central Manhattan, certainly by that being the joy of the place, that being the energy of it, that pulse of people riding waves. Whyte was about that and the kind of ideas that spun out of that were really all tapped into that. How do we bring more people into places like Bryant Park, to Times Square, throughout the city to exchange and create and make good connections?
Brandon O’Brien: Dyja’s narrative traces four major acts or eras in the city’s history that correspond roughly to the administrations of four mayors. The first movement he call’s “Renaissance,” beginning in the final years of the 1970s and running through the 1980s, under the administration of Ed Koch.
Thomas Dyja: Wall Street, before the early '80s, it was like a 10:00 to 4:00 job and white-shoe'd went and it's where your grandparents put their money. Wall Street was not a big money spinner in a fundamental way. That's where we start to talk about the neoliberalism, the economics of this, and that was something that Koch, after coming to a city where they were so desperate for money, where they were borrowing money to pay back the debt, the interest on money that they were paying the interest on, it had gotten to that point.
So suddenly, almost overnight, you go through the first couple years of that Reagan recession basically in the early '80s, suddenly waves of money, waves of money, and the city suddenly has all kinds of cash. I think the Koch years roll, tap into that and roll ahead with like, "Oh, my gosh. We have all this, we've got to ride this." He looks, he works with or at least parallel with Mario Cuomo, who is governor for much of this time, and puts basically a huge amount of money behind affordable housing and housing creation, which to me lays the groundwork of change that happens after this.
You can't talk about safety in neighborhoods when there aren't neighborhoods, but when you suddenly have people, again, Holly Whyte, people in those places, that changes. But his real Achilles heel was on race, I think he made the city a much more divisive place by looking at economics and public policy in a way that, for someone who is supposed to be a liberal Democrat or even a centrist Democrat, his attitude towards Harlem, towards Black Brooklyn—really regretful.
Brandon O’Brien: Turning point 2, Dyja calls “Reconsideration,” a short period in the early 1990s that corresponded with the administration of David Dinkins, New York City’s first African-American mayor.
Thomas Dyja: So the Dinkins years are a reconsideration of, because by the end of Koch you've gone through Black Monday, the market has crashed, and there's this feeling like we've gone up, a big sugar rush basically, we've gone up, the city's gone crazy and then it crashes again. Dinkins is, for a while, a walk back to some of those policies that were considered much more liberal, that are about getting money and attention into the neighborhoods, supporting people of color.
The reality is that the comeback that the city makes is really, the foundation is laid there. The crime that has gone through the roof by the end of the Koch years, once Dinkins comes in, it begins to go down in every precinct, in every category, every month it just goes down, down, down, down, down. Bratton comes in for the Transit Police, the ideas that end up being enacted on the streets during Giuliani are worked on in the subways, during Dinkins. A lot of the ideas, the idea of not just making the city safe, but making people feel safe is done and started in the subways.
But it's also the period of culture wars, the beginning of all of that discourse about multiculturalism really is happening under Dinkins and it begins there.
Brandon O’Brien: Turning point 3 are the Rudy Guliani years, a period Dyja calls “Reformation.”
Thomas Dyja: The people really who are behind Giuliani, that the sense is, as much as the city is out of control, it's that people who have been in control are no longer in control. So when we look at Giuliani, this is after the Crown Heights riot, which is obviously a sign of something not being under control, Giuliani takes advantage of that, of the squeegee men, of that kind of sense of chaos in the city, which obviously gets pumped up, because it's election time, and Giuliani moves in built on a lot of those ideas that Koch had been put forward.
They were turning into a way to control the city and control people, as opposed to what we talked about at the beginning, that Holly Whyte, "Let's throw it out there and let's see what happens." Holly Whyte was not somebody who would ever, he would say one or two people, unhoused people in a park, that's really not a problem, 10 is. So the idea of clean sweeps or something like that, he was about creating an ecosystem, a place where there's some space for everyone, we just have to figure out the right balance to make this work, as opposed to zero tolerance.
These phrases we get under Giuliani, where there's this crime stat and the sense of policing as being somehow a perfectible thing, that you were actually going to be able to get rid of it, and every week, every month your precinct had to come up, stand and deliver, which was great, accountability spread across the whole department, but it also created a drive to not necessarily create safety for people, but to create numbers for the police officers. That led into some very, very, very dark and dangerous places for the city as a whole and for people who were not necessarily being seen by many other people in the city. So the Giuliani years are a reformation, it's a sense of, "We're going to take ..." and I mean that in a Savonarola kind of way, "We're going to take control of this city and run it." At the beginning, it felt good, because he was so driven. He was somebody who was working around the clock to just make the city better. He rode in on a lot of things that had already been happening with, under Dinkins, and rolled them forward.
The housing changes had already been going on, neighborhoods coming back. So when Malcolm Gladwell writes this piece in the New Yorker about cities being, streets being full again and kids on bikes and stuff, 10 years before there hadn't been any houses there. There were no stoops for old people to sit on, there were no kids on bikes, these were vacant lots. So the fact that the people were there was a causal thing for the safety being there, as well as the police. So that's up to the long play on Giuliani, I think.
Brandon O’Brien: The final act in Dyja’s account is “Reimagination,” Michael Bloomburg’s mayorship from 2001 to 2013. Bloomberg’s years marked both economic shift and a new approach to managing the chaos of New York.
Thomas Dyja: Right, right. You had basically, part of the end of Giuliani is also the tech boom. This was, the Yankees were winning, the greatest team ever, it was safer than it ever was, we had a new economy that did not really rely on industrial things the same way, right? So it was going to be the new tech economy and everyone was going to buy Qualcomm and be billionaires, right? So it was all perfect, and then of course it collapsed in many, many ways, and then there was 9/11, which happens in a recession basically.
Bloomberg, who is a complete dark horse, no one expects him to become mayor, ends up being mayor and he brings in a surprising group of people really and turns the page in some positive ways from the Giuliani years. He brings in people into office, his kitchen table in the administration, pushing accountability in a positive way, a business structure of accountability, "We're going to get things done." And some very forward looking thinking about how the city now has to exist in a technical, digital mindset, because that's where he'd made his billions of dollars.
Problem was that this envisioning of the city as a luxury city, which is something that I think he says not the way it's necessarily taken. I think what he was saying was this is a place, the glories of New York are that it should attract the best and the brightest of the world. That's a good thing, I think we can all agree that, we want to create jobs and culture and all this good stuff, that it is a place we should be aspiring to be the greatest place to be.
The downside of that was that the sense was we're going to now make everything happen to attract those people. It's an old theory of the city exists to draw in capital, versus a place that's trying to grow its own. This was a dressed up fancier version of that. But it really did, we get a sense during the Bloomberg years, I certainly did, I know a lot of other people did, that everything that was happening was suddenly about bringing in tourists, about bringing in investment. We talked less about schools and more about Hudson Yards, which exists for tourists. The sense of rebuilding the city for us, we really, really started to lose control of.
By the end, I think people really feel it slips out of our grasp and the city exists for Russian oligarchs who live in supertalls and that this is the point. On the ground, that safety that exists and grows during the Bloomberg years, we see is, or at least we're told is the product of the policing that's going on. The reality in numbers is that it was very oppressive, it was destructive in a lot of parts of the city, and what it produced was I think hard to measure or defend. Once it went away, that sense, Commissioner Kelley, "Oh, my god. The city's going to become a dystopian hellscape." Guess what? It didn't. Crime continued to go down after stop-and-frisk was gone.
So what was really underlying that change, I think we still haven't fully mined, and at this moment when we're talking so hard and loud about crime, every conversation starts with it now, but then you pull out the numbers and you're like, "Yes, here are some things that are up, here are some things that are down." It is not as clear as, and nothing like it was in the past. So we need to have some really deep conversations about what is really happening going forward, not just with crime, but how we talk about crime.
Brandon O’Brien: Okay, so there’s the overview. Dyja’s New York, New York, New York is a sometimes-dizzying account of the city’s chaos and change over the last 40 years. I highly recommend it. But in addition to the historical sweep of the story, I wanted to know what, in Tom Dyja’s opinion, really makes New York City tick. What is a city, when you get right down to it?
Thomas Dyja: When I sold this book, the idea of the book, my editor set me off on a journey, because I really didn't have the answers. I said, "I want to figure out this stuff." So they, on a flyer, let me figure it out. So I started with different models, different mindsets of how the city functioned and how we got to some of these things, how we found people who came up with these ideas, pushed these policies, and it became really, really clear really early that you couldn't just say, "Good guys, bad guys, black, white."
Especially in New York when you talk about that policy level or that city level, you're also talking about an entire world of nonprofits, philanthropy, all kinds of organizations that are around it, that support it, that have people coming in and out of City Hall and out of City Hall, who are just that whole scape, eco-scape that surrounds the city management, that drifts into the streets. You find people on different topics in different places. I could look at David Rockefeller and say, "Bad guy, David Rockefeller." Then you see he turns up here and he does that, and there is some interesting ideas in conversations and involvement that made it really hard to just say "good, bad" on things.
That brought me back to that generation of people who were looking at things and saying, "What's going to work? How can this work? How do we figure out how to make this work?" So a lot of that work is not done when things are smashing into each other. You see more and more that it is, as I was re-conceiving of what it was, and falling back to social network theory, that is how the city is built. Not between blocks of interest, but between networks. when we talk about early 20th century, we're talking about unions, we're talking about the church, we're talking about big blocks of interests, parties and stuff.
Over time, that erodes. Labor power becomes a more diffuse thing, a lot of those things culturally just begin to, not disintegrate, but come apart and we're approached more as individuals. Once we get to technology, when we get to the internet, when we get to TV, everything along the way, it drives us to personal interests. Which is great, it's us creating our own networks, our own affinity groups and things like that, but it also takes away our individual power in a lot of ways as well. That idea of everyone getting in there and voting in a certain way, everyone getting in there and striking, everyone getting in there and really showing the power of people together, that gets lost.
Unfortunately, I do think that there's a tier of people who were onto that and have preyed on that to no small degree, that kind of picking people off by their affinities, as opposed to saying, "Listen, we're all in this boat and we need to work together on that." So that is something you see, those are certainly the negatives of it, the positives of it are a rethinking of culture. That is when we talk about multiculturalism, as opposed to the sense of there being one culture and everything else is weirdly attached to the side, even though that one culture is very much defined by a small group of people who have an awful lot of things in common, the great thing about multiculturalism is it opens it up.
That idea of that progress in the arts is all about that one path, suddenly we are blown up into seeing all these other ways of thinking and being, other cultures, other genders, other things. Culture now, as opposed to worrying about it avant-garde, a phrase you don't hear a lot anymore, frankly it's about trying to make paths and connections between all these other ways of being, which is fabulous, but it's really hard and it's scary and it's challenging and we're still looking for guides to help us through. That is a way to me, how I try to look at artists who are working in those spaces, as guides through planets.
That's the good part of that kind of network to me is a city really functioning, it's the model I eventually came to, it's like a brain where you just have billions of synapses, who are all of us, who are connecting in that Holly Whyte way, and when we connect, things happen. The energy is shared, the energy is traded, the energy is moved along, and when we have people who are not isolated, who are bashing into each other in good ways, and sometimes bad things come out of it, and that's where the energy is, and of course that was the tragedy of COVID, which was basically that shut down. We're still slowly I think getting back to creating that again, but that was, if you were going to pick something to pull the plug on a functioning city, that was it, stopping connection.
Brandon O’Brien: I love that metaphor of the city as a brain, and the way the different parts are serving different functions, they're all interconnected through these networks. It also seems like a really apt metaphor, because I think all of us have felt the sluggishness in our brains because of COVID, to think of that shutdown, shutting off those connections and that malaise or the fatigue of that COVID time, that's in some ways playing out in our, each of our heads, is also playing out in the city.
Thomas Dyja: Right. The city, that metaphor I came to of a brain just with all of us being individual synapses and going back to that Holly Whyte idea of connection, of the city really functioning at a high level when you just have people banging into each other, creating good things, bad things sometimes, but it is the energy of the city. COVID really was the worst possible thing you could imagine in a situation like this, was that it just killed ... We spent so much time, years, decades creating connection, in a fundamental way that is the work of what the city's trying to do, what church communities are doing, all kinds of groups around the city are about creating connection, they're about involving people.
The deepest poverty in the city is a matter of connection. It's making sure someone's looking in on people, about knowing that they're okay. COVID was just a way of blowing all of that up. So I think we really still are working our way slowly towards reconnecting with people, and I think it is important. When we talk about crime, people's reluctance to come back into the city, I think there is a certain, we need to think in terms of those connections again and not just in that '70s sense of, "I need to run inside and lock the door."
We really do need to be looking out there and saying, "Why are these things happening? Why are these people here in this state? Why are we like this right now?" There was a positive aspect to COVID, that was when I was finishing the book. I hadn't expected to be finishing this book in the face of that, but it was that we were asking some big questions about cities. We were asking questions about how they should work in the future, are they working? It is sad to me that we look now and housing prices are just Crazy Eddie, they're insane, they're really untouchable. That's a terrible problem. If anything is going to kill us more than COVID it's going to be turning this into Snowpiercer, some magical dystopian place where you've got rich people up here and everyone down there, which people have been talking about for decades, since the '70s.
But we really are physically seeing it when we talk about supertalls and things like that, where you literally have people living above everyone else. We all need to ask those questions and take those actions about these things in our daily lives. That was something that I really got out of the book was looking at, as much as we talk about the groups and the networks, a lot of the things that happen in this book and over these 40 years are the result of people who are obsessed with things, people who say, "I really see way to change this. I see what we need to do and I am going to just grab this bone and stick with it."
There are so many people who make so many profound changes by their commitment and their obsession. Obviously, we can't all do that, I think that "you can change the world" thing is a bit hopeful, but you can find those people. Finding those people and lending yourself to them, as opposed to pretending that tweeting something is going to actually, this one's going to move the needle, folks. Giving our time in actual service to people who really are moving forward and trying to do things is part of our job here, as I think people who live in the city.
Brandon O’Brien: How does knowing the city’s story, as you’ve told it here, help us better understand how to move forward?
Thomas Dyja: I think one of the things we've rarely taken into account in cities and things like that is generation, is time passing. Me, in 1980 is not me now. The people who you're looking at in 1985 are not who they are now. The people who are running companies and buying buildings aren't even born at that point. So we have to not look at that as a static, that people do change and one of the jobs of history or whatever this is, is to give those people some background and help them maybe not feel like they need to rediscover everything. That people have done some of this work and that in the face of change, which is the whole job of cities and a good living city is a thing that's always changing.
They're swampy, fecund places, that's where things come from, but it can also be dislocating and you can spend a lot of time, if you don't know what has happened, and be able to come up with ideas that can work. The housing crisis in the '80s, amazing people did amazing work and created crazy numbers of connections that I don't know if many people don't know about. So a lot of the work is generational, of looking at people in their 20s and 30s, and rather than bike Twitter, which is basically a bunch of people yelling at each other in a phone booth, that we need to help people look at the city in a much more connected way, to try to look at systems as opposed to just hobby horses, and see how ...
I like bikes, I am a Citi Bike guy, how does that fit into everything? How does that fit in with people, think holistically and big about the city. I think that's, rather than your friends who do all the things that you like together and you're positive they're right, which is what people have been doing forever, make that multiculturalism vision come to life. Who is not in this room? Who are we not talking to? As opposed to seeing that as a problem or as a plus, or as an enemy, it is a problem to be solved. They need to be in the room with you somehow. I'm talking about a New York level, I'm not talking about Congress, I'm talking about your neighborhood.
How do we make those changes in our neighborhood? How do we talk about a homeless shelter in our neighborhood in a way that is not purely defending my tax values, or my real estate value, but how does it make this neighborhood work? Is it how we want it to be? How do we answer these things? So that relies on creating networks or connections, at the very least, that involve more people than just the ones you're familiar with. I'm hopeful, I have two kids in their 20s and one of them is in city government and it's encouraging to see how many people around her are in this generation, who really are out there working.
But like so many other things in the world right now, that sense of, that social media sense of how things really get done is more dislocated than ever. It is not done by just tweeting and holding up a sign, it's a lot of hard work, conversation, engagement. I think it's one of the reasons why I'm very inspired in this book by Saul Alinsky, who shows up in really both of my books, or at least his work, community organizing is to me enormous. It is a huge story in this city, and community development. That is done by bringing together people who aren't necessarily on the same team, but you bring them together to achieve a goal, and that Alinsky sense of practicality, of just tangibility, let's get something done and we're not going to worry about the politics, we're going to try to get a stop sign. We're going to try to get fair pricing at the grocery store.
We're going to look at housing and see what we can do and how we do it, and we're going to look at it through the prism of our neighborhood and this place. That needs to be supported, respected, and honestly it's out there. I can't tell you how many groups I know of that are out there, but they don't get, it's hard to portray, it's seen as something less I think in the media, but I think it's the lifeblood of the city and it's where good things happen.
Brandon O’Brien: New York is a unique city in North America or in the United States, how much do you think the social networking theory and the idea of the local community development work and things that are so important in the book and historically in the city of New York, how much do you feel like those principles apply to people who are living in Dallas or living in Chicago or living in Phoenix or LA, in cities that have such a different tone and temperature? Are the principles of how we bring about change in the cities, for the better and for the worse, pretty much the same, do you think? Or is this a unique case?
Thomas Dyja: No, I think they're very applicable in cities. It's something I think that, certainly we talk about community activism, community development, you are talking about literally places where there are communities. I think the issue where it's hard is in places that used to have that. I know organizers who are trying to work in West Virginia and Ohio and places that used to have thriving downtown's and communities, and sowing them back together, then creating these kinds of organizations is next to impossible.
There is the one thing that we haven't mentioned, and I think we need to, is immigration and how important that is for cities, how crucial it was in the whole story of New York over these years, but that does bring us very much into questions of networks and people coming into networks and building cities based on networks, and how you transition from one to another, the cultural one into the city at large. In places where contact is not valued, if you're living out in 500 acres doing great work, but human contact and connection is in a very different nature than it is in a city where when you go get your bacon, egg, cheese and your newspaper, you're already seeing more people than some people are going to see for a week.
I think it is an urban thing, I think the issues, you can get into the weeds about density and zoning and things like that when you're talking about a Houston or Chicago, all these different cities, and you're really then talking about the statistics and the data and the technical aspects of how do we create that kind of energy. So I do think that any city has that possibility in it, and we're really just talking about how to make it happen.
Brandon O’Brien: Thank you. There's so much in here I wish we could have had more time to unpack. I encourage everyone, especially New Yorkers, but everyone who's listening to pick up New York, New York, New York by Thomas Dyja. Thank you very much for being with us today.
Thomas Dyja: Thank you for having me, it was great.
Brandon O’Brien: Thomas Dyja’s book New York, New York, New York is available wherever books are sold. (I’m partial to bookshop.org.)
Next time on the podcast we have guest Andrew Katay, from Sydney, Australia, who argues that in order to reach our cities with the gospel, we have to think smaller: in terms of sub-cities and neighborhoods. You won’t want to miss it.
How to Reach the West Again is a production of Redeemer City to City.
Tim Keller’s presentation on City Theory was recorded by Andrew Walker. Today’s interview was recorded at Gotham Production Studios in New York City. Everything was edited by Lee Jerkins.
The episode was produced, written, and hosted by Brandon O’Brien. Our associate producer is Braeden Gregg.
Redeemer City to City is a non-profit organization co-founded by Tim Keller and supported by generous people like you. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform, leave a review, and consider making a gift to support the work at www.redeemercitytocity.com/give.