[The Editors' Verdict] A Tale of Two Cities

Published 07 Jan.2022 14:20(KST)

I finished watching the Netflix drama series Emily in Paris. A few years ago, I had a miserable weekend binge-watching a drama series, so I had been avoiding anything other than movies since then. However, this show stayed on the charts for a while, which piqued my curiosity, and when I heard it was created by the producer of Sex and the City, I couldn’t resist.

The drama is intriguing. It is concise and lively, neither too light nor too heavy. Against the backdrop of dazzling Parisian scenery and fashion that looks like an advertisement, it leads you addictively to the next episode. This is why drama series can be problematic. The protagonist, Emily, is from Chicago and is sent to work at an advertising agency in Paris. She doesn’t even speak French and is a country bumpkin raised in the American suburbs. She is still young and inexperienced, sometimes looked down upon, but she overcomes difficulties with American-style justice and adventure?a typical narrative structure. The show reveals ambivalent feelings of both admiration and disdain toward France. To them, France pursues beauty but is irrational, lazy, hypocritical, and sometimes excessively frank. The strong tradition of culture and art makes them intolerant of tackiness, yet their superiority and pride sometimes seem excessive. Their overall attitude toward life and definitions of love and infidelity are unfamiliar to Americans from a Puritan background. Although it appears as a small crack in Western civilization, the cultural shock and clash are handled relatively fairly.

The creator subtly connects the daily life and places of Paris with those of New York from the previous work. It is an affection and tribute to the city or urban life. The only simple meal that can be made in the cramped kitchen is breakfast; most meals are eaten out. None of the main characters own a car. Everyone walks or rides a bicycle to work and dates. Apartments open directly onto the street. There are no complexes. Windows face the street rather than south. Streets densely lined with buildings and parks continuously create sights and events while walking. Fashion is both flaunted and appreciated on the streets.

Just as Sex and the City instantly transformed the bleak impression of New York into a romance, this drama almost makes me worry with jealousy whether it will elevate the status of Paris even more. The drama calmly persuades that a city must be a continuous series of human places. A place is a spatiotemporal concept where experience and memory are added to empty space. American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan defined a place as something that makes you stop even while moving quickly. Space acquires meaning and memory and transforms into a place. Therefore, urban planners and architects create spaces, but it is important to make them “potential places” with multiple possibilities. Interesting urban places make people walk, interact, and love their city.

Following the recent Seoul mayoral election, the upcoming presidential election is again flooded with housing supply pledges. These are almost the only pledges related to cities and architecture. However, rather than consideration and effort to create human places in both new towns and city centers, it is a competition to increase floor area ratios and building heights. The orderly Paris city center has a floor area ratio of about 300%, but the height is only about seven stories. Yet here, people are clamoring that even 35 stories are insufficient for apartments with a floor area ratio of 250%, and the pledges seem to respond to this. Apartment complexes surrounded by walls and even locking children’s playgrounds are accepted as normal in the city center. This is not how you create places in a city.

Even as I keep clicking the next episode button, I feel bitter because the opening line of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities comes to mind: “What if we are all going in the opposite direction?”