In a paean to Dupont Circle, Eve Tushnet draws a contrast between urban and rural relationships:
I’m told that country life teaches you patience and charity, since you can’t get away from your neighbors or your past. [...] The city teaches you patience and charity in a different way: You learn to negotiate among strangers. Every region has a different way of managing itpop culture tells me that Midwesterners smile relentlessly, Southerners drink and fight, and Californians drive. D.C. flirts. If you don’t interpret strangers’ actions with charity and good humor, you’ll go crazy here.
Tushnet also praises urban life as the “human condition with the volume on high." Larison sees it differently:
[T]he city nonetheless remains a kind of place relatively more hostile to moderation and virtue, and it will always be the kind of place prone to an exaggeration of all those desires that man needs to keep in check if he is to remain civilized rather than merely urbanized. In the meantime, the economic and political consolidation and concentration of power that our major cities embody are real dangers that threaten the urban professional and the farmer alike.