Our souls have left the cities Our souls have left the cities From a speech to the British Association, monitored for the Institute by Margaret Chisman. David Nicholson-Lord is the author of a book entitled 'The Greening of Cities'.
Cities have our bodies but our souls are elsewhere.
We cannot relax much in cities, we cannot recharge our batteries, we cannot discover ourselves nor can we discover reality, nor, finally, can we discover in cities the moments, the experiences, that make life worth living. In historical terms, this is a great transformation. For much of history, cities have served as a refuge, a defence against a threatening world. The act of settlement was a symbolic rescue from the wild. But it is wilderness that, increasingly, we now seek.