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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.