Essay: WHAT MAKES A CITY GREAT?

IT is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London,” wrote Henry James in 1881. “It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.” Were he alive today, James, a connoisseur of cities, might easily say the same thing about New York or Paris or Tokyo, for the great city is one of the paradoxes of history. In countless different ways, it has almost always been an unpleasant, disagreeable, cheerless, uneasy and reproachful place; in the end, it can only be described as magnificent.

Babylon, for example, was the first great city of the ancient world; according to the Bible, it was “the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum; the grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate and traffic jams. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that two miles from the city’s gates a traveler’s nose would tell him that he was drawing near. Scarcely anyone today needs to be told about how awful life is in nerve-jangling New York City, which resembles a mismanaged ant heap rather than a community fit for human habitation.

Indeed, the poet Juvenal’s complaint about ancient Rome might be made against almost any modern city:

No matter how I hurry, I’m hampered by the crowds

Who almost crush my ribs from front and back; this one

Strikes me with his arm, another with a heavy board;

My head is brushed by a beam, then I have an encounter

With an oil-barrel. Mud clings to my legs in heavy clods,

Large feet step on mine, and my toes get painfully

Acquainted with a soldier’s nailed boots.

Yet despite everything, including itself, the truly great city is the stuff of legends and stories and a place with an ineradicable fascination. After cataloguing the horrors of life in imperial Rome, Urban Historian Lewis Mumford adds, almost reluctantly, that “when the worst has been said about urban Rome, one further word must be added: to the end, men loved her.”

Uncomfortable and Unbeautiful

What inspires such love and pulls people to the great cities? What indeed is a great city? It is almost easier to say what it is not. Except for its wealthy elites, great cities do not always provide easy or gracious living; lesser communities are almost always more comfortable. Juvenal could have walked peacefully in any number of attractive provincial cities. The average resident of one of Britain’s planned new towns lives better than his counterpart in London. Yet London, notes Robert Ardrey, author of The Territorial Imperative, was a great city “even when the food was terrible, and you couldn’t get a hot bath.” Stockholm, Geneva and Johannesburg, by contrast, are three of the most comfortable cities in the world, but not one of them has even a shadowy claim to greatness.

The 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. If the Third Reich had lasted another ten years, Berlin, which Hitler planned to rename Germania, would have become the world’s most monumental city. It also would have been the most monumentally dull. In fact, it became second-rate on Jan. 30, 1933, when Hitler took power. A city cannot be both great and regimented. Blessed with culture, history and size, Moscow, Shanghai and Peking ought to be great cities, but they are not. They all lack the most important element: spontaneity of free human exchange. Without that, a city is as sterile as Aristophanes’ Nephelococcygia, which was to be suspended between heaven and earth—and ruled by the birds.

Diversity and Growth

A 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 or the country.” In turn, the city transformed them into something they had not been previously ard could not have become without it—men who within a few generations produced more thought and works of beauty and value than the race had ever seen before.

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 truth about most American cities.

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, 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, reflecting as does no other all aspects of national life. Still, great is not synonymous with big. Calcutta and Bombay have more than enough people, but too many of them live in misery for the cities to be considered great.

It is 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 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 as Mexico and Brazil grow in wealth and influence. After Tokyo, an undeniably great city despite its pedestrian architecture, Hong Kong is the most vibrant metropolis in Asia. It is, however, a city without a country—and therefore lacks greatness. Cairo is the capital of the Moslem world; but it lacks vitality.

Almost by definition, a city can be great only at the expense of other cities that are less than great. If the power, money and creativity that are now centered in London were divided with Birmingham, Birmingham would not become great, but London would be irretrievably lessened. A delight to live in and a joy to behold, Rome has certain qualities of greatness. It is redolent with tradition; it is the center of a universal religion; it has a people with character and a lively sense of politics. But it does not quite make the first rank of cities today, if only because Milan—cold but confident—controls too much of Italy’s wealth and industrial power. The U.S., which is rich in both money and people, ought to be able to support two great cities, perhaps one on either 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—one of the usual prerequisites for civic greatness—New York, the cultural, financial and commercial capital, is thus the only truly great city in the U.S.

Pleasures and Vices

A city does not have to be comfortable to be great, but it nonetheless must have the amenities to make life tolerable. Misery should not force thousands to live on the streets, as it does in the big cities of India; residents must be able to move from one place to another without undue strain or great delay; the conditions of life, ranging from prices to climate, cannot be totally oppressive. A great city also must have within its boundaries a large leisured class to pay for the culture and pleasure that are the outward signs of its preeminence. Money cannot buy a great city, but a great city must have money. The late Ian Fleming’s definition of a “thrilling city,” which emphasized girls and food, was adolescent, but he was not altogether wrong. A great city is always tolerant, even permissive, and provides outlets for a wide range of human pleasures and vices.

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 New Yorker “worships the dollar and is down before his shrine from morning to night.” To preserve the spirit of the place, he suggested, every man walking down Fifth Avenue should have affixed to his forehead a label declaring his net worth. No such label is really needed: a Parisian is a Parisian and a New Yorker a New Yorker, with no mistake possible. But a man who lives in Detroit or Cleveland is not necessarily identifiable as a Detroiter or a Clevelander.

First Wild Promise

The city was a place of worship before it was a fortress or trading center, with a magical attraction for men who had always lived in wandering groups or in villages. Prudence might have dictated other sites, but men returned, again and again, to the cities they remembered. Troy was destroyed and rebuilt so many times that archaeologists classify their discoveries as Troy I through IX; Troy VIIA was the “Ilios, city of magnificent houses,” as Homer called it, that fell to the duplicity of Greeks. Leveled by the Romans, Carthage returned to life to become the third city of the Empire; in the Middle Ages, Frederick Barbarossa poured salt on the blackened ruins of Milan, but neither fire nor salt could stop the city’s resurgence.

The great city retains the ancient magic even today. Men do not always love it; often, indeed, they hate it. More often still, they hate it and love it by turns. Yet once caught by it, they cannot forget or long leave it. “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, who did love Paris, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” New York, wrote Thomas Wolfe, who did not always love it, “lays hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory; he feels that he can never die.”

Like all magic, the attraction of the great city is, in the end, beyond analysis and beyond definition. Marshall McLuhan and the late Frank Lloyd Wright may have been right in arguing that the city should be replaced by smaller communities. But men, alas and thank God, are never strictly practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris—or Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon or Justinian’s Constantinople. Looking at it from afar, he said, was always to see it “in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.”