city

is that thing which to speak of is to invoke not only that tangible presence, but also the accumulating aspirations which men have sought to realize in it and through it.

Man's largest visible creation, his most manifold artifact: to name it - city' - is to conjure with the power of words to apprehend realities at the very limits of our comprehension. To the Romans an intangible commonweal, to the Anglo - Normans a thing they had only heard or in a book, 'city' enters our speech always with a charge of meaning that exceeds its literal reference to some assemblage of women and men, streets and structures. To speak of the city is to invoke not only that tangible presence, but also the accumulating aspirations which men have sought to realize in it and through it. From the beginning, man has seen his city as 'the center of the world.' Few discussions of urban Ii fe, whether of the physical urbs, or of the social civitas, or of their refraction in the mediums of art, can avoid the city's symbolic dimension, its power to focus our imaginations. Ibid.

James DoughertyThinkers

James Dougherty