“SO, WHERE WOULD YOU LIVE if you could choose anywhere at all?” a friend asked me not long ago. I was stumped for an answer. Everyone has had the experience of visiting a particularly attractive place and thinking, “I wish I could live here someday.” Venice had struck me like that, as had Key West, and Victoria, British Columbia. I could see myself living in Woodstock, too. But I don’t believe in dream houses, still less in dream places, and I really can’t imagine picking a place to live in the way that you might pick a dish from a restaurant menu. It is either too arbitrary or too calculated, I’m not sure which, but it feels wrong.
Still, it wasn’t altogether a hypothetical question. At the time, my wife and I were discussing moving from the Boathouse, the country house we had built ourselves and lived in for fourteen years, and where my friend Danielle had asked me, “Why aren’t our cities like that?” When the idea of moving had first come up two years earlier, we had talked about it in a vague, uncertain way. It was one of those what-if conversations that start as idle speculation and take weeks and months to coalesce into not exactly certainty, but at least possibility. No single overriding reason prompted this speculation, but there were many small ones. I was getting stale in my university work—after almost twenty years I had accomplished most of the things I had set out to do, and I felt I could benefit from the stimulation of new surroundings. I was fifty years old, and if I was to move, it would have to be soon, or never. There was also the unsettled political situation in French Quebec, whose separation from Canada seemed likely, if not imminent. Although I wished French Canadians well, their passionate quest for political independence seemed to me quixotic at best and foolhardy at worst. In either case, their quest was not my own. Last, while both Shirley and I had adjusted to country life, we had to admit that there were some things about it we didn’t like. The isolation, for one thing. The township of Hemmingford, where we lived, was relatively remote—fifty miles from Montreal and the university where I worked—and even going to the Plattsburgh mall meant a forty-minute drive. I don’t dislike driving (Shirley does), but I had to agree with her that it would be nice to live in a place where you could walk to a corner store, or where public transport was available to go to work, say, or to the airport. That is, it would be nice to live in more urban surroundings.
Most people have firm ideas about the ideal place to live. When a 1989 Gallup poll asked Americans the same question my friend had asked me—where would you choose to live if you could live anywhere: in a city, suburb, small town, or the country?—34 percent said they would prefer to live in a small town, more than chose any other category. Opinion polls regularly uncover this same bias—Gallup asked a similar question in 1972 and found almost a third in favor of small towns. This partiality should not be surprising, for the concept of “small town” exercises a powerful hold on the American imagination. It’s unclear exactly what population constitutes a small town, but it is probably less than 10,000 people. Christopher Alexander, the author of A Pattern Language, a primer on architecture and urban design, recommends between 5,000 and 10,000 as the ideal population for small towns; like Aristotle before him, Alexander bases this figure on the number of people that can effectively govern themselves. Whatever the exact size, most people would agree that the small town has to have a main street with stores, a few offices, and a town hall, probably across from a park or square near the center. There should be houses, preferably with porches, facing streets lined with large, overhanging trees. The small town is not a village—there is a denser sense of community, people are living close together—but it isn’t a city, either. Perhaps the most important thing about the small town of the public imagination is not its physical attributes but that it is a recognizable community.
The affection Americans have for small towns, remarked on so many years ago by Tocqueville, has since been celebrated on stage, in movies, and on television. A small town was the setting of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, as well as of innumerable television dramas, including the 1950s classics “Father Knows Best,” set in the town of Springfield, and “Leave It to Beaver,” set in the town of Mayfield. Canadians, too, share this preference for small towns. The best-loved works of Canadian literature, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, are set in small towns; so is Robertson Davies’s masterful Deptford trilogy, beginning with Fifth Business. Movies, television, and novels in both countries strengthen the perception of the small town as more authentic than the city, and “Main Street, not Wall Street” continues to raise a cheer in any political speech.
It’s worth pointing out that this affection for the idealized joys of small-town life has had its ups and downs. Hadleyville in the Western movie High Noon or Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird are small towns that are shown to be less than perfect; even Capra’s fictional Bedford Falls, New York, in It’s a Wonderful Life, has its darker side. Sherwood Anderson fled a small town and went to Chicago to write Winesburg, Ohio. Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel, Main Street, described the complacency and narrow-mindedness of small midwestern towns; its locale, Gopher Prairie, was based on the author’s hometown, Sauk Center, Minnesota. For Lewis’s generation, the small town was chiefly a place to escape from. But there were, and are, other novelists—Faulkner, Steinbeck, Welty, Updike, Davies—for whom the small-town atmosphere proved congenial. Affection for small towns is distinctly American; although the country village plays the small-town role in English culture, one cannot imagine a Frenchman, say, or an Italian, preferring small towns to large cities.
I had spent about half my life living in large cities, but I had to admit that I liked small towns, too, and given half a chance, I might have moved to one. But things worked out differently. The University of Pennsylvania called me with the generous offer of a newly established chair. Suddenly speculation turned into reality. After due consideration, I accepted. With regret, we put the Boathouse up for sale and started to pack.
Once we had navigated the bureaucratic channels of the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and acquired visas, we had to officially enter the United States, which in our case involved nothing more than driving to the rural border crossing two miles from our house. After the formality of having our passports stamped, I was talking to the American immigration officer, who offhandedly asked me where we would be going.
“Philadelphia,” I answered.
“Why?”
The incredulous look on his face suggested that the question was not, “What are you going to do in Philadelphia?” or “Why Philadelphia, in particular?” Really what he was asking was “Why would you want to go to a place like Philadelphia?” or more to the point, “Why on earth would you want to leave these peaceful country surroundings and move to a dirty, crowded, dangerous city?”
Why, indeed. I could understand his puzzlement. Most Americans given a choice would get out of a big city, not move into one. In 1994, The Wall Street Journal commissioned a study to identify the fastest-growing, wealthiest, and most educated areas of the country—that is, those areas to which its own younger readers (white-collar executives, corporate managers, and professionals, definitely people with choices) were moving. Among the criteria used by the researchers were that median household incomes be $30,000 or more (the 1990 national median was $29,943; the actual median incomes in the growth areas varied between $35,000 and $55,000); that at least a quarter of the residents be between thirty-five and fifty-four (these were not retirement communities); and that at least a quarter of the adults be university educated. None of what the article called “the power centers of tomorrow” were in big cities or in traditional suburbs or even in metropolitan areas; they were all in rural counties, twenty to fifty miles away from the nearest city. The top three areas were Douglas County, Colorado, lying between Denver and Colorado Springs; Fayette County, Georgia, south of Atlanta; and Fort Bend County, Texas, southwest of Houston. Nor were all these “power centers” in the South and West—eight of the twenty were in the northeast, and three in Minnesota. What attracted people and companies to these places were better schools, cheaper housing, low crime rates, and the chance to improve what is usually referred to as quality of life, even if this means driving an hour or more to work. One expert quoted in the article observed, “A lot of baby boomers want out of the urban scene at whatever sacrifice.”
Hemmingford, in a rural county, hardly qualified as a power center of tomorrow, but in moving to a large city we did seem to be bucking a trend. What I had told the immigration officer, however, was not precise. We were moving to Philadelphia, but not to the center of the city. Our new home is an old stone house in the garden suburb that Henry Houston started to build in 1884 in the northwest corner of the city—Chestnut Hill.
In a way, we were moving to a small town and a city both. The population of Chestnut Hill is that of a small town, about 10,000, spread over less than three square miles, which is more persons per square mile than, say, present-day Charleston or Savannah, but considerably less than most larger cities. Despite its location, Chestnut Hill gives the impression of an only slightly urbanized Arcadia. This is what William Penn must have had in mind when he planned his “green country town.” The trees that Houston and Woodward planted are fully grown and throw a broad canopy over the streets; the heavily planted gardens in front of many houses add to the atmosphere of an extended public park. Some things have changed. The lake that Houston built has been drained and his hotel has been converted into a private school, but the Cricket Club is still here, as is the Gothic revival church. Most of the Woodward and Houston houses survive, still owned by descendants of the two families, and long waiting lists attest to their continued popularity with tenants. Chestnut Hill is no longer the upper-class WASP bastion of the early 1900s, when it had more residents in the Social Register than any other community in the Philadelphia region.I It has become more socially and economically heterogeneous. There are now apartment buildings, townhouses, and modestly priced rental units. In fact the variety, from studio apartments in high-rises to cavernous mansions, is much greater than in most urban neighborhoods, let alone small towns. The main commercial street, which deteriorated in the 1950s as more and more people shopped at nearby suburban shopping centers, has been revived by an active merchants’ association that refurbished buildings, created common parking lots, and turned Germantown Avenue into a successful shopping street, precisely the sort of old-fashioned pedestrian district people find so attractive. The stores are a mix of locally owned businesses and national chains.
Chestnut Hill is legally and emotionally part of the city of Philadelphia, but it is no longer precise to describe Chestnut Hill as “a suburb in the city.” In 1990, the same number of working people were commuting out to the surrounding suburban counties as were commuting in to downtown, or what Philadelphians call Center City. The same dichotomy applies to other activities. From Chestnut Hill one goes to Center City to the Spectrum, the Academy of Music, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and good restaurants; and in the other direction, into suburban Philadelphia, to visit the Barnes Foundation, to have one’s car repainted, to buy lumber, to go to a movie at the mall. Chestnut Hill stands between two different urban worlds.
* * *
The Philadelphia metropolitan area encompasses several cities and counties in four different states; three-quarters of its residents live outside the city of Philadelphia. The term metropolitan area was formally adopted by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1949 in order to recognize that urbanization had outstripped traditional city limits and that a new classification was needed. The Latin root of “metropolis” means mother-city, and the metropolitan area was intended to embody this notion. In the United States, a metropolitan area is defined as a large population nucleus—that is, a central city (typically with at least 50,000 people)—and the adjacent communities—that is, suburbs—with which it has a high degree of social and economic integration. The Canadian definition is similar, although no minimum size for the city is stipulated. In both countries metro areas must have at least 100,000 residents to qualify. There are currently more than three hundred metro areas in the United States and twenty-five in Canada, and they are home to about three-quarters of the population of each country.
This definition of a metro area describes the main city as a nucleus and suggests that the surrounding suburban towns and counties represent satellites of a kind. The metaphor is misleading, or at least outdated. For one thing, although metro areas are named after their largest city, most metro areas include not one but several nuclei. Metro San Francisco, for example, includes San Jose, which is actually a more populous city, as well as Oakland; metro Houston includes Galveston and Brazoria; the metro region of Toronto includes no less than eight cities and sixteen towns. Moreover, because metro areas are so large, the so-called nucleus is only a small part of the whole. In the case of metro San Francisco, only about 700,000 people out of more than 6 million live in the city itself; the city of Toronto has about 635,000 residents out of a total metropolitan population of 4 million. The city of Paris—about 2.3 million residents—likewise represents a fraction of metro Paris’s 10.5 million; metropolitan growth is not confined to North America.
The nucleus/satellite metaphor is misleading in another way, because it implies that the surrounding suburbs are subservient to the central city. Before 1950 this was largely true: central cities were richer, and offered more employment than their suburbs. Cities were also the most populous part of the metro area: in 1950, seven out of ten Americans living in metropolitan areas lived inside the limits of the main central city. Forty years later the situation has reversed, and now only four out of ten live in central cities. It isn’t just that more people are choosing to live outside the city and commute in; employment also has moved to the suburban fringe. The extent of this shift is remarkable: by 1990 only half as many Americans nationwide were making the traditional suburb-to-city trip as were traveling from home to workplace without leaving the suburbs. The relationship between suburb and city has changed radically, from one of simple dependency to uneasy parity.
Most metro areas have grown vigorously, but metropolitan growth has not everywhere been accompanied by city growth. Between 1950 and 1990, old manufacturing cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore lost almost a quarter of their population; in some cases, like Saint Louis, Cleveland, and Detroit, the loss was closer to half. Despite a different political system that encourages metropolitan government, the same thing is taking place in Canada, although slightly delayed. The population of the city of Montreal, for example, which was 1.2 million in 1971, shrank over the next twenty years to about 1 million. Equally engaging cities like Boston and San Francisco have also experienced decline in the last decades. This is not only a question of people deciding to move from city to suburb or from city to city—chiefly from the northeastern cities to the South and West—but also of new arrivals choosing to locate their homes and businesses outside the central city. Thus, as metro Philadelphia gained over a million residents between 1950 and 1990, the city of Philadelphia declined by half a million.
Downsizing need not adversely affect the quality of city life. After all, businesses, institutions, even the military, are obliged to consolidate, so why not cities? Vienna, Venice, and Glasgow are smaller today than in the past, but this has not made them inhospitable places to live. The number of thriving small cities, both here and abroad, suggests that unlimited growth is not the only urban policy. Population shrinkage can be acceptable as long as resources are properly managed. Unfortunately, for many cities, poor management and shrinking resources are precisely the problem. The image of the successful central business district assiduously cultivated by city planners and municipal administrators in the 1970s and 80s, with glamorous skyscrapers and exciting cultural showplaces, has turned out to be a false measure of urban health. Neighborhoods are the lifeblood of any city. The loss of the old industrial jobs together with the middle-class move to the suburbs has turned many urban neighborhoods into dysfunctional communities of chronic unemployment and welfare dependency. Nor are these merely “pockets” of poverty—the average income across entire cities like North Chicago, East Saint Louis, or Camden, New Jersey is now much less than half that of surrounding suburbs. Their traditional tax base reduced, cities have been unable to maintain standards in urban services such as policing, education, transportation, and street cleaning. To make up for lost revenue, local taxes are raised. But reduced services and higher taxes hardly attract financially secure newcomers, and such desperate measures only serve to drive more people away.
David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque and author of Cities Without Suburbs, has studied the relationship between central cities and metropolitan areas. According to his analysis, when the average city income drops to less than 70 percent of the average suburban income, the disparity is so great that investment and job creation in the city come to a virtual halt. “The bottom line is that once past the Point of No Return, I have not found a city that has ever made up economic ground on its suburbs by even one percentage point! . . . The situation is not hopeless,” he writes, “but the city can no longer ‘save’ itself through its own efforts and by programs within its own municipal jurisdiction.”
The cities that have passed Rusk’s point of no return will require external intervention to equalize their increased share of the national burden of poverty-related problems (including a disproportionate share of immigration). Central cities cannot be asked to continue to shoulder these responsibilities without a more equitable distribution of national financial resources. Whatever the nature of this intervention, one thing is certain: if it is to survive, the central city must be better integrated into the metropolitan area, although no longer as the center, but as one of many centers. Popular media representations to the contrary, New York is not only the towers of Manhattan (it wasn’t even when Le Corbusier visited), just as Chicago is not only the Loop or the Gold Coast. These may be the urban images that attract conventioneers and tourists, but for the scores of communities that inhabit it, the metro area consists of different places, each with its own character, its own geography, and its own focus. The traditional downtown is usually still an important business center, and its historical buildings and cultural institutions may make it a destination for tourists, but the airport, which is on the urban fringe, is also a major nucleus, as important as the harbor or railroad terminus of old. Urban neighborhoods, rich and poor, have their own retail centers—as they always have had. The suburbs, no longer strictly residential, have developed town centers around shopping malls and office complexes; some of these suburban centers have grown into dense agglomerations of retail, commercial, office space, and research facilities, which the journalist Joel Garreau has christened “edge cities.” With names like Princeton Corridor and Perimeter Center (near Atlanta), the edge cities now boast more prestige office space than the downtown. The strip, especially in smaller cities, represents another kind of focus, linear and dynamic, often a fertile breeding ground for entrepreneurs. And the outer suburbs have acquired their own nuclei, often located in existing country towns. The metro area—that is, the modern city—is all of these.
* * *
Broadacre City was the imaginary metropolis that Frank Lloyd Wright started designing in the mid-1930s. This was his answer to Le Corbusier: The city of the future would not be vertical, but horizontal. Instead of concentrating people in apartment blocks, Broadacre City dispersed them in individual houses on one-acre lots. This was not a suburb, however, for Wright dispensed with the traditional downtown altogether, and scattered public and commercial buildings throughout the landscape. The citizens of Broadacre City would get about on a network of multilevel highways, in bizarre vehicles that looked like a cross between a tractor and a modern minivan; or they could leapfrog from house to house in their family helicopters, called “aerotors.” They would shop at drive-in “wayside markets,” strolling among fountains and greenery under glass-roofed galleries; assemble in drive-in civic centers; and worship in drive-in churches set amidst rolling farmland.
Wright tinkered with the design of Broadacre City for the last twenty years of his life, but it remained unrealized, and most architectural critics refused to take it seriously, considering it the embarrassing foible of an aging master. Today, on the whole, much of Broadacre City is surprisingly familiar. Wright was correct in assuming the automobile had drastically altered the way that Americans wanted to live, and our spread-out metro areas vindicate his vision. What he had not foretold, however, was the extent to which the pedestrian pleasures of traditional cities and towns have made a comeback. North Americans, who used to go to Europe to stroll the ancient streets of Venice and Strasbourg, can now enjoy restored British, French, or Spanish colonial towns like Charleston, Quebec, or Saint Augustine, or rebuilt urban historic districts, or re-creations of urban places, like Williamsburg or Disneyland’s Main Street. Even shopping malls are starting to be designed to look like traditional streets. Undoubtedly, this is partly nostalgia and partly an interest in history, but it might also be evidence, as the contemporary planner and architect Andres Duany has argued, that Americans have preserved a taste for the experience of old-fashioned pedestrian-based urbanism.
This fondness for a more traditional form of urbanity is apparently what prompted the organizers of 1994’s Final Four tournament of college basketball to create a temporary “downtown” in the center of the host city, Charlotte, North Carolina. Charlotte is the third-largest banking center in the United States and a prosperous metro area, but what had been downtown is now no more than a conglomeration of spanking-new high-rise commercial buildings. For the tournament, a four-block area was turned into a so-called entertainment zone complete with sports bars, comedy clubs, and restaurants, located in empty buildings and in tents pitched on vacant lots. For this one weekend at least, downtown Charlotte had a vibrant street life once more, even if, as one journalist observed, it was all as permanent as a movie set. “We’re only reacting to the fact that visitors will want to come here to have an urban experience,” a local architect was quoted as saying. This is what continues to attract out-of-towners to the centers of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, where one’s two feet are the preferred mode of transportation, and where urban life is still experienced firsthand.
“Firsthand” may not be quite the right word, since people experience cities in cars as well as on foot, but the desire to counterbalance our enervating mobility with something more calming, smaller scale, more old-fashioned, is real enough. Equally real is the craving for a sense of local identity, for sharing experiences at a smaller scale. The desire for community—or at least for a sense of community—is undoubtedly responsible for the success of so-called Traditional Neighborhood Development, an approach to planning suburban communities that combines smaller plots, more public spaces, and short walking distances to concentrated town centers with traditional-looking architecture. Such planned developments have proved popular with home buyers and developers in both Canada and the United States. In the suburbs of San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, the planner Peter Calthorpe has designed new neighborhoods focused on transit stops that are combined with commercial centers, much in the way that the builders of Market Square placed shops next to the railroad station in Lake Forest, Illinois. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the Miami-based couple who invented Traditional Neighborhood Development, are planning a 1,500-acre suburban development in Markham, in metro Toronto, that is designed so that all of the 27,000 residents will be within a five-minute walk of parks and small commercial centers. This type of planning is sometimes described as neotraditional, and indeed, Duany and Plater-Zyberk used Yorkship Village, New Jersey, as a model for the plan of their acclaimed Florida resort community of Seaside, whose small, porch-fronted houses and narrow streets recall a nineteenth-century small town.
Still, a desire for local identity and old-fashioned architecture should not be confused with really wanting to return to the static communities of the past—no matter how profound our nostalgia. It is unlikely that we will ever sacrifice our freedom and mobility (both physical and social) for the constraints implied by life in the small towns we say we admire. The Canadian architect Moshe Safdie is best known for the housing project Habitat, a sort of vertical suburb, with roof terraces replacing private gardens. He has also worked on town designs in the United States and Israel, and has suggested that “Policy for the coming decades cannot rest on the premise of forcing a reversal of the desire to disperse, but rather, on facilitating and shaping our wanderings: creating new centers of concentration within sprawling districts—in other words, designing the best of both worlds.” Safdie is right. The popularity of shopping malls and of historic districts shows that people still enjoy meeting face-to-face. On the other hand, the diversity of modern city life can no longer be contained in a single main street or in a small, local neighborhood center. The simple organization and limited choices provided by traditional urbanism will no longer do. We need both dispersal and concentration in cities—places to get away from each other, and places to gather—and it’s time to stop assuming that one necessarily precludes the other.
The old hierarchy of center and periphery, of downtown and suburb, which both Daniel Burnham and Le Corbusier believed in no matter how different their urban visions, is being replaced by something else—something diffuse, amorphous, and held together, as J. B. Jackson has suggested, by a system of roads and highways and, one could add, by a system of telephone wires, television cables, and computer links. According to Jackson, what was once a composition of well-defined physical places has been replaced by vague zones of influence; accessibility, not permanence, is what characterizes the metro area. If getting somewhere is as important as being somewhere, then mobility affects our very sense of place. “It can be said that a landscape tradition a thousand years old in our Western world is yielding to a fluid organization of space that we do not entirely understand, nor know how to assimilate as a symbol of what is desirable and worth preserving,” Jackson writes. If he is right, North American cities will continue to become less and less like the cities of the past.
The urban future can be glimpsed in new, fast-growing cities like San Diego, Dallas, and Jacksonville, which are developing a dynamic kind of home-grown urbanism based on movement and accessibility, decentralization, and a complete reliance on private cars rather than on public mass transportation. It is these cities that are the new economic powerhouses. The city of San Jose proper, whose population almost quadrupled between 1970 and 1990, is the only American city with more than a quarter of its workforce engaged in manufacturing; the median household income is the highest of any of the major cities. Cities like San Jose are characterized by an extremely low overall urban density, much lower than that of the nineteenth-century industrial cities. Phoenix, which has grown through vigorous annexation, now extends over more than 400 square miles; Houston over more than 500 square miles, about four times as large as the area of Philadelphia.
Once we accept that our cities will not be like cities of the past, it will become possible to see what they might become. Combining lessons from the past with the present will not produce a unified city, but a combination of disparate elements, old and new, dense and diffuse, private and public: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City meets Jane Jacobs’s Greenwich Village. This will please neither the advocates of traditional urbanism nor the edge city boosters, but its chaotic, ideological impurity may be a more truthful accommodation to the way we live today.
* * *
I take the train to work, the same line that Henry Houston convinced the Pennsylvania Railroad to build in 1882. The stop where I get on has only a platform with a small, open shelter to protect waiting passengers from inclement weather. One morning I read a notice calling for volunteers to clean up the grounds around the railroad stop. The following Saturday, I joined my neighbors in what I discovered is a semiannual event. The anomalous sight of a retired business executive raking leaves, and a turbaned matron chain-sawing dead trees seemed slightly ridiculous and also discouraging. After all, this was the sort of maintenance traditionally held to be the job of the public authorities, whose inability to perform even such humdrum tasks seemed to me evidence of serious urban decline. But on second thought, I changed my mind. Decline there might be, but our efforts were not worthy of ridicule. Here were citizens reaffirming a small measure of control over their shared physical surroundings, and demonstrating a sense of community, which is part of what cities are about—or should be.
As I was heaving branches into the Dumpster, I was reminded that the city of the future, whatever form it takes, will depend on the goodwill of its citizens for its well-being. Planners and architects lay out the avenues and expressways and build public monuments and civic symbols, but these don’t add up to much if a strong sense of urban community doesn’t take root. A sense of community has nourished Savannah and ensured that James Oglethorpe’s beautiful streets and squares are still used today. It has sustained large parts of the center of Philadelphia as residential neighborhoods, despite the decline of that city’s manufacturing base, and if it is not exactly “a green country town,” as Penn wished, it remains a good place to live. A sense of community enabled the people of Chicago to rebuild after the fire of 1871, and to create so many architectural masterworks. A sense of urban community is also visible in Yorkship Village, whose inhabitants have tended and preserved Electus Litchfield’s modest and humane architecture, like good gardeners.
“A town is always a town,” Braudel observed. He might have added, had he been writing about North America, “even when it doesn’t appear to be.” The first crude settlements, isolated in the wilderness of the New World, up and down the Atlantic coast and on the banks of the inland rivers, were certainly towns; despite their size, so were the hamlets of New England, like Woodstock, which resembles a miniature town in its civilized urbanity; so were the hastily built, grandiloquently named “cities” of the western frontier. Like Annapolis and Williamsburg, all are properly called towns because the intentions of their makers were ambitiously but explicitly urban. City life continued to evolve in unexpected places: in the temporary plaster-covered pavilions of the White City, which opened the door to a new vision of the city; in the town centers and along the leafy streets of the garden suburbs, where escapees from the industrial city created a new kind of urbanism; and today in the shopping malls, where a promenading version of city life is reappearing.
Yes, the fortunes of cities rise and fall. This was—is—especially true in the New World, where there is little urban stability and some cities grow while others decline. This very instability, however, seems like a native condition of our cities. It is a reflection of a society that has embraced change and transformation, and which continues to fashion and refashion its surroundings. Mistakes will be made, as they have been in the past, technological change will continue to surprise us, and ambitions will frequently outstrip reality—and vice versa. But the expectations will continue to be, as they always were, urban.
I. The term WASP—white Anglo-Saxon Protestant—was originated by sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, born and raised in Chestnut Hill.