As I write this Canberra, the federal capital city, is a petite, bonsaimetropolis of 460,000. Now, though, I ask you to stickybeak quite far into the future and to imagine Canberra (in truth growing apace as we speak and for example projected to have 700,000 souls by 2058) grown to become a big and teeming city resembling in size today's marvellous Melbourne.

What feelings does this scenario trigger in your bosoms? Does it delight you or appal you to imagine your grandchildren and great-grandchildren in such a city? Would you wish for them, instead, the present little, park-like, strangely uncitylike city (a kind of Wagga-Wagga but with First World amenities) that you know today, where actual people are vastly outnumbered (sinisterly, in my opinion, as if they are getting ready to overwhelm us and seize power) by trees?

I have for decades through my columns been an advocate of a bigger, Melbournesque Canberra, often kindling against me the fury of the Small Canberra fogeys sentimentally attached to the federal capital village they knew in the golden olden days before the atrocity of self-government.

Now some of the virtues some of us impressionistically see and feel in all big and bustling and exciting cities and would wish for tomorrow's Canberra are given some scientific support.

For the online Aeon and Psyche Andrew Stier, a doctoral student in integrative neuroscience at the University of Chicago, contributes a thought-stoking essay Why Life Is Faster But Depression Is Lower In Big Cities. Here is a short taste of the essay. Small Canberra zealots are warned it contains ideas that may dismay some readers.

Stier's research focuses on systematic understandings of thought content and mental health in cities.

"Cities are bastions of opportunity," the Chicagoan observes.

"They are filled with vast numbers of people meeting friends and family, visiting restaurants, museums, concert halls and sporting events, and travelling to and from jobs.

"For decades, the conflicting experiences of city living have led urbanites and scholars to ask: are cities bad for mental health? The conventional wisdom ... for more than half a century has been, 'Yes'."

But there is scant evidence for this belief, he insists.

'[And] as it turns out, the relationship between cities and mental health is more complex than conventional explanations suggest," he writes.

"A study that I recently conducted with my colleagues at the University of Chicago demonstrates that larger cities in the United States actually have substantially lower rates of depression than smaller cities."

This seems to be because, he fancies, social interactions are famously good for our mental health and because the bigger the city, the greater abundant availability of these sorts of interactions.

He is very good on why the "hustle and bustle" and "pace" of bigger cities (he reports "research shows that people literally walk faster in larger cities, that people in towns with around 10,000 inhabitants tend to walk at a leisurely pace of 3.5 km per hour, while people in cities of around 1 million tend to walk at a pace of 5.8km per hour, almost a jog") seems to have at least as many positive impacts on mental health as the famous negative ones (such as noise, crime, and abruptness/rudeness).

"Studies show that, in general, [bigger] cities foster greater social interaction (both positive and negative), diversity, culture and generation of ideas.

"These principles seem to apply across cultures and over time, as far back as 1150 BCE."

Speed the day when Canberra is a big and broad-shouldered city of millions of folk and millions of effervescing opportunities and interactions, when stimulated Canberrans hurry to and fro in the bustling streets beneath the CBD's loftily magnificent skyscrapers, their walking pace almost a jog.

We leap to the year 3000 and notice how in their hurry they do not notice on one busy Canberra corner a modest figurative statue (a seagull perched on its head) erected to an early 21st century newspaper columnist. He was a chap who gave the best years of his life to writing in praise of the Small Canberra he lived in without ever being blind to that city's small-town warts and shortcomings.

The plaque on the statue has no room to mention it but one of the late columnist's pro-Canberra causes was the urging of the creation of the post of Canberra City Poet or Poet Laureate. After all, he argued, every self-respecting city in the UK and the USA has one of those. Why not us? By 3000 Canberra, having progressed in every way, the city has long since become laureate-blessed.

Back here in 2022 I am still pushing for this idea but warn that once achieved, there will sometimes be bad City Poets. Last Thursday, March 17, was the anniversary of the day in 1740 when Henry Fielding launched his criminal prosecution of the then awful Poet Laureate for his, the laureate's, crimes (including "murder") against the English language and against poetry.

What a good idea! Bad poetry is unforgivable and has gone unpunished for far too long. Let us have a Suppression of Bad Poetry Act that keeps today's poets on their toes and that anticipates the day when corrupt, nepotistic Chief Ministers try to award the City Poet gong to their talentless nieces, nephews, cronies and lovers.

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