Albuquerque begins on the slope and a bit of the innards of a small mountain range east of the city proper. The bulk of the city is settled in the valley west of the mountains, as if the weight of the buildings and asphalt and people sunk the ground in a little where the concentrations of said stuff are the highest. As the city tapers off to the west, the valley rises to a plain with a few ancient, dead volcanoes and a suburb.

At the time of day when the sun is low in the west, it obscures most of the city in a haze; and from the city heights where I live you can almost imagine that you are looking at just the vast desert.

Geographically, Albuquerque is a beautiful place. It's not the same kind of desert as Santa Fe, however. In the first part of the twentieth century, most of New Mexico from Albuquerque down was covered with dunes of desert sand. In Santa Fe, there are many types of small desert shrubs and grasses, even the strange desert trees. In the mountains east of Santa Fe, the climate is wetter, and the usual mountain varieties flourish. Albuquerque, though, is a true desert. Even its natural properties can't compare to the man made desert that this city has become.

While driving yesterday, I challenged my boyfriend to find one thing of beauty that was manmade. A piece of creative and lasting architecture, a mural, mosaic, or statue... in the older parts of town and the artsy "Nob Hill" near the university, these things are not rare. The bulk of the city, however, is purely commercial. Huge asphalt roads and parking lots, small, squat shopping centers and the bloated megastores, the generic restaurants... the billboards screaming at you from every angle... it reminds me so much of Oran, the plague stricken town in Camus' great work.

We build things to be cheap and efficient. In this country, when we build things for the "long term" we mean ten or twenty years. Says a coworker of mine who spent a few years in Paris, where buildings meant to last for the long term stand for hundreds of years through wars, disasters and development.

This is our environment, this is where we live; where we spend every day. Why is beauty not a consideration?

This is the heart of the debate in the field of aesthetics. Is beauty necessary? Is it even real? Can we live without it? Why would we want to?

And of course, there is the subjectivity of beauty. How can we impose one ideal on everyone? Or even the idea?

In Santa Fe, the building code specifies that all buildings must be made of, or made to look like, adobe. Santa Fe is almost universally acknowledged as the most beautiful city in New Mexico... but there are those who think that the little adobe buildings are very ugly.

What about neighborhood coalitions? Those creepy little organizations of folks who tell you what three shades of grey you can paint your home, or how many lawn ornaments you can adorn your space with, or how tall you can let your grass grow... certainly these people have aesthetic considerations at heart, and yet the neighborhoods they impose their rule on tend to be not beautiful, but rather homogenous.

I believe that ultimately it is not a question of accepting one ideal of beauty, but one of encouraging everyone to make beauty a consideration in their communities... simply by expressing our individual ideals in the places we build and inhabit. If we begin to act as though we would like our communities to be lasting impressions of our individuality and our spirit, monuments to show the world and the future the heart of our culture, then perhaps an aesthetic ideal could be attained that would help our monstrous modern cities become worthy companions to the great ones of the past. More importantly, perhaps, they could become places that are worthy of inhabitation for the bulk of our lives, places that could even enrich them.