Benefits of Being in a City

Movies and television shows and books and magazine articles (every sort of media, it seems) makes city living seem oh so exciting and in many ways quite irresistible.  Country living is presented as fine, of course, if you must—it does have advantages of clean air and green space galore—but it just lacks the panache of life in the city. (No one seems too psych’ed about life in the suburbs except, or course, those of us who do so quite happily).

But what, really, are the benefits of spending time in the city?

• Being in many cities around the world means you’re likely to spend more time walking around than you probably will living somewhere where it’s so easy to pop out into the car whenever there’s anything you need or want to do, and that can be good for your waistline, your heart, etc. All this walking and also, potentially, rides on public transportation, make it more likely you’re living in an environmentally responsible way, at least transportation-wise—how green your actual city life is, is dependent on lots of factors, such as how your in-city home is heated and cooled.  But, regardless of how environmentally responsible your city life is, how good it is for the life of the planet, it’s likely that your walking in the city is good for you personally, health wise.  Want to know how walkable a city is?  Look it up on a website such as this one:  https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/states/
• If you have certain life goals, it may be tough for you to live too far from a city. Although more and more experiences are available electronically every day, if you are a competitive dancer, someone who relishes the opportunity to eat the latest food craze during its very first week, or a person who lives for urban parkour, life in the countryside (or the much-maligned suburbia) will pose some, shall we say, “challenges.”  Also, depending on your own capabilities, living in the city may be the best way for you to have any quality of life at all.  An example:  if your eyesight isn’t good enough for you to drive a car safely, living in some areas outside of cities could be daunting.
• All this aligning with life goals also means that part of your personal identity might be that you are a city person. If that’s the case, living anywhere else means that you’d be living in a way inconsistent with, in psych terms, your “self-concept” which makes us tense and erodes our wellbeing over time. One of the single most damaging things you can do to your own psyche is deprive yourself of the opportunity to be the person you want/believe yourself to be.
• Living in the city may also, paradoxically, lower your stress levels. Being able to walk about to go to the store, to be able to choose from fleets of restaurants, to always (at least eventually) find whatever piece of clothing you need/desire in your size, makes life easier than lots of time and energy spent bustling from one less than satisfying situation to the next, particularly if that chain of actions never leads to “success.”  So, if you do indeed have access to the whole of the city in which you live, you may feel a very comfortable level of control over your own life (which is good for your mental and physical wellbeing and performance).  Having “everything” near to each other can be convenient, with well-planned multi-use developments being potentially most convenient of all.  Crime rates in cities get lots of attention and if you’re the worrying sort this might really get you down—but it may be possible for you to live your life in a safety-conscious way that makes you an unlikely crime statistic.
• If you are extraverted you get a burst of feel-goodness when you can spend time around a comfortable number of pleasant others (no one you want to know seeks out a nasty crowd), and where are those mood-boosting souls more likely to be, already assembled for your consumption, than in a city?