What Makes a City Beautiful ?

IT’S all just a matter of opinion, isn’t it? Nobody can agree on aesthetics, right? The Anglo-Swiss writer Alain de Botton demolishes these myths and others in a video on “How to Make an Attractive City.” Slate has a fascinating story on the topic, and breaks out the writer’s six criteria for urban beauty.

By the part that interests me — and speaks to this site’s concern for the overlap of culture and economics — is this bit on the way cultural relativism works out in the real world.

“We think that no one has a right to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly,” de Botton says, noting that there are “good reasons” no one vacations in Frankfurt, Germany, or Birmingham, England. “[L]et’s stop being dangerously relativistic about this. Yes, there is such a thing as beauty. Sydney and San Francisco and Bath and Bordeaux have it, and most other places don’t. The proof lies in the tourist statistics. Let’s stop saying that beauty is just in the eye of the beholder. That’s just a gift to the next wealthy idiot who wants to put up a horrible tower.”

This can operate as a metaphor for a lot of cultural issues since the ’80s or so. (“Very, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful,” he says. “Embarrassingly, the more appealing ones tend to be old.”)

De Botton is about my age — a fellow Xer — and though he is European, he grew up in the age of postmodernism and neoliberalism, which I am increasingly convinced are the same things.