The Hinge of Our Humanity

Mending the Fractured City in an Age of Dislocation

For the fourth time since it debuted on the global stage, Covid disrupted our Christmas plans. Rather than going to Connecticut to celebrate with afflicted family members, we spent a few days with friends in New York City. It was snowy and cold, but trees twinkled in the bow windows of Brooklyn brownstones, while decorations festooned myriad bars and restaurants, beckoning us in from the wintry weather. It was enough to fill one with holiday spirit.

And then a man set fire to a woman sleeping in a subway car.

The video appeared on my Twitter/X feed before I knew what I was seeing. The whole scene is incomprehensible, and yet the news coverage reports that what I saw is exactly what happened: a man watches as the woman he set alight burns to death, while nobody, even the police, appears to intervene—including the bystander who films the scene with a steady hand. The victim herself, standing bewilderingly still as the flames engulf her, seems resigned to her own imminent loss of life as reflected in the lack of humanity of those around her—a silent bystander to her own demise.

This depraved, appalling act immediately came to symbolize everything wrong with post-pandemic New York. This year’s decades-high number of subway murders proved that New York City has “lost control of crime.” Indeed, this was only one of two murders on the subway last Sunday, both happening on the same day that New York Governor Kathy Hochul touted her subway safety record. Others see the murderer—an illegal Guatemalan migrant who had been previously deported to his home country—as indicative of our failed border security and immigration policies. Meanwhile, the city’s severe housing shortage may have something to do with why the victim was sleeping on the train. One unknown woman becomes the avatar of the city’s chronic dysfunction, while witnesses stand by as if they expected things to end this way.

Although the NYPD disputes the characterization of their officers, and The New York Post and Newsweek each offered theories, we can pop-psychologize or politicize an explanation, but we know this: nobody intervened to help the victim while she was burning.

And that was what was most disorienting about the video: the shocking lack of humanitarianism did not jibe with my experience of everyday New Yorkers—or at least my memory of them. I felt, surely, in the New York I lived in until 2017, somebody would have done something other than hit “Record.” The kind of callous indifference to the distress of another human being seemed like something you’d see only in movies or news from war-torn lands. Not New York.

Yet I wonder what any of us would have done if we were on the subway platform last Sunday. We’re advised not to run into a burning building if we’re not firefighters, but what do you do when a human being is completely engulfed in flames and the psychopath who did it is still on the scene? That’s not a reality anybody has been prepared for. When I watched the video, I felt a commingled sense of surreality, horror, and helplessness. What would I have done? What could anyone do?

The murderer robbed everyone of that essential element of their humanity, a sense of personal agency.

Covid was a murderer writ large, but it stole from us, too. The lockdowns, though imposed on ourselves in the interest of public health, deepened a social isolation that had already begun well before the pandemic. For decades, we’d been losing our “social sinew.” Then, we severed the connective tissues of shared experiences and spaces, closing schools, offices, churches, community centers, and “third places,” placing ourselves under house arrest where we were safe from but helpless before a global catastrophe. Like the murderer, the pandemic robbed us of agency and connection.

When we got the shot and finally emerged, sunlight refracted onto an alien landscape of fractured cities. Having turned away from each other, we see less of each other, and perhaps we see less of each other’s humanity.

Cities are fundamentally humanitarian—they exist of, by, and for people. In the death of one woman, we can see how we have failed to make our cities hospitable to humans: the housing shortage; the struggles of public transit; the obvious disorder and decline in public safety represented by vagrancy and crime. We know that this isn’t even the half of it, and so we know, too, that these failures are but a few of the faces of the many-headed monster that still stalks us. We stand by in silent shock, fearful that the other faces of our troubles might haunt our mirrors—that somehow we always knew it would come to this, and that we might be implicated.

Scarcity breeds contempt. In a zero-sum world, every newcomer is a threat, every stranger is a competitor driving up rent, the vulnerable might even deserve their unlucky lot, and everybody else is a potential problem taking up space. There’s little room for a humanitarian spirit in such a world. This final essay of the year was originally supposed to be a more lighthearted retrospective pulling together some themes that I’ve written about in 2024, but this tragedy captures The Big Idea at the root of all my writing about cities:

The death and life of cities is not primarily about calibrating land use policy or funding transit projects or streamlining inefficient bureaucracies: it’s about how we, as people, choose to coexist with one another and what kind of society we are building for ourselves—open or closed, optimistic or cynical, liberal or illiberal, abundant or zero-sum.

We get to choose who we are and what we build, for we are builders. Our cities—their creation, survival, and triumph—is a rejection of the notion that we are helpless victims of circumstance, and they’re a rejection of the zero-sum scarcity mindset. We’re an enterprising and agentic species that has survived the worst that nature and our own inhumane impulses have thrown at us—and we’ve thrived. Today, we have known solutions, counterexamples of success, and lots of good ideas for many of the urban problems facing us; this publication has documented many of them and will continue to do so in the new year. Other challenges, especially the continued social and economic fallout from the pandemic, the promise and peril of new technologies like autonomous vehicles and AI, and potential environmental and geopolitical threats, will require us to draw on our collective ingenuity and resourcefulness as we have done before. I’m optimistic that we are up to the task—if we can find within ourselves a renewed humanitarian spirit.

If cities are humanity’s greatest achievement, then the extent to which they succeed or fail hinges on us—on our own humanity, or lack of it.

None of us should choose to remain a bystander.

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