Robert GoldstonThinkers

The City is not merely a collection of buildings, however imposing, nor a massing of people, however many. It is a place where people, much more isolated personally than in a town or village, consciously identify themselves with public symbols, with their fellow men on a more impersonal scale.

The City is looked upon too often as an environment strictly for exploitation. If this persists, the city will not survive as a place to celebrate the human experience, to create, preserve and transmit a human culture.

The City is, if lacking a sense of mission, in the process of decay and, perhaps, eventual disappearance as urbane places to live.

The City is a place where, if the sense of mission has been perverted to mere self-aggrandizement, (as in New York or San Francisco), the city becomes an urban jungle, a chaotic wasteland of personal greed and public disorder.

The City is today a shrine of naked power, either the power of commerce (new york, chicago, marseilles, nagasaki) or the power of the state (washington, moscow, paris, brasilia).