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If you find Bedford Falls (in 'It's a Wonderful Life') cute then you will like this. In fact this passage describes precisely what I don't find attractive; what city life at its best is not about.

City life is above all not primarily about community.

More about community, the myth of community later; but for now let me say that I simply don't feel that is what my little patch is about. What does all my local colour add up to? Community? Hardly; we barely know each other. We don't even know each others names; I don't know the name of the man who has sold me a newspaper daily for ten years. I don't especially want to know it. I like the man; his laconic contempt for august public figures on the front page of his newspapers ("Fuck 'em") his amused disdain when I pay with coppers ("Wossis then? you give me fuckin' charity money innit?"). I admire his cool, handsome sons in their posh school uniforms, hungry for a better life (Internet fortunes, City jobs) than their dad had , kicked out of Kenya along with other Asians in the seventies.

Tight-knit community? I don't think so; very loose-knit community. We don't know each other well; we don't "look out" for each other; this is certainly not Hudson Street; but then was Hudson Street ever "Hudson Street"? Deyan Sudjic in his book The 100 Mile City thinks that Jacobs (and others) sentimentalise, ruralise the truth of the much less cosy nature of metropolitan society.

We are not looking at a complex highly textured society here in Acre Lane; true, an urban anthropologist might well discover his own complexities in it; could no doubt identify the type of minimal cohesion that makes it operate; shake his head, (if of a leftish bent) over the 'anomie' it revealed; for there is nothing like the (supposed) intimacy of the rural community in Acre Lane. Instead something looser, loose to the point that, (to cite a recent case in a German city apartment block), a mummified corpse could be found upright in front of a television with a four year old newspaper on its knee. That is a shocking fact; but for me it is not socially shocking. I do not feel obliged to wring my hands and draw dire conclusions about city life. Indeed, the shocking looseness of the city is an intoxicant to the young incomer from the provinces. It is the city at its best. Spengler, darkly suspicious of the city, correctly recognised, at least, that modern urban humanity was "neo nomadic". Even earlier Adam Smith (cited likewise by Carl Schorske in his essay 'The Idea of the City') considered the city's enterprising denizens to be "socially unreliable, labile."

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