The Overlooked Ways Love Shows Up in Urban Spaces

The useful part

Over the past two decades, my doctoral students and I have focused on studying love, care, kindness, and compassion in urban settings. Because social science research on life in America's cities is desperately incomplete. Much like the vision of urban life that permeates most of American popular culture, social science research imagines urban areas as sites of overwhelmedness, disengagement, social and moral crisis, threat, and violence.

How it works

• But, as someone who has lived and worked in large urban centers—New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Istanbul—I know firsthand that urban centers are also sites of human virtue.
• My former students and I have been eager to understand how love, generosity, and care manifest and operate in the hyperdiverse, densely populated, loud, fast-paced complexities of urban spaces.
• Through surveys and interviews, we have sought to understand how adults residing in big cities define love, how they see love being expressed, and their views of the cascading effects of giving and...
• We have learned that the decision to express love and care for others in large cities is not simply a moral or emotional decision.
• We offer two examples of the lens needed to notice the presence of love in cities.

What to take from it

First, we have learned that identities matter in experiences of compassion, love, and care between strangers. Urban dwellers' identity (for example, race or gender), lived experience, context, familial, cultural, and legal systems' realities w...

Details worth keeping

From holding doors open for one another, to offering seats on buses and trains, to stopping to help with directions, to paying unexpected compliments, city-dwellers create environments that are saturated with powerful but easily missed acts of care.