Madrid has nice things

10 observations, nice things, and little ideas that made Madrid pretty pleasant for a week-long trip last spring: You can’t make a city like Madrid with token spend. You probably can’t even make Madrid by gathering numerous friends in an underdeveloped grass plain and deciding you’re going to make a great city. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Extremely related to the previous: Madrid has many nice things because it’s a lot older than most American cities. It necessarily evolved and was built at human scale. It was probably a major pain to get a (pretty good, IMO) subway underneath it. But, given the fixed locations of palaces, royal gardens, etc. you get a pretty pleasant place. Money invested in a city doesn’t automatically improve it. And it can’t buy you happiness. But it can avoid many kinds of misery! (Possibly only if you invest capital in making things nice, and invest socially to avoid misery? I know, it’s going to be difficult to get the private enterprise types to wrap their heads around that one.)…

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