Many persons are discomforted by cities and disdainful of the people who live there, but this is only partly because lots of dispiriting and nasty stuff happens in cities. The fact is that most Americans lead perfectly satisfactory lives without spending much time in cities. Many persons still live or work in cities, of course, and large numbers of us like to visit them from time to time. Furthermore, nearly all of us are touched in one or another way by ideas, styles, and habits practiced by our big-city cousins. Still, we do not pay as much attention to cities as we did earlier in the century. Indeed, we work hard at ignoring what goes on in cities and do not admire much that we see on those occasions when we look.

No small amount of credit for spreading the bad word about cities and making people want to ignore cities must go to persons like me. After all, had generations of reformers, critics, reporters, and social scientists spent less time harping on all the bad things they saw in cities and paid even a little more attention to the civility routinely displayed there, cities today might be more revered than they are reviled.

Be that as it may, there is a good reason why social commentators look to cities whenever they want to talk about our shortcomings as a people or about all the smudges and cracks they see in the American way of life. It is because so much of the country's prosperity and civic culture were actually fashioned in its cities. Thus, any criticism of American cities serves as an indictment of the country's accomplishments as well as the bourgeois sensibility and religious beliefs that pushed its people along for over 300 years. We really are uncomfortable with America's material success and want to condemn in strong terms just how unfair it is that some people always have more than they need while others always have less.

Men and women like me have been talking about cities as sinkholes of civic indifference and depravity long before team bowling became a harbinger of civic decay and resuscitation. Great changes in the way we earn a living or make families, nagging poverty, public welfare, the failures of organized religion, weak communal obligations, and rampant consumerism may be national issues today But these problems were observed first and felt harder inside our cities many years ago.

This explains why politicians make fitful visits to our cities every four years, shake some hands, promise to work some magic, and then blow out of town. They may not be as committed to making America more prosperous as they would have us think, or they may have no idea that they are standing in the very places where America's magic really happens. A far more likely reason is that they really have no idea what to do. So they trip over each other and their own tongues trying to convince us that America is in pretty good shape but has intractable problems that only they can solve. Before too long, of course, the fluffy words and hard-held principles fizzle and croak in the face of new distractions or the realization that we are not as badly off as we thought.

This is bad news for cities, because they do have problems that could be addressed by our leaders and do not get the attention they deserve. It is even worse for analysts and critics who earn a living trumpeting bad news, because unlike politicians we usually do not have the luxury of being distracted by new challenges or flying off to more exotic locales. We stick pretty close to home where we busy ourselves by issuing more dire pronouncements and happy bromides until the next prince passes through town and raises us from the crowd. Most heralds and would-be wizards are accustomed to doing time in the tower when they fall out of favor.

But we live for the moments when our words stick in the prince's brain and are waved over the heads of grinning peasants and local nobles hoping to be appointed to a post that requires no heavy lifting.

The interesting thing is that our caterwauling does make a difference. Princes and nobles keep turning to us in the hope that we can help describe what is wrong and suggest how to fix it. Our words and songs are never pretty, but they are heard. And for nearly 200 years the one song we always could be counted on to sing is the one that says America's cities are in trouble, again.

Our Urban Way Of Life

The lyrics go something like this. Cities in the East and Midwest are old and rotted. Cities in the South and West are growing much too quickly. They all have too little industry and too many tourists. Only rich people can live there these days, and no one knows what to do about the poor. Newer immigrants are even more different and obnoxious than the old ones. The schools stink. Kids are out of control. Roads buckle. Bridges crumble. No one wants to think about what is flowing in the sewers or is buried in the ground beneath old industrial sites. And can anyone really explain how those luxury box seats will make our city a better place to live and work?

Evidence of decay in cities and expressions of disrespect touch everyone, but may fall hardest on groups that have been here longer. Old-timers imagine themselves surrounded by persons they do not know especially well and whose company they avoid. Long-held beliefs and customs are belittled. Civic rituals and partnerships are said to be feeble. Communities, the one place people should be able to see their ideals turned into good works, seem to have more and bigger holes today.

These are powerful but not especially new ideas. What is different today is that these ideas have burrowed their way into the brains of persons on both the left and right ends of our political spectrum. Both liberals and conservatives are in uncommon agreement that the common good may be irrevocably lost to us, both as an idea and as a practical set of accomplishments. Their writing and speeches are filled with allusions to uncertainty disagreements, and sometimes just outright meanness. They call for the world to be remade in a more congenial way but cannot decide whether that means we need to be more open, tolerant, and anonymous or more resistant to outsiders, committed to following more rules, and in each other's face.

There are persons who believe that American society is fundamentally sound. They think that its various pieces hang together pretty well, and that there is more music than noise being made when those pieces clatter and clash. They see a people dedicated to prosperity and orderliness, and they recognize the presence and power of many religious faiths at work in the accomplishments of these people. Individuals who hold these views are among us, but they do not spend much time writing about cities.

Persons who write about cities are much more likely to point out that these big places are important because they hold different kinds of people, and that this creates all kinds of mischief. They may see some strength in all this diversity; but most professional city watchers think all the different kinds of people who live and work in cities will do a lot better if they stay away from each other. This is what an urban way of life is all about.

We once thought that it is virtually impossible for city dwellers to have meaningful relations and that all their exchanges are governed strictly by money or are wildly unpredictable. We know now that cities are not that bad. Everyone there is not nutty miserable, or alone. In fact, many normal people live there, and they lead satisfying lives.

Men and women who live in cities can even find occasions to work together. Social scientists have ways to describe this kind of arrangement. They talk about "communities of limited liability" and "liberated" or "unbounded" communities as places where people live around each other but are not expected or compelled to work with their neighbors, acquaintances, or kin unless it suits them. This need not happen often, and their collaboration does not have to last a long time. But it is possible for city dwellers to get along.

People who live and work in cities, we experts think, are more likely to retreat to little worlds they have made for themselves and take comfort in the few other persons who share their views. Cities are thought to hold many of these little worlds where persons are free to believe what they will, act as they like, and find other people who are like them. The "subcultures" that arise in cities and the safe corners where they hide work out well. They might even have something to teach the rest of us about how to get along in the world.

It also is possible, and even likely, that the values and customs of persons who live in these small worlds are not the kind one wants to share with many other groups, much less the whole city Even if they were, however, most observers believe that it would be tough to share these lessons with many other parts of the city. It is just too hard, we think, for persons who fill small worlds inside cities to reach out to individuals who are not like them. Carrying on bigger conversations with many different people would take a lot of time and patience, two things that city dwellers apparently do not have or regularly display in their dealings with each other.

Such unity as can be found in an urban way of life, then, usually is seen only inside subcultures and the small, safe places where their adherents live, work, and play It is not to be found crossing many of the borders between these small worlds, and it could not blend lessons drawn from markedly different parts of the city The larger world encompassed by the city would be organized more like a confederation. It would not be run by a class of publicly minded stewards.

When we diagram an urban way of life in this way, it looks a lot more like something liberals would embrace and conservatives would abhor. It is open to many different persons and points of view It also leaves people alone to do what they want to do, one supposes, as long as it does not bother too many outsiders. While it is not organized around traditional values and customs, ideas that conservatives find appealing, an urban way of life would leave room for more conventional practices and principles. In some corners of the city people could keep their doors shut to outsiders, punish rule breakers with a vengeance, and demand that persons pay more attention to what is best for the group than what they want for themselves. It is just that their preferred way to make a world would not be featured in the whole city.

Liberals are not necessarily happy with this state of affairs. After all, the spontaneity and diversity they see practiced by subcultures inside all the little natural areas that make up a city do not make it easy for people to work together or even figure out that they have common problems. Of course, conservatives have even more reason to be upset with this state of affairs. They have seen their particular vision of how to build a common culture slip through their fingers. Persons who have not lived in the city a long time or contributed much to its prosperity and upkeep may feel empowered to criticize persons who have and to repudiate old ideas and ways of doing things.

Whether communities are organized around liberal or conservative principles the result is the same. The city is not a great laboratory for discovering what people have in common or in creating a single vision for what a good community should look like. This is what is wrong with our urban way of life and, in turn, with America generally. We cannot find a common set of virtues to embrace or customs to follow. We are not united, and we are incapable of finding good ways to come together or a compelling reason why we should even try.

The Civic Culture Of Cities

Cities are not awful places, of course, and persons who write about cities often have good things to say. Furthermore, it is clear that city dwellers are a lot more resilient and capable than we once imagined them to be. They also get along better with each other than we supposed. The reason why cities look good or at least a lot better than we thought has nothing to do with how technologically advanced they are or how much money people have or how many fancy office towers, public gardens, and grand boulevards they have built. It has everything to do with how persons who live and work in the city use the tools at their disposal, spend their money, and fill the spaces they have made. That is to say, it has everything to do with their way of life.

Cities are the largest things built by human beings that actually work; and that is not the result of some happy accident or because persons planned it that way. Cities also are incredibly complex social worlds, and that is not a coincidence either.

It takes a great deal of hard work and more than a little cooperation and good fortune to ensure that most everyone gets enough to eat, is clothed satisfactorily, and has decent shelter. All the cooperation, labor, and good fortune that enable cities to operate as well as they do, as often as they do, spring from a common source. It is the way of life that human beings create together that makes it possible for them to get along with each other so much of the time.

An urban way of life is not something physical like a tall building or a bridge. Nor is it as familiar to us as our family neighborhood, or job. It is more like a set of public habits or customs. These are part of everyday life in cities and at the same time much bigger and more commanding of our attention than most of the events that make up our daily routines. Some of these habits are important. Others are less so.

Like everything else in cities, the customs, codes, and ceremonies we use today were created by earlier city dwellers and willed to us. As the temporary custodians of these public habits, it is our responsibility to use and change them as we see fit and then to pass them on to the persons and groups that take our place. There is nothing static or necessarily permanent about an urban way of life. Nor is there much about it that has not been borrowed from another people or adapted from an earlier time.

Though the shape and tenor of our customs change over time, their ultimate purpose and service to us do not. We call upon them when some of us want to say something important to another group or sometimes even to everyone in the city. We also use these routines when we want to remind everyone, including ourselves, that we are still around.

It is through these public declarations that we develop a basic but often unspoken set of understandings about who we are and how we are to behave when we are in each other's presence. It is also the way that we acquire an appreciation for the delicate foundation of mutual trust upon which a predictable and, one hopes, agreeable public order is built. The craft of citizenship is made up of such shared understandings and practices. Whether we use them in our small corner of the city or in the city as a whole is less important than the fact that we use them at all. This, too, is an integral part of our urban way of life.

The creation and maintenance of a civic culture is the most important accomplishment of an urban people. After all, it is only by observing and participating in more and less homogeneous groups that we begin to make sense of all the different persons around us. It also is the way we learn how to accomplish anything worthwhile and how to mind each other's business. It is this quality of minding someone else's affairs that distinguishes the myriad of personal rituals we act out every day from those that have us watch out for each other.

That part of an urban way of life which becomes accepted or celebrated as a people's civic culture also provides us with ways to frame explanations about the big changes that overtake us from time to time. Our ability and willingness to work with other persons is most severely tested on such occasions. The habits, rituals, and beliefs that we package as our civic culture provide us with the means to pass these tests. There are times when we do a better job of it, and there are moments when we fail miserably The critical factor would seem to be that we keep trying to get it right.

To the extent that we succeed at all or as often as we do, we are able to build a place called a city that stands as a monument to our way of life. We also find ways to live together that a less persistent people could not hope to match. The best clues to how well a people manages to get along in the world, therefore, are to be found in the ceremonies, customs, and codes for public behavior that constitute a city's civic culture.

Individual city residents, workers, and visitors will find their own way to cope with life in cities, or they will not. Much of the time, of course, they do considerably better than that. Whatever tricks to surviving and thriving in cities they have picked up along the way probably are known to a great many persons. On the other hand, the pet solutions adopted by some persons or groups can bump against those practiced by others and rub raw the sensibilities of everybody involved. That is why we experiment with bigger, more inclusive strategies to make cities corrigible places to live and work.

It is all this experimenting that gives cities distinctive styles and temperaments. A visitor or newcomer can feel immediately ill at ease or comfortable in a city long before he has settled into it or knows intimate details about the lives of anyone who lives there. This is because the feel that a city has owes much more to its larger pubic rhythms than to the private steps of its individual dancers.

Though a city's civic culture is accessible to many persons, it still has a mysterious and unfinished quality that even its long-term residents can have difficulty explaining. It never is completely known, much less practiced in the same way, by everyone in the city. Bound by traditional ways of doing things and imagining the world, it is still very much a work in progress. Conditions of life change, and human beings change. If a civic culture is to provide good clues to how a people is to accommodate itself to new circumstances, it too must be able to change.

This is a problem, but it is not a new problem. More than two thousand years ago the Greeks struggled with the question of how to integrate different persons into a polis or political community and to teach them a common set of civic virtues. They also tried and failed to limit the impact of the outside world on their cities and to ignore the divisions built into their own society.

The solution for them, and us, was to develop the broad outline of a civic culture and let different groups in the city begin to fill in many of the details of what would pass as good ceremonies, customs, and codes for public behavior. Specific elements of a civic culture remained better or less well known to particular groups and were practiced unevenly or not at all in different parts of the city. Other routines gained bigger audiences and were used to good effect across the whole city.

It is hard to compose a neat picture of a civic culture, because all the pieces do not hang together neatly. Some rituals that make up a civic culture give out the same message or convey a similar moral. Other values and routines make different and even contradictory claims. What they have in common is the ability to serve as an early warning system to outsiders and an elaborate commemorative display for one's own people.

Implicit in the work of a civic culture are ideas that help different parties to make better sense of each other's world, to anticipate problems, and to exercise caution when dealing with persons not like oneself. The stylized displays and messages presented through a civic culture need not be read accurately, of course, or be responded to appropriately. The seriousness of the encoded piece of behavior manages to be understood, even if its meaning is not, because of the organized and dramatic way it is presented.

Beyond providing the participants with a menu of possible responses to any given problem, a civic culture acts like a map. It shows how various ceremonies and customs can be strung together or recombined in order to make any answer more credible, if only to the group that comes up with it. Whatever else is offered in a ceremony or customary display of good public behavior, therefore, the reenactment of pieces of a civic culture binds the participants to each other. It also draws them closer to the place where the rituals are carried out.

The symbolic seeds of a civic culture are planted in the soil every bit as much as they are put into the people who did the planting. In this way a civic culture makes it possible for different groups to claim the same piece of land as their own and to become part of a more inclusive community. They gradually develop something like a common view of the world and they figure out better ways to be in it together. This remarkable accomplishment might be realized in many settings, but it happens most often in cities.

Community Building In American Cities

It rests with us to describe the nature of the bonds that hold American cities together and to describe what give those bonds their rightful feeling. Good bourgeois principles-a belief in prosperity and conducting one's affairs in an orderly way-are the foundation of American civic life. The nature of the social bonds that hold us together-- the way we create and maintain our communities as viable and vital places-is a bit more difficult to describe.

The easiest way to start, perhaps, is by noting that conservative and liberal philosophers come up with markedly different answers to three important questions about how to make a good community. Who can be a member? How seriously are rules followed? How responsible are we to other persons?

Conservative social philosophers tend to believe that membership in a community should be tightly guarded, people should adhere to the rules, and we are accountable to other persons. A good and orderly community is held in trust for the next generation and for those outsiders who can satisfy the entrance criteria. Liberal philosophers typically argue that a good community is fashioned in a more democratic way and that order can be guaranteed only through the voluntary compliance of its members. In this scheme, communities are open to all types of persons, rules can be amended or recast with comparative ease, and an individual is more accountable to himself than to other persons.

I readily concede that I am painting with a pretty broad brush here. My picture is more a composite of a lot of different points of view than a precise rendering of any one philosopher's ideas. It misses a lot of subtle details in the approach of liberals and conservatives to the problem of making a good community. On the other hand, I am doing every one of them a favor by creating the impression that they had figured out some time ago that the questions I posed were the ones they have been arguing about.

If I have not brutally misrepresented their ideas, then we can be grateful that diehard liberals or conservatives are not the people who actually create and amend our civic routines. They never would have built the kind of communities we have today. Their creation would have been laid out a lot more neatly, but their version of a good community would not have worked nearly as well as our own jumbled concoction does.

Americans have conjured up a brilliant solution to the problem of how to build a good and orderly world inside cities. It is organized around four basic ways of "doing" community. Each one draws on specific themes favored by liberals and conservatives and mixes them together.

Commercial communalism is the kind of community building that we associate with the business leaders of a city. Their version of building a good community emphasizes following rules and minding each other's affairs. On the other hand, business leaders are willing to loosen their entrance criteria for membership in the community. The only reason for accepting more persons and different kinds of people may be to promote economic growth, but this is an important step away from their otherwise conservative take on how to build a better world.

The foremost examples of commercial communalism in American cities are found in voluntary subscription campaigns that businessmen use to drum up money and support for projects they deemed to be in the interest of the whole community. These campaigns have long been used to promote a variety of initiatives inside cities. Projects in whose behalf subscription campaigns are undertaken sometimes are geared to meet more public ends such as constructing a municipal park or providing charity. On other occasions the campaign can serve more private ends like the promotion of a joint stock company that would bring more industry and jobs to the city. Much of the time, however, it is difficult to tell where the dividing line is between the public and private benefits that will result from the successful completion of a subscription campaign.

Ethnic communalism is the kind of community building that is featured inside ethnic enclaves and favored by persons who trace their origins to a foreign land. Unlike businessmen who try to run a community ethnic group leaders in most cases have been able to retain their strict membership criteria. Within the confines of their own group, however, they promote a lot of self-seeking behavior and accept beliefs and actions that can be much different from those embraced by persons in the larger society.

The quintessential examples of ethnic communalism are found in rotating credit associations and mutual trade associations. Both take advantage of the trust and regard that fellow ethnic group members have for each other. The former requires participants to share a little of their disposable wealth in order to capitalize the purchases or investments of their fellow ethnic group members. They usually are used by less well-to-do persons. Mutual trade associations are created by ethnic businessmen in order to protect their markets inside a given territory and to help them reduce some of their costs by collaborating in the purchase of materials and goods at better rates. There are obvious parallels between these types of activities and the voluntary subscription campaigns undertaken by more prosperous business leaders. Indeed, rotating credit associations and mutual trade associations are the ethnic versions of voluntary subscription campaigns.

Consumer communalism is achieved through the spending habits of shoppers and investors. Persons are supposed to become more alike through the power of the marketplace, and up to a point this strategy works well. Individuals certainly are able to share more goods and the experience of acquiring them. Self-seeking behavior is encouraged, and many different persons are encouraged to participate in activities that reflect such pursuits. At the same time, all of this acquisitive behavior is supposed to be accomplished under carefully laid out rules. Failure to abide by the rules governing shopping and investing is supposed to limit or stop one from participating in this kind of communal activity.

The central ritual in consumer communalism may be shopping. On the other hand, it is the extension of credit to more and different types of people that makes it possible for them to act and look more like each other by spending and investing in similar ways. Principles embedded in voluntary subscription campaigns are broadly applied here as well. Individuals voluntarily give up a portion of their wealth in order to get something for themselves. At the same time, they are contributing to the well being of the community as a whole by circulating more money through it and showing their loyalty to local businesses. In effect, consumer communalism gives persons who are not rich an opportunity to participate in rituals that once were the special province of only wealthy individuals. It also enables less prosperous members of the community to adorn themselves like truly wealthy people do.

Finally, one observes government communalism whenever government agents do something that draws citizens together or extends the rights and prerogatives of citizenship to more persons. Rules are not ignored once individuals gain admission to the community as citizens, but the same rules may not be enforced as rigidly as they were before citizenship was granted. Government officials sometimes try to encourage certain groups by passing rules that favor these parties. Or, they may subsidize into existence groups that are deemed useful to the commonweal. More often than not, how ever, government agents build better communities indirectly by assisting larger numbers of citizens or by involving them in officially sponsored ceremonies such as voting.

The central rituals in government communalism are not elections and voting. They are paying taxes and getting special favors. The act of paying taxes is akin to a mandatory subscription campaign, and the revenues that are generated are supposed to be used to serve a broad public good. It is the way that both more well-off persons and less than well-off persons extend credit in amounts that are roughly proportional to their wealth to agents who are supposed to represent their interests. More often than not, though, these benefits are not spread all that broadly and end up benefiting some persons more than others. The general good accomplished under government communalism is of an indirect sort, just as it is in shopping. Improving the condition of life for some of us is deemed a good thing for all of us.

Each of these approaches to making communities was in use well before Americans staged their revolt against Great Britain. There has been no great evolution since then in the way that Americans make communities or transform themselves into a more united people. One way of "doing" community may be more popular for a while, but it never dominates the other approaches to building communities for too long. It is more likely that persons put these ways of "doing" community together in different combinations in order to address a new or especially nagging problem.

If I have done my math properly, there are fifteen ways in which these four approaches to community building can be brought together or used separately. The residents of American cities could experiment a long time with different ways to improve their communities before running through all these combinations and conceding defeat. Americans I know were still trying to work things out the last time I looked.

Future Look of American Communities

It often is said that we live in a liberal age. Persons more experienced than I am certainly write about cities as if they were sinkholes of sharing, tolerance, and private-regarding behavior. Still, I am not sure they are right or that cities are best understood in terms that liberal commentators would recognize, if not find entirely to their liking. Indeed, I am pretty certain they are wrong and that it makes at least as much sense to imagine cities as shrines to conservative ideas and customs.

It may be that our period of history has been tagged as being more liberal because we try so many ways of mixing and matching different approaches to building communities at the same time. I am afraid that this explanation is no more satisfactory than the one that has featured liberal imagery in such an unflattering way for so long. After all, social historians have shown us that many groups in the 19thcentury experimented continuously and sometimes frantically in the hope of finding some new way to keep their urban communities united. We shall have to find a better explanation for why we are living in a liberal age or abandon that idea altogether.

I suspect that we shall not have to abandon this idea. Our liberal bias is seen plainly in the many ways we use the marketplace and government to encourage more of us to stay orderly and behave as if we were prosperous, even when we are not. Customs and beliefs surrounding consumer and government communalism can help make us happy and whole, but only in a roundabout way Goodness is accomplished by making individuals responsible for building a coherent world.

Citizens and shoppers can make the world a better place, but only one person at a time. In principle, there is nothing to stop them from becoming more organized. Yet the basis for doing so among shoppers is not readily apparent, unless they belong to a group with some outstanding grievance against a particular product or company.

The reasons for citizens to mobilize are difficult to sustain, even though the means to do so are readily available. It is hard to keep large numbers of citizens together for extended periods of time except during periods of national calamity and sometimes not even then. Government officials and political rituals can encourage citizens to build a particular kind of community. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine leaders trying to dampen the tempers of their constituents and discouraging them from joining a large political or consumer movement.

It is not easy to make better communities by relying so much on government or the marketplace. Each has obvious shortcomings. The most important limitation is that they depend too much on what individual citizens and shoppers must do or have done for them.

Americans have a great deal of experience with corporate or group-based strategies to improve their communities. We simply have not emphasized them in recent decades. Were we to pay more attention to such approaches in the future, we would turn to commercial and ethnic leaders and the groups they represent.

These men and women have always been able to call upon like-minded persons to work in behalf of their own interests. The dilemma for businessmen and ethnic leaders is how to make something that is better for their members into something that is good for the rest of us. What makes this kind of community building work is that outsiders can take some advantage from the success that these groups enjoy. The benefit may come from having safer neighborhoods, a new park, workers and citizens who are better trained, or attracting new investments to the city It really does not matter as long as a broader good is served by the private advantage enjoyed by businessmen and ethnic groups.

If Americans were to turn to commercial and ethnic leaders for more assistance in building their communities, it would not require us to abandon the good work that governments do or the important habits that shoppers and investors pick up in the marketplace. City dwellers have always relied on different ways of "doing" community in order to make a disparate collection of persons and groups into a more united people. No single approach or philosophy for making a community is going to work all the time for everybody. Each contributes something to our urban way of life. Combining them works even better.

In Celebration of Us

It is regrettable that the world does not present itself to us cleanly. If it did, we might be a lot happier. We certainly could be neater about what we do with it.

All of our sloppiness notwithstanding, Americans played the hand they were dealt a lot better than most of us appreciate. We did not go into the contest unaided. There were two different rulebooks that we consulted. Conservative thinkers wrote one of these books. Liberals wrote the other one. We read both works. Fortunately for us, we pitched the books into a corner before committing them to memory. This made it easy for us to forget the single most important lesson they were trying to teach us. Namely, that there was only one way to win this game.

Americans ended up taking rules from both books and putting them together in odd combinations. This should not have worked; but it did. Indeed, their mixed-up approach to the game of how to make a good community worked very well indeed. It perfectly suited the messy world they had inherited.

Observers have long noted that the world inside cities was not neat. In fact, it was downright sloppy and sometimes completely incomprehensible to them. For this reason alone, perhaps, they felt comfortable about dismissing large parts of it as unworkable and proposing that we scrap the whole enterprise and start fresh someplace else. A lot of these people moved to the suburbs.

Other persons were not so sure that cities were a complete failure. A good number of them pointed out that much of what we like most about our civilization either was created in cities or bloomed better there than in most other places. Nevertheless, most of them moved to the suburbs, too.

If there is one thing about cities on which both their boosters and detractors can agree, it surely is that cities are an odd, even paradoxical, mix of the best and the worst that life has to offer. Unmistakable wealth and grinding poverty are posed like ill-matched relatives forced together at a family reunion. Parks that once were lovely and full of children are now unkempt and littered with broken bottles and worse. Homeless persons who murmur and sing to themselves or bark obscenities at passersby stand defiantly in front of grand public buildings or panhandle for change. Neatly dressed men and women rush by them on their way home after a long day at work. A short ride on a trolley or bus takes them from elegant downtown offices and department stores past neighborhoods with tired buildings and scary-looking tenants. They are all distinct but inseparable pieces of the same big puzzle.

The Greeks of Plato and Aristotle were the first people who tried to make sense of cities and the civic life of their inhabitants. They found their own answer to the question of what makes a good community, even if it did not work out as well as they hoped. People who have lived in cities ever since then have come up with their own answers to that question and were equally unimpressed with the outcome. Americans were only the most recent and loudest people to wrestle with this problem. They too, worked out an answer that was unsatisfying.

We will not stop trying to discover a better answer, of course, and that is an important part of the puzzle. The solution we have come up with so far, however, works pretty well. It turns out that the good community is not a fair place or a just place, and it is most certainly not a place where everyone is equal. It is a place where persons find many ways to work together every day despite the fact that they do not look or act the same, are not equally blessed or rewarded for their labor, and may not even like each other.

This is not what the Greeks had in mind when they talked about creating a viable and vital civic culture. It is better. Only privileged persons had the right to imagine themselves part of a bigger, more inclusive community inside the Greek city. Women, working people, children, immigrants, and the people we call "minorities" never enjoyed the rights or the responsibilities that came with membership in such a community. We in the United States certainly do not have a perfect record in this regard; but we do have more different persons working on the problem than most societies do.

In our cities we have created a civic culture that both liberals and conservatives can live with, if not admire. We are open to some outsiders, but not everyone. We have lots of rules, but we allow them to be bent and modified to fit the customs and beliefs of newcomers. We respect each other's privacy up to a point, but we recognize and reward persons who work in behalf of a broader public good.

Some philosophers have told us that meaningful human action and discourse rooted in a specific place make one a contributor to history. To the extent that this is so, then the foremost expression of this ideal is to be found in the large, bustling, and often confusing places where so many Americans work, visit, and still call home. These places are our cities, and it is why they still matter.
 

Daniel J. Monti, Jr., teaches in the Department of Sociology at Boston University. His most recent book is The American City: A Social and Cultural History.