SF: a small musing.

San Francisco is a city where I found myself using the word 'vibe'. I feel deeply embarrassed by this confession; it was out of character.

It may be because in many respects, the city was so alien to London living, particularly the way in which everything (allow me to generalise wildly) feels much more relaxed, as if the pace of life has slowed, the sharp edges of it softened by perpetual sunshine and the dominant stress of timetables and careers washed aside by more leisurely priorities.

This is not, of course, to suggest that San Francisco is not a centre of business and employment; but there exists a marked divide between its financial centre, echoing the advanced metropolitan form (albeit skewed by dramatic topography) of Chicago and New York, and the rest of the city, characterised by low-rise, iconically-beautiful wooden houses, unaltered hand-painted shop signs and ubiquitous technicolour murals. Art, like beauty, is welcomed in this city like few others.

So, it's California living: your peers drink beer and make music in the park, socialise every evening, have a resilient and optimistic demeanour and smoke a hell of a lot of drugs. Street life exists in a way it struggles to in British climes; the popularity of inventive street food initiatives are proof of this if nothing else.

The visual lack of creative destruction (as seen in original unaltered signage and the absence of postmodern/neomodern characterless 'regeneration' schemes), the liberal approach to street activity and decoration, and the striving for (albeit at times homogenous) architectural beauty gives rise to this air of relaxation, contentedness and ultimate liveability that so many cities could do well to emulate.

I'm not sure if I could really live in San Francisco, though. It is pleasant, yes, but it is a world of its own where the middle class revel in beer and zine-making (or home improvements and dog-walking) and the others are forgotten, avoided or (perhaps undeliberately) fetishised. Neverthless, there is something very seductive and powerful about its beauty. Walking through its streets gives me pleasure that is in all honesty intermittent on those of London.