Why I won't be swimming in the Seine.

Feargus O’Sullivan is a writer for Bloomberg Citylab specializing in coverage of urban Europe, with a portfolio spanning architecture and design, urban policy and infrastructure, his writing seeks not just to keep readers up to date with urban news but also tap into the reason people are interested in these issues in the first place: because they love cities and see them still as the best places for humans to have the chance of fully realizing their potential.

On top of all this he's also one of my favorite writers. Below is my interview with him.

My mother, a language teacher and civil servant, was a walking argument against anti-intellectualism. On a daily basis she showed how you can be clever and kind, and how the former can actually strengthen the latter. As an unassuming person, she’d probably wince hearing me say this though.

My father was a lot. He sang opera so loud in the bath you could hear it down the street, and he said good morning to people in the afternoon. He was an unwitting eccentric and – I hope – bequeathed me some of his extra-ness.

Growing up in London in the years before helicopter parenting meant a huge amount of freedom. As kids, my three elder siblings and I used to take the Tube to the end of each line, running riot and pulling faces out the door at each station to dissuade people from getting in our carriage. That freedom rarely got me in sticky situations, although I was chased down the street aged 15 for wearing a cravat.

You may be surprised to learn that I think Europe’s most underrated country is actually Belgium. Visually, its cities are certainly among Europe’s strangest.

I really hate when I have to remind people of the extra “a” in Feargus, because I have to do it on a daily basis. This is apparently the more traditional spelling in Ireland, where my dad was from, but I don’t think he realised how many misaddressed letters and emails he was setting me up for.?

If I wasn’t a journalist I’d be a university lecturer in film history. That was my first career, I just happened to suck at it.

Writing a book sometimes carries more cultural prestige than it deserves, at least in my case. I’ve put great effort into my journalism, but people tend to still more impressed by the fact that I’ve published something that came out between hard covers – even though that book was just a novelty collection of recipes from films I wrote 15 years ago on my days off.

I write because writing is a joy. There’s a reason so many people dream of becoming a writer – even if that writing ends up being the blurb on the back of a cereal packet – because voicing and shaping an argument is something we all tend towards anyway, so to work it into a profession feels like winning the lottery. Having said that, I quickly realised that the journalist’s primary role is as a clean-ish conduit for information and perspectives originating elsewhere, rather than as a bravura performer on the keyboard.

I fear getting behind the wheel of a car. I don’t have a license and frankly, for everyone else’s safety, I probably shouldn’t have one. I don’t even know what the pedals do.

Writing about cities was not a viable full-time career option when I started out in journalism. I’m so grateful to Citylab for opening up the field – it really was and continues to be a pioneer in the area. It has given me a job where, by focusing on something I’ve actually got to know about, I more or less keep my impostor syndrome at bay. I also love that I get to write the kind of internationalist content I always wanted to read. Even as a teenager I used to turn to the international section of the newspaper first, and feel disappointed that it was only one (broadsheet) page.

Hotel rooms are a powerful argument for sharing resources. As long as the sheets get changed, no guest really minds what’s gone on in them before their arrival.

Cobblestones are so obviously well-suited for use as missiles it makes me wonder what an authoritarian like Baron Haussmann was thinking when he covered Paris with them. One of the slogans bouncing around during May 1968 was “under the cobblestones, the beach” and –while this wasn’t what the phrase meant – it’s true that when they are prised up from the boulevards, the ground is sort of sandy underneath.

Paris – and France by extension – used during my childhood to be the portal through which many British people accessed and interpreted the rest of Europe. In the days before cheap flights when people took the train or drove, it was the first port of call on most journeys to the continent even if visitors were just passing through to somewhere else – a magical place where chic people ate garlic and kissed with their mouths open. Now that it’s just a two-hour train ride from London, that exoticism it retains for some Americans has gone for us.

Swimming in the Seine sounds like a recipe for catching some forgotten medieval pestilence to me. It’ll be an amazing PR coup for the city if they get it clean enough, but I’d argue that Greater Paris has bigger fish it needs to fry first.

The resilience of people and places is something we should be cautious about overly celebrating as a solution in itself. Sure, people can be resilient in the face of having rocks thrown at them repeatedly, but how about we just stop throwing the rocks?

Berlin is being lost to some extent by a lack of imagination at the top. It has a reputation as a petri dish for experimentation but I struggle to think of much it is really leading on right now. Soon the Wizard of Oz illusion it has maintained internationally as a city of endless freedom and creativity may falter, and out from behind the screen will step a little grey man in a suit.

Athens, now my second home due to my Greek partner, is a wonderful city if you don’t object to lots of concrete. Seen from above it looks like a vast Elephant’s graveyard, but down in the lively, shady streets it’s one of the most effortlessly inviting well-integrated places I’ve ever visited.

Antwerp is way underrated as an introduction to Europe (I warned you I loved Belgium). It’s got most of the best bits of European cities in microcosm without the tourists and has an intriguingly central European feel for somewhere on the edge of the North Sea.

These days, London is nobody’s idea of utopia – but the idea that cities can be “in” or “out” or going up or going down assumes the perspective of an affluent, mobile person, whose options bear no resemblance to the average person’s reality. London is packed with a huge number of opportunities and with diverse, creative people who usually have a massively better attitude than they’re given credit for. They aren’t going anywhere.

15-minute cities will struggle – and may lose – against the massive barriers to building affordable housing that would make the concept genuinely holistic and transformative. I salute the idea, but fear that in practice we’ll just end up with a few more planters on pavements.

Car free cities are due for a fierce backlash from parts of the political establishment across Europe. Some political incumbents have run out of big ideas and are now trying to tap into anti-Green activism in the hope of acquiring a populist gloss. It probably won’t work, but it’ll hold us all up as the clock ticks.

Hear Me Out: We live in a fast-globalizing world, but I worry that the knowledge-sharing that needs to come with that is lagging behind. As someone who writes and reads a lot of international coverage, I see that our understanding of what happens in other countries is often limited by narrow preconceptions of how a country’s society is organized, or of what it might have to teach us. When we read, all of us have some tendency to ascribe symbolic roles to specific places, and to filter what we read through those assumptions. In Europe, my area of focus, this reproduces the idea that, say, Germany’s default setting is always technocratic efficiency, that France is a place where people strike out of cultural habit, and that the continent as a whole is a place where people spend all August lolling on the beach.?

It’s not that these beliefs have no basis whatsoever (though I am not, unfortunately, writing this on a sun lounger). They are still limiting and present the world beyond our immediate doorstep to us through a scratched, opaque lens. It can mean that places that have already “won” get to rest on their laurels, while the achievements of others are disregarded. For example, we tend to be (rightly!) in awe of the polyglot abilities of Scandinavians, without necessarily acknowledging the unsung but incredible multilingual talents of people in many African countries.?

?With these blinkers on, we learn less from each other because the constant tinny ring of our confirmation biases stops us hearing the real music playing. It means that Americans might see things they admire in Europe as impossible to emulate at home because, well, they’re just a case of Europeans European-ing again in their inscrutable European way. The phenomenon is international – it is hard, for example, to get British people to believe Germany’s railways are currently in a mess (trust me, they are), because in our received world view, having infrastructure problems is not what Germany is for.

As a writer and editor, what I want is to help people – and myself – to break these patterns and look a little more clearly. The fact that some things work well in one country and badly in another may be partly down to cultural differences, but cultures are shaped and reshaped on a daily basis, and develop along pathways that can be emulated, rejected or adapted. We’re unlikely to junk all of our assumptions – or to wish to – but the possible rewards from a clearer perspective are huge.

You can find Feargus’ work here and follow him on Twitter here and LinkedIn here