We have been thinking about the actual upper bound on this. How many neighborhoods can a person genuinely know in one lifetime? Not visit, not pass through, not even spend a long weekend in — but really know, in the sense of having walked them at all hours, learned the cafés, recognized the regulars at the corner bar, and understood why the people who live there love the place.
Our best estimate is somewhere between twenty and forty. That number is shockingly small. It means that if you devote your travel life to depth rather than breadth — spending three weeks in one neighborhood instead of three days in seven cities — you can hope to develop intimate knowledge of perhaps thirty places in a 60-year travel career.
Thirty neighborhoods. Out of how many tens of thousands worth knowing.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is the opposite. The implication is that breadth is almost always the wrong strategy. If you have only thirty neighborhood-shaped slots in your lifetime, you should be ferociously selective about which ones you choose, and you should keep going back to the ones that earn return visits. Two weeks in Le Marais beats two days in Le Marais plus two days in five other cities, every single time.
We try to write this site with that in mind. Our city guides are not bucket lists. They are starting points for travelers who want to pick a few neighborhoods and go deep.
