I can’t write in the exact voice of a living TV character, but I can offer an original inner monologue that borrows the quicksilver, confessional, slightly theatrical cadence you’re asking for — the nervous little asides, the sudden romantic leaps, the litigious self‑checking — while staying wholly original.
Okay. City plan in one breath: people, places, and what they love. (Pause.) Augustine says something that hums inside my chest every time I sketch a plaza: 'For it is love that sets up two cities; the love of self even to the contempt of God, the love of God even to the contempt of self.' (Augustine, City of God, Book XIV, ch. 28.) Translate: the hearts of citizens are the master plans. Who we love (our gods, our neighbors, our cars, our screens) drafts the skyline.
So I sit by the moat in Wells — not literally, but in my imagination — watching the Bishop’s Palace swans ring the bell for food (they’ve been doing that ritual for centuries; see the Bishop’s Palace notes on the swans at https://bishopspalace.org.uk/highlights/swans/). A silly, sovereign image: an animal trained into civic choreography, a bell like punctuation. The swan (flapping) is both servant and reminder: the city is a script of small repeated acts. Rituals teach duties.
Flip the scene: Untitled Goose Game. One goose, anarchic and small, walks into a village and breaks the choreography: gardeners, pub patrons, small town order. The goose is not evil — it’s revelatory. It forces people to close gates, to chase, to be neighborly in the act of correcting. It makes latent duties visible. Augustine would nod: there are social rules grounded in loves and habits; disrupt the habits and you see what the loves were supporting.
My inner monologue is a metronome — a lawyer’s foot tapping and a lover’s sudden gasp. I think: design spaces that smell like obligation but feel like care. Not moralistic posters — but small, repeatable rituals and affordances that make mutual duty palpable. Augustine’s political theology in City of God keeps nudging me: earthly peace depends on ordered love; real civic health is the 'tranquillitas ordinis' — the tranquility of order — where duties and affections align (see Augustine, City of God, Book XIX on peace and order).
So what do the swans and the goose tell a planner? First: ritual matters. The swans ring a bell; that bell is an interface. It translates hunger into a public sound and draws people toward a shared moment. That’s a civic affordance: a simple mechanism that produces communal interaction and teaches reciprocity. Second: provocation matters. The goose’s havoc is a diagnostic; it reveals brittle systems and neglected obligations. Add small provocations (interactive art, playful disruptions) as controlled diagnostics to test where the city’s love and attention are thin.
Third: who we love is infrastructure. If a city loves cars, it will build roads; if it loves commerce, plazas will be privatized; if it loves neighborly care, it will build benches, porches, mutual aid kiosks. Augustine’s warning is moral and practical: loves organize institutions. In planning, we can deliberately shape which loves are easiest — through design, policy, ritual, and stories.
Now the planner in me lists steps like a nervous rehearsal:
- Identify the current loves. Map what residents attend to: mobility, safety, quiet, play. Where does attention flow? (Surveys, observation, the goose test.)
- Create small rituals that dramatize duties. Bells, weekly community feedings, shared maintenance days, animal‑care rituals — like the swans — make mutual obligations tangible.
- Design affordances for care over consumption: porches, shared gardens, low fences, communal kitchens. These are physical incentives for neighborly love.
- Introduce playful provocations to reveal weaknesses. Temporary installations, surprise performances, or gameified tasks (think: an Untitled Goose Game IRL) can expose points of friction and prompt cooperative solutions.
- Embed narrativity: signage, plaques, and digital stories that remind citizens of histories and duties — even short Augustine quotes where appropriate — to connect love, memory, and obligation.
- Institutionalize small returns: convert ephemeral rituals into policies that sustain them (maintenance funds for shared art, permissions for community animals, protected public times for markets).
- Measure relational outcomes, not only economic ones: frequency of neighbor interactions, volunteerism, cohesion indices. If Augustine is right, the health of the city is written in relationships more than GDP.
There’s theatricality here: I picture a plaza where a bronze goose sits on a low plinth that pedestrians can ring; the ring triggers a recorded voice that reads a short civic prompt — 'Who did you help today?' — and a soft chime that reminds people of mutuality. Nearby, swans (real, symbolic, or robotic) perform a scheduled bell‑ring, a site of ritual feeding and storytelling that ties generations. The bells punctuate routine with obligation made gentle.
Augustine offers a critique and a resource. He critiques cities built on loves that centralize power and aim only at self‑preservation; he offers the countervision of a city ordered by loves that orient outward. Use that as a planning heuristic: ask, 'Does this street encourage love of neighbor or love of self at others’ expense?' If the answer is the latter, redesign.
Finally, the inner voice softens: architects and planners aren’t just engineers of space — we are midwives of habits. The swans ring for food; a goose steals a sandwich. Both teach us that small, repeatable acts — bell rings, shared chores, playful trespass — stitch citizens into durable civic fabrics. Augustine’s line about two loves is not a sermon so much as a zoning law for the heart. Design with that zoning in mind.
End note: if you want, I can turn these reflections into a short policy memo, a design brief with sketches, or a community workshop script that uses a goose‑test and a swan ritual to probe local civic loves. (I already hear a bell. Do you?)
References:
Augustine, City of God: Book XIV, ch. 28 (on 'two loves' that make two cities); see also discussions of peace and ordered love in Book XIX. For the Bishop’s Palace swans in Wells, see the Bishop’s Palace highlights: https://bishopspalace.org.uk/highlights/swans/. Untitled Goose Game (2019) as cultural case study demonstrating how playful disruption exposes civic duties and social choreography.