Nathan GlazerThinkers

The Car is a danger to the modern city in terms of its contribution to air pollution, to huge road building investments which damage the city, and in the drying up of public transportation which increases difficulty in access to certain parts of the city.

The City is productive in that it makes things everyone needs, it produces knowledge to make things more efficiently. These things, in modern societies cities are far more productive than the countryside.

The City is a place where geographical proximity between classes may still lead to very little social contact. They generally use different stores, schools, churches, and open spaces.

Los Angeles is notable in that it produces less than any other great city of the things that, from a grim, protestant way of looking at things, anyone really needs. And yet it grows like mad.

Urban planning is a failure today because it has not yet broken loose from the small-town vision concerned with small-town values. What passes for city planning today is fundamentally a rejection of the big city and of all it means its variety, its peculiarities, its richness of choice and experience and a yearning for a bucolic society.