Against the convenient city

Among the essential innovations in urban life in the last decade, the spread of e-bike networks, and the increase in the number of delivery riders who use e-bikes, facilitated by mobile technologies, have done as much as anything to fragment the connections on which any kind of day-to-day civic sensibility might be built.

The first, e-bikes, are a quicker way to carry out errands, to get home late at night, to cycle somewhere without arriving drenched in sweat. But they are certainly not stylish. Indeed, Lime bikes seem to be designed to be ugly, perhaps a cheap form of advertising. And they are decidedly global. A Lime bike in New York is the same as one in London or Paris. London’s ‘Boris bikes’ or Paris’ Vélib’ network may be ugly in their own way; they at least have a concrete, local visual identity.

The marriage of convenience with ugliness reaches its apotheosis in the modern take-away delivery system. In every city, especially the cities with high numbers of students in dense blocks of flats, from dinner time into the small hours, the streets are transformed into a racecourse for e-bike riders. Central Glasgow is the worst I have ever seen. The only crowds are men loitering as they wait for orders. The streets – and, shamefully, the pavements, too – are flooded at peak hours with riders, almost silent but very fast. It simply does not feel like somewhere the city’s suburban citizens might enjoy visiting.

Vincenzo Latronico’s 2022 satire of Berlin hipsterdom Perfection follows an Italian couple who work as freelancers in online marketing. Latronico charts their story from early optimism – moving to Berlin in their twenties felt fresh and marked them out from their childhood friends who stayed in Italy – to inertia and creeping boredom. They live in a hollow, sanitised, Instagram-friendly world, yet Latronico notes the flatshare is always dusty. They frequently order in takeaways, Vietnamese an especial favourite; they don’t speak German, though they have lived in Berlin for over a decade; they work from home, entering daily into a fugue state, minds lit up by endless scrolling as they flit between ‘projects’. The couple’s Berlin story culminates with them renting out the apartment, so that they can take ever more elaborate holidays, and, eventually, work from anywhere.

This is the other side of the class dynamic of the contemporary city – who orders the Vietnamese? Who expects it to arrive seamlessly, in a matter of minutes? Who no longer thinks to walk to the restaurant?

Making time is one of the most significant challenges for the city-dweller. And so aiming for convenience is a compelling response. Delivery isn’t cheap, but the convenience can be genuinely helpful; medicine and food arriving speedily for the ill and bedbound. After the England-Norway quarter-final, I did take an e-bike home from South London. It meant that I got home about 20 minutes faster than I otherwise would have done. But part of me wished I had taken the underground – the tube is a comedy of manners post-midnight on a normal weekend – and regretted the silent route I took home.

The convenient version of urban society which we have brought to such a pitch in the last few years is a hollowed-out version of older dreams of city life. The burghers of the Hansa towns, the denizens of the Italian city-states, and the heroes of Britain’s great 19^th-century cities believed in making money, in convenience, in speed. But their cities were thoroughly peopled and noisy. When reforming mayor of Birmingham Joseph Chamberlain brought a vast thoroughfare through the slums of the inner-city, he wanted it to be full of people, shopping, pursuing the daily opportunities urban life offers to satisfy every taste and every mood. To live in cities is to rub along, sometimes with no little discomfort, with hundreds, if not thousands, of people we will never speak to, and never know. But the rubbing along is part of the point; avoiding it would require city-dwellers to live somewhere else altogether. And that is the dream of suburbia.