Re:Stockholm’s deepest subway station is also an ecological ...
by atombender on Monday August 20, 2018 @12:52PM
(#17801522)
That's a weird metric to measure a city by. NYC is a vibrant city whose interestingness is intrinsically tied to the unique, sometimes weird blend of people inhabiting it. But tying this colourfulness to the amount of grime in the subway seems like a strawman to me. NYC isn't what it is because of smelly bums in subway cars, leaking ceilings, "showtime" kids or schizophrenic maniacs wielding knives, all of which feature heavily in the subway.
Secondly, there are plenty of cities with clean, "quality" civic spaces that are also have plenty of weirdness and colourful culture, including Berlin, Paris, Barcelona and Moscow.
It’s not so much that the bar should be higher, so much that leaving the bar as low as it is provides a signal that contrasts the range of sky high standards New York also makes possible in other ways.
Yes, the subway sucks, but New York’s tendency is to let the full scope of humanity simply exist out in the open, as is, warts and all. This is the philosophy I take away from it.
Should the world standardize a mandatory minimum quality upon public civic spaces? If we did, wouldn’t that require cracking down on deviations from the prescribed norm? Wouldn’t that drive people out, possibly sending some to a place much worse that a dirty smelly subway tunnel? The answers to these questions aren’t cut and dry.