Cities are like languages. We construct them out of need and build them on nothing, arguing about the process the entire time. Scratch that – a city is a language, one that speaks in slums and skyscrapers, parks and people. Your city speaks to you, and the words it chooses are the ones you use to describe it to others. The study of words is called linguistics, and it can be applied across all peoples and lands – it is possible to break down every language in the world into components and analyze these atoms in order to better understand our own brains. The pieces that make up linguistics can be broadly defined as morphology, phonology, and syntax – or, in plain language, how words are formed, how they sound, and how we put them together to make sense of our sentences. These linguistics structures can also be applied to cities – for the same reason we study languages in the first place: understanding.
First, morphology. In linguistic terms, a morpheme is the smallest unit of semantic meaning. To put it bluntly, morphemes mean stuff. The word “dogs” has two morphemes - “dog” and “s”. Dog refers to a familiar four legged furry animal, and the “s” tells us there is more than one. Do you see? Morphemes are not just words, they are parts of words, indicating things like possession ('s), tense (-ed, -ing) and plurals. Observe that there are two kinds of morphemes – functional and content. Functional morphemes are the ones that are grammatically, syntactically required in a sentence. Things like -ing to indicate present tense, like happen + ing, or write + ing. By itself, -ing has no value or meaning, it must be affixed to something else. Content morphemes are just that, morphemes with semantic content, semantic meaning. Content morphemes are words by themselves, like book or dog.
Applying this to a city, one could say that a functional morpheme could be political party signs in front yards. By themselves, they have no intrinsic meaning when applied to, say, a neighborhood. But enough of them on a block can tell you something about that block, tell you that these people vote, that they are politically active, and maybe how they think. They are the possessive “'s” , showing ownership. A sign by itself tells you nothing, but in a particular neighborhood, in a particular yard, a sign can tell you much more. Another example of this could be litter. A crushed soda can doesn't mean anything, really. A crushed soda can in the street, next to some beer bottles and empty plastic bags can tell you much more. Litter fixes the street firmly in the past tense, like “-ed”. To be clear, it is not just an example of scale, but an example of affixing. These items need to be attached to something larger, something human, in order to have meaning. This is how we identify what part of town we're in if we don't already know. We look at the morphemes around us and draw our conclusions based on not only what they are, but where they are. They are essential to the sentences of the streets.
Content morphemes are somewhat easier to understand. These are the parts of a city that have meaning wherever they are. In this, they are iconic, and these are the stems that functional morphemes are grafted onto. A street, a church, a school, a junkyard. Maybe even people themselves. Often urban planners get caught up in designing the idea of a city around some specific content morpheme, like a monument, or a park. But taken by themselves, such morphemes are cold and useless, hollow structures waiting to be brought to life. Air must be forced in to order to make the city speak, and that's where phonology comes in.
Since phonology is the study of how words are physically formed, in urban linguistics phonology is the lilt to the voice of the town. What comes out of your city when it exhales? What language is it speaking? When all these morphemes come to life and interact, how does it all sound to the outside ear? All cities have the same basic parts and functions, but just as every language has dialects, every city has variations on its themes. Cities export more than just industry, products, and college graduates. They also generate identity, art, and culture. They are incubators for new sounds and new dialects, not just in a linguistic sense but in a deep cultural one. We all know what New Yorkers are supposed to sound like, but more importantly even if we've never been there we know what it feels like to be a New Yorker. That's successful export of identity, that's phonology. When the people are pushed past the morphemes, strange and wonderful things are formed, and then they can be tagged directly back to the city. So what is San Diego's dialect, it's phonics? We breathe in the ocean and the Santa Anas, and breathe out ships, a sense of luxury, and comfortable power. This is how we sound to the rest of the world, today. What will it be tomorrow?
Finally we come to syntax, what many would call the heart of the matter. Syntax means nothing more than rules, and cities are full of them. There is internal syntax, which the city generates by itself – the signs and roads, the directions, traffic flow, zoning laws, and rail lines that lay out in an easily understood format how it will conduct its day to day business. This is the grammar of the city, and it's often called a map. But there is also external syntax, which is imposed – how the shape of the hills structures the speech of the city. We can also call that geography, but it's more than just terrain and elevation. How does the nature in the land interact with the city? And vice versa, how is the city interacting with the land? This is rapidly becoming a field of great interest in service to the idea of sustainable living, and zero-emission building. While we've long had the power to change internal syntax, now urban planners are worried about the externals. (In China right now there is a planned green city being built called Dongtan, which aims to be self-sufficient and non polluting, housing 50,000 people). Syntax is where most urban planners start when they begin to design or improve a city, but care must be used to ensure that man made rules don't conflict with natural ones, or disaster can result – witness New Orleans.
What I've described here shouldn't be thought of as the only way to experience a city – just another way to do it. We use language all the time, both written and spoken, and literally nothing comes more naturally to humanity than speech. We are born pre-wired to understand the sounds around us and somehow, to synthesize something useful from it and adapt it to our own use. We also spend most of our time in cities of one size or another, and it might be good, from time to time, to stop and think about what works, what doesn't, and what we might be able to fix.
The Riff
I'll give you an example from my life, a sort of geo-linguistical biography. I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and left when I was 18 for a variety of reasons...yes, there was a girl involved, but there was also a deep impression in me that my hometown was going nowhere fast, stuck in the past. Past tense, has-been. Morphemes from growing up? Slums, old decrepit buildings from the turn of the century everywhere. Kudzu vines climbing everything, poverty covering everything. Leaning old apartment buildings settling lopsidedly, like low rent Towers of Pisa, sinking into the red clay of the riverbank. The phonology was old and forgetful, like an old man forgetting where his hat is, wheezing oil refinery pollution into the sky while birds and airplanes fly high overhead, never landing in Shreveport. Shreveport, with a syntax of flat flat flat, the river being the main feature that decided the shape of the town. I don't go back, too much, but unless you've lived there, please don't make fun of it.
Sarasota...you probably have a good idea here. It was stasis, present tense. Beaches, hippies, villas, old people, out of state license plates, manatees, and lizards. Really, the place was like a lizard mecca. Brightly painted beach houses trying to convince you they were fun and spontaneous. What did it sound like? The old people fighting entropy as fast as they can and the young people fighting to not turn old. Everyone is swimming against a strong current, maybe not sinking but not really going anywhere either. It sounds like the tide, constant, pointless, and pretty. A nice way to describe a vacation. The ocean kept the syntax regular and predictable, the streets paralleling the beach from end to end.
And finally San Diego. San Diego is all about the future...it doesn't have a past, and it feels too preoccupied with tomorrow to put much thought into today. Everyone here seems to be saving up for something – a house, or a better car, something that will make them happy. The cranes raise everything high into the sky, and the bulldozers clear every scrap of land they can to build something that will be ready tomorrow. Balboa Park, the Gaslamp, Navy ships. It's hard to encapsulate the place into one idea, because it's never stopped long enough to be caught. The people who live here seem to exist in slivers of a city, never seeing the whole thing. Possibly San Diego is waiting for the Next Big Earthquake, which it won't get, or the Next Big Wildfire, which it may. It's waiting on something, that's for sure, and I think it will keep on waiting, and keep on building, until the very end.
