Cities Are Not For Everyone

David Harvey's "The Right to The City"  digests that the city as such a large scale artificial product that sets the stage for life, generically,  and at its level of ubiquity serves as a controller of it... at least for many. It can be seen as an outcome of capitalism but, throughout history a product of excess.

My immediate thoughts go to equity and access; if not merely brought on by the assertion in the title of the article, it is probably the most topical. It seems familiar now that cities aren't for everybody, speaking of course, economically and financially. Though cities are often more liberal of thought and accepting of differences due to increased diversity, an obvious outcome of density there is a clear income bracket barrier. 

I think now more than ever, our class is thinking in terms of financial stability and trajectory as we begin to close in on graduation and have to consider career and life decisions. As an anecdote, my brother has been trying to get me to move to Boston (where he lives), where the average rent is $2,850 (depending on where you look). You would think that graduating from a decent institution with a master's degree in a growing field, where we enter a job market with essential technical skills and knowledge, would allow us to move anywhere we want, but this is not the case. Anyone graduating from our program clearly has some sort of privilege to even be getting a master's degree. Yet, moving to many cities would be a difficult or poor financial decision. Therefore maybe a complaint from a place of privilege helps portray the scale of the issue. Cities are not for everyone.