(See Cover)
Once a land of farms, fields, forests and neat white towns, the U.S. today is a nation of "metropolitan areas." Last year the Census Bureau listed 224 of them,* containing 70% of the U.S. population.
Through some cultural lag, Americans continue to speak of "the cities" in accents implying that they are something different and special. But the cities today are America, and "the problems of the cities" are pretty much synonymous with the problems of America. To be sure, there are vast physical and psychic differences between Manhattan and some of the leafy streets of its sister borough of Queens, and between Queens and Scarsdale, and between Scarsdale and Levittown, and between all of them and Duluth, Minn. But they are all "urban," and they must all contend with traffic jams, parking, pollution, shortages of hospitals, parks, police and even water, usually with inadequate schools and spreading slums, and always with taxes and America's weird tangle of municipal jurisdictions.
Just as most of the problems besetting Americans grow out of the conditions of city life, so do most of the things that make the U.S. tick. Fully 90% of the gross national product comes out of the cities; most of America's ideas are thought up in the cities, most of the culture is centered there. Yet in a summer of racial wrath that has already shaken dozens of American cities, the problems of urban life suddenly seem all but insuperable.
Many Hats. "All the things we've tried to help the cities with aren't working out very well, are they?" asks Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 40, a former Assistant Secretary of Labor and currently the most controversial of urban-affairs analysts. The question may sound over jaunty, but in fact it reflects the chief preoccupation of Pat Moynihan's life and the central domestic issue, one that is increasingly engaging the nation's intellectual community.
Across the country, more and more universities are setting up centers for urban studies. Founded in 1959, the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, which Moynihan heads, is the most creative of the nation's new centers, † At Harvard, a course in urban problems that was introduced only in 1964 is now among the top three in popularity among undergraduates. At Chicago, graduate students, who once showed little interest in slum problems, are becoming urban specialists by studying the pathology of urban life.
In the process, a new scientific diagnostician has been born. Not just a city planner, not just an educator, not just a politician, he is some of each—and something more. The "urbanologist" aspires to be a student of the entire city, an ecumenist of the metropolis, whose concerns go beyond brick and mortar to budgets and laws, souls and sensibilities. Just as the word urbanology is a cross between Latin and Greek, the science—or is it an art?—is a melange of many disciplines.