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What is a City?

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"What should a city be, anyway?" asked a recent Los Angeles Times editorial. Adding (perhaps because the question implied an answer you couldn't live with), "Cities are optional."

But are they?

The current substitute for a real consensus about the form of civic life is a fake standard called "core services," as if a municipality only served a functional role. So much trash collected. So many acre feet of water delivered. So many gallons of sewage pumped. But beyond that, the metrics get murky. Does one cop make you safe? Would 100 make you 100 times safer? And how would you measure the degree of safety you feel? How would you commodify your sense of being safe?

And if you can't provide a consumer-based metric of public safety - surely a "core service" - how will you measure the value to you of a park on the other side of town? Of a museum you never visit, containing art that offends you? Of anything that benefits your neighbor but not you?

To put it in blunt consumer terms: If you don't want it - even if the Times thinks it's a "core service" - why should you pay for it?

The Times spoke of "discipline" in the process of triaging which municipal services to keep and those to abandon, as if we all agreed on what "core services" are and agreed, too, on how to measure the return on investment that would justify your paying for them.

The Times also misunderstands the status of a state in the provision of services and the status of a city. Cities have always been pre-eminently the providers of "quality of life" services. Many states (and counties) during the 19th and early 20th century did little to sustain communities beyond roads, prisons, and courts.

Framing the future of Los Angeles on the basis of identifying which services the state and counties must perform and which services the city can therefore give up is both bad policy analysis and bad history.

California's broad array of services (state, county, special district, and city) reflects a particular history, grounded in the late 19th century fight against monopolistic railroads, which continued into the 20th century, leading to a vast expansion of roles permitted to cities, counties, and special districts to provide new kinds of services in new ways.

We don't know what Los Angeles is. We never have, except as a container for extravagant dreams and the inevitable discontent that follows extravagance. But Los Angeles is surely something like a city.

Cities have a moral purpose greater and more necessary than as providers of ambiguously defined "core services."

The purpose of a city is the creation of a maximal number and diversity of public settings in which citizens might acquire the ability to sympathize with the condition of others and act on redressing those conditions. It is this sympathy from which justice comes.

Consumers have no incentive to be just. But citizens - and their representstives - are called to be.

The image on this page (a collection of portraits of Los Angeles mayors) was made by Flickr user frankjmtz. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

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