Will Great Cities Survive

A few years ago, my granddad bought me a subscription to "The Wilson Quarterly," the publication of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  It's a wonderful magazine.  The latest issue (not yet available online, unfortunately) includes Joel Kotkin's essay (adapted from his book, "The City:  A Global History (2005)), "Will Great Cities Survive?"  The many MOJ bloggers and readers who are interested in urbanism ("new" and otherwise), and also in the connections between cities, community, and Catholic sensibilities and traditions, should try to track down this essay. 

"Cities are humanity's greatest creation," Kotkin writes.  And, "[t]o be successful today, urban areas must resonate with the ancient fundamentals -- they must be sacred, safe, and busy."  Kotkin suggests that one of the new "urban renewal" strategies -- i.e., fading cities re-inventing themselves as hip, edgy congregating points for so-called "young creatives" -- is not likely to succeed because it departs so markedly from these "ancient fundamentals" in failing to appreciate the role that the sacred, and the religious, long played in the developing and sustaining of cities:  "Almost everywhere, the great classical city was suffused with religion and instructed by it.  'Cities did not ask if the institutions which they adopted were useful . . . .  These institutions were adopted because religion had wished it thus.'  In contemporary discussions of the urban condition [including, I'm afraid, many "new urbanist" discussions], this sacred role has too often been ignored."   

Rick