"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (1961)

The Industrial Revolution heralded what few thought possible to engineer: sustained economic growth. With hindsight, governments have come to believe that property rights, the rule of law, the private enterprise, and insurance promote growth. The governments undertook to guard these tenets. Growth has continued to oblige.

Reducing the success of cities to a handful of tenets has proved elusive. Suburbs have been more popular and more enduring than Jane Jacobs had imagined. They are popular among the generations who grew up without having experienced the ideal cities envisaged by Jacobs. They are enduring because they are simple enough systems to be understood and managed. Even suburban boredom has been less venomous than Jacobs had imagined, because of the diversions supplied by television and the Internet; few view watching the street as a comparable entertainment.

The mind needs a delicate balance between external structure and stimulation on the one hand, and the peace and quiet, necessary for independent reasoning, on the other hand. Sensory deprivation and solitary confinement relax at first, then cripple. In the absence of external stimuli, the mind hallucinates.

So suburbs can debilitate. Yet survivors abound, for at least two reasons: (i) what constitutes sense deprivation varies across individuals depending on the baseline level of stimulation to which they were exposed when they grew up, and (ii) individual tastes differ; some may actually like suburbs, regardless of upbringing.

A major suburban limitation is that suburbs do not permit casual relationships. Only intense ones or none are available. So one must settle for an extreme. Furthermore, intensity will typically not translate into depth. Those few with whom deep relationships are possible are unlikely to be one's neighbours.

The restlessness in "the" American character may stem from the dull city scenery. There may be high-density (but architecturally and occupationally monotonous) agglomerations of people without a city atmosphere. Most streets in American cities are barren after dark. One must travel in order to experience the variety of scenery and people. Without a local sample of this variety, however, one may be unaware that variety exists and gratifies.