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Home›Fiction›The Concrete Jungle

The Concrete Jungle

By Rachel Du Mont-Greenlee
August 1, 2022
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concrete jungle
Coffee House Writers / Rachel Du Mont-Greenlee

The concrete jungle wakes to rays of the sun. Panes of glass play with eastern light. Towers of brick, cement, and stucco rise above urban citrus trees to glimpse the stirring towns.

Traffic pours in, traffic pours out, and cars line up like glistening ants. Vehicular networks like brain neurons branch outward and inward, a mass transit of information, knowledge, and progress.

Street corner cafés with striped awnings overhead, and bistro seats on sidewalks fill with loyal patrons. A man in a suit takes his coffee with cream, no sugar, and resists an apricot turnover. The woman with a backpack, chai tea every Tuesday, sits at the window.

Midday heat ripples across the asphalt and trucks scatter in the neighborhoods, smelling of cinnamon, peppers, and sizzling onions. All claim to have the city’s best burrito.

Murals of cerulean, turquoise, tangerine, and fuchsia enliven alley walks, calling for peace, love, and progress in each spray and stroke. Messages sing in the afternoon quiet.

Shoppers weave through storefronts, markets, and food stalls, assessing clothes, lettuce heads, and bracelets that dazzle beneath a California sun. They trade with merchants. Chat with old friends.

Evening sea breezes funnel the cosmopolitan grid. Workers drive away in cars, and children ride on bikes, shoppers with bags in hand, stumble homeward bound. Happy hours and golden hours grow smiles.

People rise onto rooftops for sangria, old fashions, and vodka sodas with lime, searching the horizon for a glimpse of tomorrow, a reminder of today. Purple mountains zigzag in the distance. Ocean sparkles enlighten hope.

Stars burst to life in a violet, cloudless sky, and the city ebbs and flows like the tide miles away, people coming, people leaving, people staying for one more view.

The sun sets on the urban core, and the sliver moon ascends, trailing the sky canvas, midnight to morning, but the city never sleeps. Full of life, always in motion.

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Rachel Du Mont-Greenlee

As an antiquarian, Rachel Du Mont-Greenlee grew up knowing she’d incorporate history into her career, studying ancient civilizations and the physical, cerebral, and social jewels they left behind. During her studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where Du Mont-Greenlee earned her bachelor’s degree in City and Regional Planning, Du Mont- Greenlee realized her passion for architecture and urban forms, physical spaces that bridge cultures and enable sociality. After working several years in public and private sector urban planning, Du Mont-Greenlee returned to academia, earning her master’s degree in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London. At Goldsmiths, she wrote anthropological ethnographies including the following topics: how sense of place authenticity relays to mental experiences in restaurants, and an auto-ethnographic piece on the South Orange County suburbs that moves between architecture and people and sets an analogy between the making of homes and the making of housewives, informed by classic feminist theory. To better understand the politics of place, place authenticity, historical remembrance through spatial awareness, and architecture’s construction of sociality, she spent a year and a half researching urban trends during the coronavirus pandemic in London, England. Du Mont- Greenlee compared her social findings that society underwent gentrification of the mind amid the pandemic to the gentrification of urban places, including Shoreditch, London. In doing so, she found that anything—even longstanding architectural bastions once revered for their ingenuity could be erased or forgotten. Much like the books of old burned for their revolutionary messages. While not sculpted from brick and mortar or concrete or wood, the written word weathers time as do the architectural wonders of the world. Both are fragile, capable of crumbling in a moment, but both transcend time and remind humankind of history. Touched equally by the lives of collapsed civilizations as those breathing alongside her today, Du Mont-Greenlee believes the marvels humans create reflect the soul of humankind. These ideas inspire the non-fiction articles she writes for Coffee House Writers and her fiction manuscript Edge of Worlds.

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