Why I Write About Cities

On certain mornings, Montréal feels like a conversation I’ve been having for years. The streets aren’t new, but they’re never the same: the sound of a broom on wet pavement, a woman carrying a basil plant home from the market, the half-finished mural that already belongs to the neighbourhood. Cities reveal themselves through these minor gestures—acts so ordinary they almost vanish.

I began writing about cities because I kept noticing how easily those gestures disappear. Urban life, at least the way we measure it, tends to flatten into data: transit counts, zoning codes, emissions targets. Yet behind every number lies a moral choice—what kind of noise we consider tolerable, whose rest counts as rest, which fences feel protective and which ones feel cruel. The moral life of a city hides inside its infrastructure.

When I left academic research, I thought I was abandoning theory. What I discovered instead was that the streets were full of it. Every sign, bench, or bylaw carries an idea about how people should live together. Some express trust: a public piano, an open garden gate, a box of free books left on a stoop. Others express fear: spikes, surveillance, light that never dims. Together they form what I’ve come to call the moral aesthetics of the contemporary city—the way design makes our ethics visible.

Writing about this means paying attention to what is usually ignored. It means treating a noise complaint or a park renovation as philosophical evidence, and listening for the values embedded in texture and sound. I’m interested in how care and control coexist in the same space: how a rule can protect and exclude at once, how a gesture can be generous without being noticed.

I don’t write as a planner or an expert, but as a citizen walking through the moral weather of the city. The essays gathered here—on fences, trust, rest, transparency, and renewal—are attempts to name what I see and feel in that weather. They belong to Montréal, but they could happen anywhere that people build and maintain a shared life.

Every act of design is a small theory about human nature. A bench suggests what we believe about rest; a fence, what we believe about danger; a patch of green, what we believe deserves to grow. I write about cities because I want to understand which of those beliefs we’ve built into our streets, and whether we still recognize ourselves in them.