YOU ARE NOT WHERE YOU LIVE

In a secular society, it’s easy enough to say that anything is “the new church.” Sneakers are the new church; pop music is the new church; sports are religion. When we lack formal structures for identity and belonging, anything that can be bought and sold is often bought and sold under the pretext of identity and belonging. But to me, there’s something particularly pervasive about the places where we live.

“Don’t call me American—I’m a New Yorker,” reads a tote bag across the aisle on the subway. The canvas seems to me like a modern crucifix.

Although cities may be a contemporary church, it’s not exactly a “new” function for them. Cities have functioned as sites of transcendence and belonging for thousands of years. After all, people waxed poetic about Rome and Sodom; to be from these places meant something.

However, for those of us who define ourselves by where we live (experiencing our awe and transcendence in crowds and public transit), our religion is slipping through our fingers even as we’re performing our rites.

As we cling to our metropolitan identities, our cities are being sanded into smooth, cosmopolitan sameness: farmer’s markets, bike-share programs, luxury minimalist condos. It seems the more cities collapse into an interchangeable median of “good taste,” the more fiercely their residents cling to a unique sense of urban identity.

Perhaps we cling so tightly to these myths precisely because reality is hollowing them out.

You may ask yourself: well…how did we get here?

Friends, Romans, Countrymen: our devotion to our towns runs deep.

In ancient Rome, the cobblestones were charged with divinity—what they called genius loci, or “the spirit of the place.” To live in the ancient Chinese capital of Chang’an, it was believed, was to live at “the center of the world.” Even Mexico’s Teotihuacan (“the place where gods were born”) was a cosmological map, aligned with astronomical phenomena. In antiquity, cities weren’t just practical settlements—they were physical embodiments of myth. Your town was a shorthand for your beliefs, values, and experiences.

And then it all changed.

Now, I don’t want to blame it all on Christianity but…Christianity changed things. With the rise of a monotheistic and universalist religion, divinity was no longer tied to specific sites or cities. God was everywhere—at least in principle. Which led to a new problem for local clergy: how do you set your parish apart?

Enter: cathedrals.

From the ninth through fifteenth centuries, geographer Keith D Lilley argues, “urban landscapes were symbolic, and that mystical meanings of the city were constructed and conveyed through its form.”

The medieval city was a place where the material world met the cosmos. Medieval cities often centered (literally) around the church, whose walls allowed “the divine mysteries to be conveyed to an uncultured people,” per Thomas Aquinas. The clergy was, in a way, franchising transcendence—wrangling down a universal god into their own particular local form.

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Bizarrely, this problem of “universal vs. local divinity” was simultaneously articulating itself outside of Christian Europe. Around the same time, the Maya began developing a networked sacred geography: temples aligned with celestial cycles that extended beyond one city. In Asia, pilgrims journeyed to Bodh Gaya or Himalayan monasteries.

Locations were no longer holy in and of themselves; they were places where the veil was thin, so to speak. In certain places (and in certain places only), you could reach out and touch the divine. It was no longer genius loci but axis mundi. (This, I think, was the start of tourism.)

(Thanks, Christianity.)

Axis mundi (a physical point that connects heaven and earth) may seem to have disappeared. But in 1912, as the world was grappling with the sinking of the Titanic and the birth of the word “hello,” sociologist Émile Durkheim declared that “in spite of the diversity of forms which [rituals] have taken, [they] have the same objective significance and fulfill the same functions everywhere.”

In other words: axis mundi (and even genius loci, for that matter) has never disappeared; it’s just changed form. We haven’t exorcised the need for our locations to be divinely charged or to mean something about us. We just changed how.

Perhaps it became trends—what the people in London were listening to in the ‘60s, what spiritual wisdom you could find at an ashram in India. The presence of a place became less about divinity and more about what the people there did—or at least what you could buy from there.

And, like most psychic trends today, we can trace it back to Freud.

Freud used the term “identification” to explain how we form our sense of self by internalizing aspects of others. Freud meant this for other people—like parents, friends, or authority figures. But his nephew, Edward Bernays (called the “Father of Public Relations” extended the thinking: people could also identify themselves through brands. A car wasn’t just transport, it was masculinity or status. Soap wasn’t hygiene, it was purity or beauty.

Eventually, cities and nations themselves, too, became branded. The ideals were perpetuated in movies and books, then in travel marketing. New York was ambition; Paris symbolized a blend of past and present; LA played out fantasy. Each metropolis proposed a narrative—or at least a structure upon which you could hang your own experience.

Cities now function not just as places but as ego ideals. Just as Freud described soldiers identifying with a commander or Christians with Jesus, modern people identify with the spirit of their city. It’s not just where they live; it’s what they internalize.

Moving to a city means that you have the freedom to narrate your own life—as long as you forget that that narrative has been commercialized. To quote Durkheim again: “We are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally.”

But is this really so different from the Romans fighting under the providence of Apollo? Isn’t this just modern genius loci?

Well, yes and no.

Whereas the place-based identification of yore brought people together in something approaching transcendence, the branding of a city today is less about shared values and community than what this says about me. You don’t worship the city; you use it as a function of your self. You never transcend the ego; you supersize it.

Even as cities became brands in the late 20th century, they still felt singular. Tokyo was a place where ancient wisdom met modern innovation. Berlin invited you to fill in the black-outs: of both history and last night.

But walk through an airport duty-free zone, a hotel in Dubai, or any one of the new “urban malls” and you walk through the new “smooth city.” The term, coined by architecture critic René Boer, describes the bland taste overtaking cities around the world: minimalist aesthetics, shoppable via app experiences, and perfectly paved plazas. Most of this built environment is (by absolutely no coincidence) black and white.

“The fact that ‘urban’ no longer means raw, edgy and conflictual but smooth, perfect and happy can be seen as a landmark shift in urban history,” Boer wrote.

He continues:

While neoliberal urbanism is in essence a political project, it has paradoxically given rise to the post-political city, in which ‘the urban’ has increasingly become a commodity and urban politics are deliberately undermined in favor of technocratic-economic measures. Its inhabitants are treated as consumers rather than citizens, who also need to work increasingly efficiently, which fuels the demand for smooth, friction-free urban spaces.

Boer’s “neoliberal urbanism” is city management that prioritizes profit and private investment over pesky things like public services and affordable housing. So as a city begins to conceptualize itself as a commodity, residents follow.

And to bring back Eddie Bernays: when “the urban” becomes a commodity, it becomes a reflection of the self. We move to places for the branding—encouraged to define ourselves through city-myths that rarely match reality, clinging to narratives of difference as the world collapses into a median of smooth “good taste.”

As we consider the city-sized self, we should remember that in his book “The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism,” Byung Chul-Han critiqued the modern sense of self as something isolationist:

freedom consists in a pure inwardness that is in no way entangled with anything external or other. In this immersion in pure thinking, human beings are wholly with themselves, only relate to themselves, only touch themselves. Nothing external disturbs this self-referential contemplation.

The smooth city extends this delusion outward: a perpetual continuity where nothing interrupts our psychic sanctity.

Contemporary individual identity may be illusory (or at least market-based), but sameness erases something vital, too.

It’s likely we’ll always derive something about ourselves from where we live. But as I walk around these newly smoothed environments, I’ve been thinking about what we worship and why. Is divinity universal or particular? Both?

A few weeks ago, I was visiting The Well, Toronto’s new mall-cum-food-hall-cum-office-space-slash-luxury-condo-building. And I never quite knew if I was inside or out. The ceiling rises from the ground via a few white metal trunks, creating an undulating, glass canopy. (Very church-like.) Amidst the buzz of people, the space was almost solemn. Almost serene.

I stopped and drooled at the windows of Le Creuset; I bought an overpriced basil-scented deodorant at Sephora; I considered getting one of those permanent anklets soldered around my leg. A mall for people who hate malls but also kinda miss malls, I thought.

A security guard in a bulletproof vest patrolled the perimeter, where the outside world collapsed into The Well. It felt like nothing I had ever seen before—but more than that, it felt like something you could see anywhere.

Globalization is like Christianity in that it is shifting our understanding of place-based identity. Once again, we are moving from something local to something universal—though this time, we don’t praise god, but the market. Whereas cities once lost their divinity, they’re now losing their distinctiveness.

Chul-Han suggested that the self is an ever-shifting thing—not something that can be discovered but something that arises naturally from everyday experience. It is not a stable product conjured through self-reflection, shopping sprees or meditation retreats, but a process that emerges in how we interact with the world.

If we only interact with a smooth world, we risk losing our tolerance for friction. We risk our ability to look at the world in all its particular strangeness, and marvel at the bounty of experience: personalities, birds, types of hummus. Life is glorious in its breadth. And we can’t experience transcendence without difference.

After all, we dissolve into the crowd precisely because it is a mass of people who are decidedly Not Us.