The architecture of altruism

Some musings inspired by this...

The city is feeling more and more like home. I love the hushed weekends when we're as quiet as a suburb and can sit on our balconies under the sun, but I like it too when on Monday everyone comes back to town. The strangers passing left and right beneath my gaze feel every day more like My People. How good it is that my building's architecture should, in its own small way, encourage this sense of connectedness and community! There is something wholesome and affirming about being among other people - though it has the potential to be destructive and maddening too. I wonder if sometimes the privileges that money can buy do us harm - we move up in the world, buy a car and a house with a private lawn and only spend time in the company of those we choose. Might there not be something good about being forced to catch the bus with your kids or to take them to the local park to play on the grass? Perhaps it is, afterall, better to live in a block of flats than in your very own house? But when the block is twenty stories tall, the architecture brutally functional and absent of imagination, and the playground small and watched, then somehow the mass of people feels anti-community. It's an odd balance.