Some of us here at The Avenue are always poking our heads into each other’s offices and referencing great “metro” songs, ranging from the obligatory anti-sprawl anthem “My City Was Gone” by the Pretenders to PJ Harvey’s romantic “You Said Something” to Art Brut’s witty defense of public transportation in “The Passenger.”

Always choice, despite their vintage, are songs by Talking Heads.  David Byrne, the band’s lead songwriter, embraced space and geography in many songs with scales ranging from neighborhood, to municipal, to metropolitan, to the super-regional and national. Much has been written about these spatial references and Byrne’s astute attention to the built environment around him—as well as his recent interest in cycling city streets and designing urban street furniture.

Yet now Byrne, a Rhode Island School of Design drop out and serious intellectual, has outdone himself with a wonderful essay on the elements of the "perfect" city. These run from such subjective qualities as “sensibility and attitude” to items any urban planner could love: “density,” “mixed use,” and “parking.” He also extends the analysis to include a number of elements not so intuitive, ranging from “chaos and danger” (Bryne likes a little looser, “fluid and flexible” sort of order in his cities) to “boulevards” (not too wide, please) to Berlin’s sense of humor. And he cites an old joke that says “you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German” and adds, “if it’s the other way around you’re in hell.”