Good Cities
In search of the good city.
Some cities lead you home; others leave you consulting a map. I walk them and write about the difference, asking what makes a place beautiful, humane, and worth staying in.
I write as a classical teacher and author rather than an urban planner. I spent many formative years in Rome, studied at the Angelicum, and now teach Literature, History, Philosophy, and Latin in America. So these essays move between Aristotle and asphalt, between Aquinas and the parking lot, asking older questions about cities than the ones our zoning codes tend to ask. What is a city for? Why do medieval streets lead us home while modern grids leave us consulting maps? What did Socrates see in the public square that we have forgotten?
Alongside the essays run dispatches from the road and a slower thread: Letters on Dwelling and Displacement, a year-long correspondence with a friend on the far side of the world, written one letter a month as both our families move between countries. Where the essays argue, the letters simply notice.
If you care about place, tradition, beauty, and the strange fact that we are all, in some sense, children of a city: welcome! It’s free.
New here? Start with these:
• Beyond Euclidean geometry: how Siena teaches us to find our way home
• A City Is Made of Space, Not Buildings: what “the urban commons” really means
• How Cities Die: suburbs, parking lots, and the slow dismantling of shared public life
• The Food School and the Walled Town: a dispatch from Youghal, County Cork
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All the best!
C.W. Höjer
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