Show Me the Magic

Late last month, I found myself squinting against the sun, strolling around the historic part of downtown Huntsville, Alabama, with my longtime friend, Jacqueline. Per usual, I was keeping my eyes peeled for interesting historic buildings and small businesses worth visiting, but more than anything, I was looking for people. We pushed up a hill and turned a corner near an area with a cluster of old buildings and small shops, exactly the kind of place you might expect to find folks milling about. Yet, to my disappointment, the sidewalk was completely empty. “Where are all my people at!?” I called out. 

I was mostly joking, but not entirely. This wasn’t our first trip downtown and, each time, I found myself puzzled by the insane abundance of parking cars and parking decks, but the absence of people. On the evening of Jacqueline’s birthday, we had dressed up for a nice dinner and couldn’t find a single person to take our photo outside of a pretty building. 

Observing street life is my favorite part of visiting a new city. Even if I don’t eat out, buy anything, or attend any interesting cultural programs, if a city affords me a chance to observe people bustling about doing whatever it is that people do in that town, that gives me a much richer picture of what gives that city its unique identity and character.  

(Source: Unsplash/Kate Trysh.)

The Magic of the City 

In Chapter 10 of their wonderful anthology, A Pattern Language, the authors write about “the magic of the city,” referring mainly to the cultural amenities that give a city its sense of vitality and energy: museums, operas, fine dining, etc. Neighborhoods offering such amenities, they argue, will be among the most desirable to residents, but they can often become the costliest parts of town to visit. To curb this, the authors recommend the pattern of distributed cultural hubs all around the city (one hub per 300,000 residents) so that it’s more feasible for more people to experience the magic they offer. 

The authors spend most of the chapter exploring the question of how these neighborhoods ought to be situated and how many should exist in a city relative to its population size. But what’s most interesting about this chapter is not the idea of a city containing magic, nor the idea that a city should have distributed cultural hubs. Rather, it’s the idea (mostly implied) that containing and offering such magic is part of what means to be a successful city and that seeking out and participating in that magic is part of what it means to be a human being. 

But what is the magic of the city? The magic of the city is unique to each place. It’s the “ballet of the streets” that we see as we stroll open-air markets hosted on car-free streets. It’s that feeling we get when we turn a corner at dusk and stumble upon diners eating outside local restaurants under string lights. It’s the joy of seeing a couple break out in dance to live street music. It’s hearing children squeal as they play tag at dusk in an open plaza. It’s walking past an art gallery just as attendees applaud for an artist’s speech, it’s cozying up at a café for an acoustic music performance.  

In short, the magic of the city is what happens when a city is arranged in such a way that life itself becomes visible. 

Why Magic Matters

Interestingly, the authors don’t spend much time defending the idea of magic or the idea that people will want to seek out culture, aka “magic.” They assume it goes without saying that humans will make culture and that, as social beings, we will naturally seek out other people and participate in cultural exchange, whether that’s by making it ourselves or experiencing what others have made. For them, it’s more important to discuss how these pockets of life ought to be arranged in a city so that they are accessible to as many people as possible. 

But I think it’s worth slowing down and thinking more deeply about the relationship between the city and our culture-making capacity. Culture-making and cultural participation really matter. It’s an essential part of being human. It’s our way of participating in the never-ending conversation about existence and meaning. It’s part of the process of how we build a sense of ourselves as individuals, as well as how we build a sense of home, belonging, and community. Culture-making gives us a sense of orientation in the world. 

Cities have always existed as hubs of culture-making, and while our modern cities are full of opportunities for consumption, that’s not the same thing as being full of culture. It’s not just about offering amenities to fuel transactions and consumption. It’s about arranging a city so that the authentic culture-making capacities of the people who live there can emerge. It’s the difference between a city hosting a chain bakery like Madeleine’s Café or holding a French bakery run by Huntsville’s Kevin Zurmuehlen, a former U.S. military professional who discovered a love for baking while watching The Great British Baking Show. 

After starting to bake in his family kitchen in 2020 and then selling goods to friends and family, Kevin and his wife eventually decided he should step away from his 30+ year career in the army to become a certified pastry chef and open an authentic French bakery in Huntsville. The success of this daring decision was obvious as Jacqueline and I stood in line on a Saturday morning before blueberry picking. We watched parents with their children choose pastries from the dazzling display case, older ladies catching up on outside patio tables over treats, and teenagers ordering lattes and baguettes. It was buzzing, but not just with the buzz of business, but also with the magic of localism. 

A New Vision for Downtowns 

This short chapter on magic got me thinking: how would we approach our downtowns differently if we started to focus less on transactions to attract investment and consumption, and instead thought of them more as hubs of magic? Of course, this would mean rethinking the status quo in a few ways. For one, it would mean redefining success to include using land to support more businesses and creative spaces, rather than cars, and embracing design features that make people more visible. This would also require aggressively supporting local businesses and creative spaces over the more predictable, but less soulful corporate storefronts. It would mean reducing the presence of cars, investing in people-focused placemaking and finding creative, efficient ways to connect residents from other neighborhoods to downtown that don’t require cars. 

Magic exists in every city and making magic visible is a worthwhile goal for our downtowns. The good news is that this doesn’t have to mean giving up on other more “practical” goals, like increasing investment and tax revenue. I actually think money and magic can work together: achieving more magical downtowns would require investing in land-use and transit features that are more directly tied to a city’s long-term resilience. 

A city that has successfully made magic (and people) visible in its downtown is a city that’s probably doing other things right: providing weather-suitable amenities and street design, investing in a variety of affordable and reliable modes of transit, allocating land such that common destinations are close enough to bike or walk to, nurturing small businesses, preserving a sense of beauty that makes walking or being outside desirable, and investing in public safety. 

These are cities that will make magic and money for the long haul: truly a win-win.

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