Livable megacities

Gezien op Youtube op 4 oktober 2016:

After dinner we often enjoy listening music with the whole family. Our girls take their iPads and play clips on YouTube showing their favorite artists. It’s a kind of Dutch karaoke we love to practice when looking at the videos. Real fun. Last night the youngest showed us clips of a band, called Clean Bandit. Clean Bandit is a string quartett from Cambridge, UK. They planned to perform a concert here in Paradiso, Amsterdam, this weekend, but they apparently posponed their European tour.  Anyway, one of their clips is taken in London, on a London bus. It’s called ‘Stronger’ and the man who is singing and dancing in the video is a senior busdriver, a nice looking immigrant who’s living and working in the capital city. The clip, released in 2015, is taken in the outskirts, on an industrial site; tubes are passing by, dancers are dancing on a platform, the band is playing in the bus late night, the weather is wet and rather cloudy. This is London, more than 8 million inhabitants, the big city, no doubt about that. Everybody is working hard until late, but they’re happy. Really a clip with a positive urban vibe.

Another clip of Clean Bandit is taken in Tokyo. It’s called ‘Rather be’ (2014) and features Haruka Abe as a Japanese fan of the band who becomes delirious and has hallucinations of band members and its logo appearing unexpectedly in her daily life as a chef. Tokyo, a megacity of some 35 million inhabitants, is shown in the film as a really great city, we at home enjoyed the shot taken in the fish market early morning, but also Abe driving her moped in the city streets, Tokyo street life  in general, Japanese restaurants, Abe prepraring great food, Abe waking up early morning, metro’s passing by, night life, waking up again, life flows. No doubt about it: this is the real big city, the megacity, the real life, an exciting place. Older people in Holland still think medium sized cities are more livable. They love Zwolle, Utrecht and Den Bosch. If you would double Amsterdam, they think it will almost die. Not me. I wish I was young again.