The European Model for Falling in Love with Your Hometown

James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, insists that there is an even deeper way we pay for this folly of poor urban planning. “It matters that our cities are primarily auto storage depots,” he says. “It matters that our junior high schools look like insecticide factories. It matters that our libraries look like beverage distribution warehouses.”

When so much of what you see on a typical day is so drab, it’s hard to care about what happens to these places. I have fallen in love with Paris, Stockholm, Oxford, Florence and Gouda, Netherlands, as well as New York, New Orleans and even Madison, Wisconsin, because they stir something in my soul. It’s more than scenic charm; it’s a feeling they inspire as I walk around them with my family or soak up their atmosphere just sitting at a café table or on a public bench.

It’s been 15 years since I began roaming European cities in search of ideas that we could take advantage of here in America, and I am happy to report that I’m not alone. Many people, it seems, have returned from Barcelona, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Toronto or Portland, Oregon fired up by what they’ve seen and wanting to do something like it at home. Historic preservation and sidewalk cafés, tapas bars and Irish pubs, bicycle lanes and farmers’ markets all owe some of their popularity to inspiration from abroad.

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