Over the past two decades, my doctoral students and I have focused on studying love, care, kindness, and compassion in urban settings. Why? Because social science research on life in America’s cities is desperately incomplete. Much like the vision of urban life that permeates most of American popular culture, social science research imagines urban areas as sites of overwhelmedness, disengagement, social and moral crisis, threat, and violence.
But, as someone who has lived and worked in large urban centers—New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Istanbul—I know firsthand that urban centers are also sites of human virtue. People in urban contexts, including those living in high-stress, oversurveilled, underresourced communities, draw daily from deep wells of love, compassion, empathy, kindness, and generosity in the service of caring for each other. From holding doors open for one another, to offering seats on buses and trains, to stopping to help with directions, to paying unexpected compliments, city-dwellers create environments that are saturated with powerful but easily missed acts of care.
My former students and I have been eager to understand how love, generosity, and care manifest and operate in the hyperdiverse, densely populated, loud, fast-paced complexities of urban spaces. Through surveys and interviews, we have sought to understand how adults residing in big cities define love, how they see love being expressed, and their views of the cascading effects of giving and receiving care, generosity, and love.
We have learned that the decision to express love and care for others in large cities is not simply a moral or emotional decision. We offer two examples of the lens needed to notice the presence of love in cities.
First, we have learned that identities matter in experiences of compassion, love, and care between strangers. Urban dwellers’ identity (for example, race or gender), lived experience, context, familial, cultural, and legal systems’ realities work together to shape decisions about whether to extend acts of love to people you do not know. For example, Kehinde, a 26-year-old African American man living in a large, densely populated city, described his experience of giving and receiving kindness, care, and love in his city as shaped by how he navigates other people seeing him as a Black man.
“I will see folks all the time that may need a hand with their bags or crossing the street or just little things like that. And I take a second, hesitate,” Kehinde says. “I don’t want to scare them. I don’t want to come off as a threat.”
To get through these moments, Kehinde describes engaging in a practice of analysis and shape-shifting. Before he steps in to offer help, he assesses the environment and changes the way he carries himself so that people will perceive him as a possible helper rather than as a threat. He says: “I smile a lot more. My voice might change a bit.” He might shrink his body and keep his head down, to avoid seeming intimidating. After helping someone, he moves along without lingering. Reflecting, he acknowledges not being his full, true self in these interactions. “I have to realize I’ve been socialized—made to believe that this is what I need to do in order to navigate the situation.”
Kehinde’s story highlights the point that identities matter in economies of care. The images and stereotypes that we construct about people come at a cost even in moments of compassion. Stereotypes affect who we perceive as deserving of care, concern, and protection. Stereotypes also inform our expectations about who can be trusted to help. Stereotyping is not unique to urban settings. But because urban settings tend to be especially diverse spaces, they create abundant opportunities to study how identities and the social scripts we hold affect the way that strangers care for each other across lines of difference. What Kehinde and others bring to the fore is the reality that the targets of stereotyping are aware of the ways that they are perceived. They learn that to be seen as helpful rather than as threatening, they need to read situations correctly, make adjustments to their approaches (e.g., keep “appropriate” distance), and exit situations strategically.
Targets of stereotyping must strike a balance between their own deep-seated motivations to behave caringly and their desire to stay safe. For individuals like Kehinde, miscalculations can be costly. If, in the effort to behave lovingly and compassionately, someone is misidentified as a threat, that can lead to a range of consequences from being rebuffed and embarrassed to becoming the target of violence, arrest, or death. The end result is that people consciously or unconsciously learn the rules of engagement around helping strangers.
A second lesson that has emerged from studying love in urban settings is that love lives in the built environment of cities. I highlight this lesson in my Positive Psychology in Urban Settings classes. Cities are often saturated with murals, billboards, and symbols that convey messages of love, solidarity, and belonging. As residents move through neighborhood streets, they may encounter signs prominently posted in shop windows or near the entrances of religious institutions that remind them that “Black Lives Matter,” “Love Is Love,” or “Immigrants Are Welcome Here.” People display rainbow flags and national flags from apartment windows, on cars, and in other spaces, declaring both their own identities and pride for and solidarity with those identities. The architecture of urban spaces may also play a role in expressions of love and care. In many urban neighborhoods, porches, stoops, and front steps serve as places of connection and care. Simple greetings (e.g., “Morning, baby!,” “You doing good?”) voiced by neighbors sitting on their steps serve as ways of spatializing love, care, and connection in urban landscapes.
I return here to my initial point. Our studies of urban areas are desperately incomplete and will remain incomplete until we more fully examine how various forms of human goodness—including love and care—flourish in urban settings. Likewise, our understandings of love and care will remain underdeveloped until we explore how these experiences emerge in the most densely populated, diverse, complex social structures in which people live. We will truly understand love when we understand how it is titrated through place, context, history, culture, religion, structures of power, identities, and a host of individual and relational factors. Urban centers give us powerful opportunities to know love.