Watching complexity unfold

I like to walk in cities.

To this day, it’s still the best way I’ve found to experience a city. Its architecture, pace, sounds, and smells tell a much broader story than any single activity could.

Over the past year, I’ve spent time walking in New York and Paris, two cities I love for their own respective reasons. I’ve noticed that I don’t look at them in the same way.

New York is life unfolding. I try to take in the businesses, the streets, the intensity, the adrenaline I get just from being there. It’s hard to grasp. I can hardly watch New York as much as I can live it, unless I’m standing at a viewpoint or somewhere high above the streets. From there, the view is mesmerizing. It’s like watching a fire, a forest, or waves rising and dying. I’m watching emergence, a complex system greater than the sum of its parts. There’s no steady state: the fire never stops burning, the waves never stop rising and falling. Each element is hardly worth watching on its own, yet I could look at the whole for hours.

When I take a picture of New York, I naively try to capture it by photographing a street, a skyscraper, or the interaction between the two. Many people default to photographing steam rising from the streets, as if it were a proxy for a city burning with intensity. Perhaps this smoke is the closest I can get to capturing New York in a single image.

Jane Jacobs spent years watching her own block in Greenwich Village. She called what she saw “an intricate sidewalk ballet”, an order “all composed of movement and change”, and took care to add: “it is life, not art.”

Paris, on the other hand, is a beauty.

Much of the Paris we know today was shaped by Haussmann under Napoleon III. Where New York feels like the self-organized product of countless individual decisions, Paris feels like the expression of a coherent architectural vision: centralization at its most beautiful. Its streets and boulevards form a remarkable composition. The magnificence of the facades lies in their uniformity: the same height, the same cream stone, the same iron balconies running from one building to the next.

That harmony is also what makes Paris fragile. One wrong note and the whole street hears it. Ask any Parisian what they think of la tour Montparnasse. New York feeds on its own disorder. Tear down a building, close a shop, and something else grows in the gap. Nassim Taleb would call it antifragile.

I find myself looking at Paris the way I look at a painting. It’s an architectural masterpiece, almost a finished product. It’s easy to photograph, which is why so many people do, and why the photographs can be so stunning.

I sometimes imagine those who envisioned Paris stepping back from their canvas, dropping their brushes and saying, “Voilà!”: now, they leave it to people to start living in it. We consume Paris, but Paris doesn’t consume us in the same way. I walk down its streets looking up as if I were visiting an ancient temple, amazed by the details and the taste evident in every window. I wonder why they chose these pilasters, these moldings. I feel like a spectator admiring the work of an artist. My presence in the streets of Paris doesn’t add much to the magic. I have a visitor’s pass; I’m enjoying the beauty in front of me.

I’ll keep walking in both cities. My secret is to walk the streets of Paris at night, or very early in the morning, the way I’d visit a museum to avoid the crowds and enjoy the beauty for my own selfish pleasure.

I would never imagine walking the streets of New York with nobody around. I don’t think I’d really see the point.

Vic