Finding Love in a Hopeless Place

No one can agree on the origins of Valentine’s Day. It’s possibly a rebranding of Lupercalia, an ancient pagan fertility festival featuring animal sacrifices, naked flagellation, and bottomless goblets of wine. A slightly tamer theory points to the story of Saint Valentine, a priest who was beheaded on February 14, 269 for performing weddings for couples forbidden from marrying under Roman law and later canonized for that reason. We can also potentially blame the poets. In the 1300s, Chaucer’s “Parlement of Foules” and “The Complaint of Mars” linked St. Valentine’s Day with ideas of romance and yearning. Regardless of how we got here, Valentine’s Day has become the day designated for love, as well as economic activity. Last year Americans spent $25.8 billion, about $185 per household, on red roses, greeting cards, chocolate, and prix fixe dinners.

Even with a special day, there’s a lot of love we don’t celebrate. The intimate relationships that make us feel cared for within our communities. The bus driver who helps a city kid get off at the right stop is a public transportation rite of passage. The bodega guy who has memorized your breakfast order and holds a set of your spare keys. The neighbor who checks in on your cat and waters your plants when you’re on vacation.

Cities are fertile grounds for love. In urban spaces where we’re in constant contact with other people, whether by choice or necessity, the mythos of the rugged individual American falls apart. There’s a reason some of the most iconic romantic comedies take place in urban settings, and the cities themselves feel like distinct characters in their love stories. Movies like You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, and Rye Lane show how walkable cities create opportunities for serendipitous encounters that can change the trajectory of your life. Moonstruck highlights the power of close-knit neighbors and family that support you through ups and downs of relationships. Rom-coms show us the many features of cities that are conducive to forming intimacies.

The invisible and often unspoken ways we show up for each other in cities are at the core of romantic urbanism, a term we developed to imagine how cities can be built to foster love between friends, neighbors, family members, and lovers. Romantic urbanism is an invitation to think about cities through the lens of love and care in urban policy and design. While cities offer many conditions for love to thrive, they are rarely built with love and connection in mind. What would cities look like if policymakers and designers prioritized love as a necessary ingredient to a full life, and as the ultimate end in the pursuit of affordable housing, good jobs, and safe transit?

Urban planning, design, and policy play a significant role in how connected we feel to our communities and neighborhoods. Car-centric design makes it difficult for people to develop and maintain close relationships. Budget cuts to libraries and community centers are eroding third spaces where people can linger without having to spend an inordinate amount of money, with detrimental effects to our collective health and well-being. We are currently living through a loneliness epidemic. In 2023, the US Surgeon General released an advisory warning labeling loneliness and isolation as a major public health concern. Half of adults in the US report feeling alone, with fewer ties to shrinking social networks. The report found that the health risks of chronic social disconnection — such as cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death — are comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Social connectedness isn’t just nice to have — it’s lifesaving.

Social connectedness is especially vital in emergencies and disasters. Eric Klinenberg’s groundbreaking study of the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave found significantly lower death rates in mixed-use, intergenerational neighborhoods because of the power of neighbors checking in on each other to keep each other safe. In 2012, community groups mobilized quickly to help New Yorkers impacted by Hurricane Sandy, providing essential services when the government response was slow or inadequate. The rise of mutual aid groups during the pandemic and other natural disasters speaks to how critical community networks are for supporting people through tough times.

As it turns out, people are hungry for connection. More people are swearing off dating apps in favor of meeting people in real life. Young people are craving third spaces to hang out in person as an antidote to growing up chronically online. There’s a growing movement to decenter romantic relationships and create alternative systems of care. At a time when the Trump administration is systematically dismantling social services, tearing apart immigrant families, and denying personhood and gender-affirming care to trans people, the need for care-centered policies is all the more important. Many local governments are taking heed. Some cities are experimenting with new initiatives that cultivate community connections to improve health outcomes for older adults. Mexico City Mayor Clare Brugada has called for a transformative network of care infrastructure by building 100 “utopias” with community centers that offer free services and amenities to neighborhood residents. These examples show what cities can look like when policymakers put caretaking at the heart of public service.

While care-oriented initiatives need not be confined to urban areas, the density and diversity of cities make them natural testbeds for new approaches to strengthening community cohesion. Counter to the stereotypes of cold anonymity, cities are conducive for forming relationships of all kinds. There’s a good reason cities are home to immigrant enclaves, queer communities, countercultural misfits, and so many other groups who have been historically marginalized or persecuted. The expansiveness of cities — and the social freedoms and economic opportunities that they offer — allow many types of communities to feel welcome and take root. In turn, the resulting diversity makes cities endlessly interesting places to connect with many kinds of people, romantically or otherwise.

Our curiosity about other people’s experiences of love in cities led us to put out a public call for reflections on romantic urbanism, from essays to visual art to design installations. The essays featured in this series explore a few of the many forms of love and care found in cities. Some connections are deep and longstanding, like the bonds we forge across lineages of the families we were born to and the families that we choose. Other ties are more fleeting but no less meaningful, like the relationships we develop with our neighborhood grocers and fellow transit riders who nourish and witness us as we move through the daily rhythms of our lives. Some essays prompt us to reflect on the limitations of our current systems of housing and transportation for people who are disabled, queer, or want to live beyond the confines of the heteronormative nuclear family. We hope that these accounts inspire us to imagine new possibilities for cities to nurture the many kinds of relationships that make us feel we belong and have a place in the world.

The things cities do well — providing vibrant public spaces, diverse people, interesting and walkable neighborhoods, rich nightlife and cultural institutions, and reliable and affordable transit to access all of those places — are the building blocks of human connection and love. And cities that center care in supporting people’s well-being and livelihoods and strengthening community ties support the timeless and universal human endeavor of trying to love and be loved.