Eyes on the Street

When I explore a new city, I try to remember that I’m not on vacation: I have a job to do.

The work is often hard, but the strategy is simple: start out low and gradually seek higher ground.

If the city has decent transit, I’ll take it—but only for long trips. For the most part, I travel on foot.

My job is to figure out how the people and things within this place work. And this I can only do walking on my own feet, touching with my own hands, and seeing with my own eyes.

Who designs the trash cans? Who picks up the trash? Who cleans the parks? Who builds them? Who pollutes them, and how, and why? Who prevents crime? Who solves it? Who cleans the graffiti? Who decides what is graffiti and what is not?

Who makes sure the lights come on? Who conducts the trains, and who takes care that they run on time?

Who makes money, and who simply earns it? Who wears the stylish clothes, and who carries themselves with little imagination? Who owns the warmly lit, well-appointed properties, and who lives in the modest homes? What do each do with their days?

And why are the utility poles bent that way? Why are these manhole covers shaped strangely?

Why this, and more importantly, why not that?

There are many questions I ask AI as I walk about, but never these questions, exactly—not while I am walking. For these are the sacred questions, the ones that give my walk purpose.

The only way to answer these questions is with observation, conversation, imagination, and introspection. I try to do as much as I can of each as I walk.

And I seek continually higher ground. Sometimes that means riding in an elevator; sometimes it means climbing a hill in the mud. It can be tedious, and it can ruin my shoes. But it doesn’t matter, because if I do my job well, it’ll all be worth it once I reach the right altitude.

The moment when I find just the right perspective on the city skyline, and I can turn around and grasp, just for a bit, that sense of the infinite, that magisterial complexity, that unbounded sense of possibility, that sum total of the joy and anguish, mediocrity and savvy, audacity and boredom, I have encountered on my walk—compressed, somehow, into the piddling number of photons I can see with my eyes.

What I see in these moments, I know, is one of the only opportunities I have to reflect on what it is to “govern,” or to “study policy,” because it is one of my only opportunities to look at the economy with my own eyes, and to hear it with my own ears.

On my best days, I remember those views, and I remember the chords I have heard cities play. I know any good work I’ll ever do in my life will be shallow arpeggiations of those chords, dim echoes of the orchestras I’ve heard after lengthy walks to high ground.