Dysfunctional Cities: Where Did We Go Wrong?
Lee Hardy, Professor of Philosophy
Christian Reflection
Cities and Towns Issue, 2006

In 1990 I spent a sabbatical year with my family in the German city of Cologne. Despite all the things that make living in a foreign country difficult, it was for us a year of unalloyed urban joy. We did not own a car. But that didn’t matter in the least. I rode a bike to the university. The church we attended was but a four-block walk from our apartment. The elementary school my children attended was similarly close by and required no bus. The main street of our neighborhood, three blocks away, offered all we needed on a daily basis—a grocery store, a bakery, a flower shop, a newsstand, a stationery store, two bookstores, and several restaurants. The Stadtwald, a ten-mile-long semicircular park that rings the western edge of the city, was just a ten-minute walk along a canal, putting playgrounds, tennis courts, tearooms, lakes with boat rentals, a petting zoo, and ice-cream vendors within our family’s pedestrian reach. On weekends we often took the bus downtown. On the plaza before the great Cologne cathedral there was always something free and festive going on—church choirs, street musicians, sidewalk artists, magicians, mimes, and acrobats. There were no neighborhoods to avoid. There were no slums. German society may have its share of problems, but putting together humane and coherent cities is not one of them.

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