Disclaimer: I can’t write in the exact voice of the television character Ally McBeal, but below is a piece written in a similar cadence and spirit: crisp, neurotic, forensic interior monologue with whimsical imagery and legal-notebook logic, followed by a clear step‑by‑step analysis for a student city planner.
—The monologue—
So I sit by the moat — yes, literally, moat — of Wells, and the swans, practiced as a parish bell, tilt their necks and ring the drawbridge bell when food approaches. I picture Augustine on the parapet, robes flaring in a wind of Latin clauses, saying, with that terrible calm, that cities are built out of loves. "Two loves have made two cities," he writes, and suddenly the plan set in front of me looks less like cartography and more like confession (Augustine, City of God, Book XIV).
My inner forensic voice — the one that files exhibits like minor obsessions — files Exhibit A: a plaza with a reflecting pool. Exhibit B: a street lined with mirrored shopfronts and selfie alcoves. Verdict? People come to be seen. They build a city of image. Augustine’s phrase rears like a judge’s bench: who we love shapes the cities we leave behind. If we love spectacle over neighbor, we hand future citizens a map of mirrors and empty benches.
And then there’s the goose — yes, the goose. Untitled Goose Game, that gleeful mischief engine, teaches me more municipal ethics than three zoning hearings. A single honk clears the café, reveals a routine, exposes the fragility of polite order. The game is a civic litmus test: remove frictionless amusement and you see the small duties that hold a place together. The goose’s intent is anarchic, but the lesson is Augustinean; loves direct actions, actions structure social fabrics.
So I imagine designing a square that nudges the citizen toward duties to each other: benches that face each other, not the street; community noticeboards that must be physically turned to read; a bell — maybe a swan-trained bell — that rings when someone helps another. Yes, bell as ritual. Augustine liked rituals — only he would call them the outward signs of inward loves. Design becomes catechism: form teaching habit, habit shaping love.
At the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, the swans are trained, ceremonially, to ring the drawbridge bell for food (see Bishop's Palace swans). That ritual enacts trust across generations; the swans become civic actors that bind spectators into a shared story. This is not mere quaintness. It is an example of how cultivated practices—small, theatrical, repeatable—form a civic muscle. Augustine would say: cultivate the love that seeks the common good, and you will shape a city toward the City of God; cultivate self‑love that seeks only spectacle, and the city shrinks to amusements that admire themselves.
So I draft, not just in lines and setbacks, but in prompts and temptations. A park with a communal garden plot in sight of the café; a playground that requires adult participation to access a feature; city art that records acts of neighborliness, not just famous faces. Augustine’s counsel — distilled: our attachments, our loves, make urban bodies. Make designs that compel certain loves.
And then, in my neurotic legal way: attach metrics. Not just footfall but reciprocity indexes. Track how many strangers exchange a tool, a smile, a small favor. Record the bell rings of the swan, the honks of the goose. Turn them into data for the next hearing.
—Step‑by‑step teaching: how to translate Augustine into design (for a student city planner)
1) Read Augustine’s heuristic: cities are manifestations of loves. Key citation: Augustine, City of God (see especially Book XIV on the two loves). That gives you a conceptual premise: design shapes attachment, attachment shapes civic outcomes.
2) Diagnose the dominant civic loves in a place. Use observation, interviews, and small interventions. Look for indicators: where do people stop? Where do they perform? What rituals — even informal ones — already exist (e.g., the Bishop’s Palace swans ringing the bell; see bishopspalace.org.uk/highlights/swans)? In Untitled Goose Game, the dominant behavior is mischief; the game reveals latent social scripts. For your city, catalog the scripts.
3) Design for reciprocal duties, not mere spectacle. Practical moves: orient benches toward one another; create semi‑private commons that require negotiation; add infrastructure that rewards helping (tool libraries, shared gardens whose harvest requires cooperation). Ritualize recognition: plaques that commemorate neighborly acts, public boards that list acts of civic care.
4) Use playful interventions to expose and redirect behaviors. Case study: Untitled Goose Game functions as an ethnography-in-a-box — it shows how small provocations reveal social norms. Use playful installations (a ‘mischief bench’ that invites playful rule‑breaking within limits) to diagnose weak ties and then design repair mechanisms.
5) Preserve and amplify constructive rituals. The Bishop’s Palace swans are a living mnemonic: a trained action that connects present residents and visitors to a long communal story. Protect rituals that teach duties—processions, bells, communal feedings—and adapt them to be inclusive rather than exclusionary.
6) Measure affinities, not just foot traffic. Develop indicators of social capital: frequency of neighbor exchanges, shared tool usage, mutual aid registrations. Augustine’s question isn’t how grand the façade is, but who is loved into being by the city’s arrangements.
7) Iterate with humility. Augustine’s moral teleology is about formation over time. Likewise, city design is iterative: small rituals and material nudges, repeated, change attachments. Watch, tweak, and preserve what cultivates neighborly love.
Concluding courtroom aside: If the city is a body of loves, the planner is a kind of litigator and pedagogue—arguing for spatial laws that inculcate good habits. Augustine’s line hangs there like a judge’s last line: who we love shapes the cities we leave behind (Augustine, City of God, Book XIV). So design not streets of mirrors, but spaces that insist on being looked at by someone else’s eyes. Train the swans, welcome the goose, and build places that make duty visible, habitual, and strangely, almost irresistible.
Primary source note: Augustine's argument about the two loves and two cities is developed in City of God (see Book XIV and related discussions). For the Bishop’s Palace swans and their bell‑ringing tradition see the Palace highlights page linked above. Untitled Goose Game is a contemporary cultural example showing how playful mischief exposes social norms.