TOWARDS THE URBAN CENTRE

1. The suburbs are 'looser' than the urban heart of the city, not contrary to it, no, but less centripetal overall. Things are generally more spread out, houses or dwellings often being detached or semidetached, with the corollary of more garden space.

2. But as one approaches the properly urban areas of the city - and London is as good an example as any - the buildings generally stand closer together, and row after row of tenements is not uncommon.

3. Now imagine what kind of effect this distinction between the spaced-out suburbs and the up-tight urban areas has on people, or, rather, conceive of people as being divisible, according to environment, between the 'looser' suburbs and the 'tighter' ('thicker') urban areas-proper, and you will quickly come to the realization that people become the mirror images, in effect, of where they live.

4. Thus suburban people, accustomed to more space, will generally be less 'up tight' than urban people, or those who live in or near the heart of the city, and correspondingly 'looser' in their morals.

5. For the more centro-complexified things become, the more centripetal, by a corresponding degree, do people become, and, conversely, the less the degree of centro-complexification the less centripetal, correspondingly, are people, and the greater the likelihood, in consequence, that how they dress and behave will reflect this fact.

6. Therefore one would logically expect more evidence of sartorial looseness in the suburbs than in the city proper, even to the extent - though this is not commensurate with degrees of centripetal difference - of flounced dresses and/or skirts as distinct from tapering ones, or of straight or even flounced jeans as distinct from tapering ones.

7. Certainly the evidence would appear to suggest that the pressures of urban centro-complexification condition large numbers of people towards tapering attire of one kind or another, while their suburban counterparts, though not entirely exempt from such pressures themselves, demonstrate greater flexibility in their sartorial styles, even to the extent of favouring clothes which, in their flounced or flared 'looseness', are not so much less centripetal as patently centrifugal, and thus indicative of influences having less to do with the suburbs than with avowedly rural or provincial milieus.

8. Be that as it may, there are a number of grounds (besides sartorial ones) for supposing or even concluding that environment has an effect upon morals, and that where people live to some extent determines, through protracted conditioning, how they live, whether for better (city proper) or worse (outer suburbs).

9. Thus I will make no bones about the fact that inner-city people are generally more moral, because centripetal, than their suburban counterparts, and correspondingly less inclined to yobbish or lax behaviour.

10. My own experience would confirm that the city, with its centro-complexifications, not least of all in respect of architecture, is the place to develop the centripetal orientation of an omega-point philosophy, and that only in such an environment can such a philosophy be developed to its logical conclusions, not in relation to suburban conditioning.

11. I was brought up in the suburbs and detested the city, meaning London proper. But the older I get and the more accustomed I become to city life, the less appeal the suburbs have for me, and I would now regard a move from London proper to, say, the Surrey suburbs of my youth as retrogressive.

12. I have 'grown up' in London, in the best sense of that term, and although I am far from endorsing the concept of metropolis as moral exemplar (least of all in relation to square and/or rectilinear styles of architecture), it is incontrovertible to me that London provided the basis for my transcendental philosophy, the centripetal orientation of which would not, I feel sure, have come to fruition in a markedly suburban environment.