Go Big or Go Home

Is Ambition Free?

Urban life breeds isolation and connection, alienation and awakening, oppression and solidarity. The city embodies contradiction: its density compresses human experience into proximity while its systems expand inequality. Through the framework of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Jeremy Engels’s The Politics of Resentment, and Sidik Fofana’s “Camaraderie,” one can understand urbanism as a psychic condition. In Sidik Fofana’s “Camaraderie,” the city’s architecture doubles as emotional infrastructure. Fofana’s unnamed narrator reflects on how urban representation often distorts or erases ordinary life:

Look at all the movies. Anytime they show us, we gotta be on our knees. It can’t jus be us regular. If they did a movie about my buildin, they wouldn’t care about the two dudes upstairs who been together for years. They wouldn’t show when they jumped the broom in the bingo room. How everybody was happy even though it wasn’t official. They wouldn’t show the butch lady in 4D who is always wearing a necktie and got a computer certificate. They don’t care about that. That’s why we gotta be more. But some people is hell-bent on makin you a prostitute.¹

Here, the narrator’s lament becomes an urban critique—representation functions as a form of social policing. The narrator’s observation that “we gotta be more” speaks to an awareness of systemic misrecognition—an internalized pressure to transcend the stereotypes imposed by external narratives. Yet, this demand for “more” is double-edged. It is aspirational but exhausting, a psychological labor that reflects what Engels calls the moral dimension of resentment.