Word: great
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...great city is not necessarily beautiful or well-planned. Venice and Florence are delights to the eye; yet neither has been a great city since the Renaissance. Brasilia, one of the most elaborately designed of modern cities, is also one of the deadliest. An impressive physical setting is essential to a city's greatness, but by itself that is not enough. Take Pittsburgh: its natural setting, at the junction of two rivers, is magnificent. Man botched the job of doing anything with it. Grand avenues and impressive architecture, though necessary to a great city, do not satisfy the equation...
...city governed by birds might be more comfortable than a city governed by men. But it would not be human, nor would it be great; a city is great only in its human associations, confusing as they may be. The ancient Athenians, true urbanites, delighted in the everyday drama of human encounter. For them, the city was the supreme instrument of civilization, the tool that gave men common traditions and goals, even as it encouraged their diversity and growth. "The men who dwell in the city are my teachers," said Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus, "and not the trees...
Athens is a living memory of the Western world. Its great militaristic rival, Sparta, is all but forgotten as a center of human culture-and with reason. It is hard to classify as great a city that limits human contact, either through political repression, like Moscow, or through distance, like Los Angeles. It is also hard to imagine a city that is great only during the day. If too many of its occupants retreat to the suburbs to eat and sleep each evening, the place is, in fact, not so much a city as a collection of buildings-the unhappy...
When nations were smaller than they are today, Athens could be great with 100,000 people, Renaissance Florence with 60,000, Alexandria with 700,000 and ancient Rome with something like 1,000,000-no more than live in metropolitan Indianapolis now. To represent all the diverse elements of much more populous societies-diversity is one essential of greatness-the city must now have a population of several millions. Cincinnati and Phoenix, to cite two typical American provincial cities, may be agreeable places to live in, but they are simply not large enough to contain, as does New York...
...doubtful that any one nation can claim more than one great city at any given time-great, after all, is a word that implies uniqueness. It is doubtful, too, that the world itself can contain more than half a dozen great cities at once. Indeed, a great city cannot exist in an unimportant country, which is why Urban Planner John Friedmann of U.C.L.A. prefers to call great cities "imperial cities." London and Paris are still great cities, but they lost some of their luster when world politics shifted to Washington, Moscow and Peking-all of which lack at least...