Word: maye
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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, the wide variety of types and temperaments that form the American character. Americans and foreigners alike call New York the least American of cities. In fact, it is the most American...
...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 one ingredient of greatness. Washington may be the political center of the nation, but, except for its superb galleries, cultural life there is as provincial as that of Des Moines or Butte, Mont. Both Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro have an effervescent vitality that suggests the potential of great cities. They may yet fulfill that potential...
...coast, but it does not. A half-century ago, San Francisco looked as if it might become the great city of the West. Instead, it has remained a charming, eccentric and physically beguiling minor metropolis. Los Angeles, in the unlikely event that it ever should overcome its centrifugal forces, may yet become the Western colossus. Though it has many parts of greatness, Chicago, on the other hand, has always thought of itself as the "second city"-and so it always will be, if not third or fourth. Even without the political power that resides in a national capital...
Whatever else it may possess or lack, a great city cannot be dull. It must have a sense of place and a feeling all its own, and its citizens must be different from and more vital than those who live elsewhere. The difference does not even have to be in their favor. The native Parisian, for instance, is born with an ineradicable hauteur that others define as rudeness, and the native New Yorker knows the meaning of avarice before he can spell the word. So strong is the trait that a century ago, Anthony Trollope waspishly noted that every...