Protopia: Heresy of Paraphrase & A Sorta-Urbanist Booklist

Tactical and practical ways to engage with your public realm

Note: This week is going to be a little bit different. I wanted to have a formal book recommendation list, and one more fleshed-out thought.

Heresy of paraphrase

I’ve always felt like a conversation in the back of a 15 passenger van, driving through Atlanta, changed everything for me. This was a moment in my life I’ve seen as a sort of ‘coming to the light’ in regards to urbanism.

It was 2006, I was taking a gap year, talking to a soon to a freshman Architecture student from Georgia Tech. He was introducing me to the idea of New Urbanism when a switch flipped; I fundamentally saw the world in a way I couldn’t unsee.

And for the next few years, I mistook this for being more than it was. I kept trying to recreate this moment for other people by artificially manufacturing this conversation.

I was becoming a sort of urbanist-evangelical, and it didn’t work. No one wants a prepackaged political pre-cooked conversation on how they see the world in the wrong way.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it; how come this life-changing moment wasn’t working for others? It wasn’t until ten years later that I found a reason it was so easy for me to be ignored.

I was watching a video of a Christian philosopher talking about a concept called the heresy of paraphrase. In the context of art, it speaks to the irreducible meaning of an artwork. Basically, trying to explain a poem is not the same as experiencing the poem.

Like, if a book moves you to tears on page 100, and you try to explain why to someone, we cannot expect them to be moved in the same way because they didn’t read pages 1-99.

I saw this play out in realtime on Twitter in 2016. An infamous episode of Game of Thrones came out and there was an emotional scene where a character named Hodor dies. Everyone seemed to be posting about it. I felt like an outsider and wanted to understand what was so powerful about it, but the more people tried to explain, the less it made sense.

Why?

Because I had no relationship with that character.

I hadn’t experienced the 55 episodes before that moment.

I cross-applied this term meant for art (heresy of paraphrase) and now saw it in culture; there is an irreducible understanding that comes from experiences.

You see, it wasn’t that 15-minute conversation in the back of a van that changed my worldview. I lived a life which, up until that moment, was ready to see the world differently.

Thousands of micro-experiences, traveling to other countries, feeling isolated in suburbia, and studying philosophy made up a version of me that was ripe to be changed by that conversation.

We often downplay the role experiences have in changing our minds, and we forget to tap into them when trying to change the minds of others.

In everything I’m doing now, I’m seeking to draw people into their experiences. My videos may seem educational, but I’m really there to remind people of little things they already know.

It feels arrogant to assume I can teach anyone anything about urbanism, and I’ve found out it’s true—I can’t.

But if I can find something they already believe, something they already love, and show them examples of how to make more of that, that feels like an easier transition.

If I’m successful in helping people see the world differently, it isn’t that they lacked information. Most of the time, people need context and clarity.

We mistake our cause (or any cause) as a battle for information and we think that, if people could just be exposed to the information that we were exposed to, we will be alright.

I just don’t think that’s true. I think we make a decisions when our desires and imaginations are changed first (see final book on the list below).

Non-urbanism books that are sorta-urbanist books

Below is a list of paradigm-shifting books that inform urbanist concepts and I think you should read.

• Bowling Alone: Sociologist Robert Putnam talks about social capital and how relationships shape whether a society thrives or struggles. Understanding the difference between bridging and bonding social capital is a game changer.

  • For an easier read: try Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg.

• Antifragile: The goal of this book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is to give a vocabulary for one of the most influential ideas we usually don’t recognize is influencing us. This is a top three most worldview shifting book for me.

• Seeing like a State : One of the foremost scholars on anarchy, James C. Scott’s ideas will help you understand the role of individuals and citizens collectively in shaping the future of a city.

  • For an easier read: Two Cheers For Anarchism by the same writer.

• Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse: Understanding the difference between infinite and finite games can be huge in strategizing and keeping perspective. This book is an incredibly dry read, IMO.

  • For an easier read: The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. Though this is a professional context, and written more self-helpish, I think it’s a better read than the above.

• Subtract: Leidy Klotz’ book is the simplest and easiest read on this list. But the potential of subtraction is powerful, and you’ll create a mental filter for it moving forward.

• Thinking Fast and Slow: In 2020 I read 105 books. Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky were referenced in 75 of them, 10 didn’t reference them, the other 20 were fiction books. There is debate about different issues within their research, but the absolute chokehold their research has on our society is inescapable.

• The Dawn of Everything: This is alternative perspective, by David Graeber, to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (gag!) gives a more humane (also, not less scientific) view of early history.

Wildcard:

• Desiring the Kingdom: This is a book on Christian worship, so it feels out of left field. But James K.A. Smith is a kick-ass philosopher and his ideas on the true anthropology in which to build a pedagogy is unmatched. His concepts of engaging desire and imaginations more than the intellect is the basis of this whole issue.

  • For an Easier Read: You Are What You Love, by the same author.