Save this picture! Courtesy of Business Insider

If we take for granted Morris’ claim that the city is essentially a human zoo, and that, as we are all aware, it’s far more difficult for animals to mate in captivity, then - could cities actually limit our capacity for love? As our world becomes more and more urbanized, will it also become more lonely?īlame the plethora of articles that have been flooding my twitter feed in honor of Valentine’s Day, but there does seem to be, at least in the collective conscious, a relationship between big cities and single-hood.įrom the supposed “trend” of big city ladies looking for love in the suburbs, to The Daily Beast’s list of the Top 50 Cities for Love (assembled, not terribly scientifically, by looking at marriage/divorce rates and the quantity of bars/restaurants) to Business Insider’s recent article outlining where - statistically speaking - you’re most likely to find love (based on gender concentration), it seems that many cities just aren’t conducive to coupling. It’s a fascinating claim, one that led me to a rather unusual thought.

Humans in a city are like animals in a zoo. And then it occurred to me: The city is not a concrete jungle - it’s a human zoo. If you want to look for crowded animals, you have to look in the zoo. And overcrowding is the central problem of modern city life. “Some people call the city a ‘concrete jungle’ - but jungles aren’t like that. In 1969, zoologist Desmond Morris released a book titled The Human Zoo in it, he argued that human beings, tribal by nature, aren’t wired to live in the big, crowded modern-day cities we find ourselves in:

The human zoo by desmond morris