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.