IT is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London,” wrote Henry
James in 1881. “It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or
cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.”
Were he alive today, James, a connoisseur of cities, might easily say
the same thing about New York or Paris or Tokyo, for the great city is
one of the paradoxes of history. In countless different ways, it has
almost always been an unpleasant, disagreeable, cheerless, uneasy and
reproachful place; in the end, it can only be described as magnificent. Babylon, for example, was the first great city of the ancient world;
according to the Bible, it was “the mother of harlots and abominations
of the earth.” Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and
intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum; the
grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate
and traffic jams. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that
two miles from the city's gates a traveler's nose would tell him that
he was drawing near. Scarcely anyone today needs to be told about how
awful life is in nerve-jangling New York City, which resembles a
mismanaged ant heap rather than a community fit for human habitation. Indeed, the poet Juvenal's complaint about ancient Rome might be made
against almost any modern city: No matter how I hurry, I'm hampered by the crowds Who almost crush my ribs from front and back; this one Strikes me with his arm, another with a heavy board; My head is brushed by a beam, then I have an encounter With an oil-barrel. Mud clings to my legs in heavy clods, Large feet step on mine, and my toes get painfully Acquainted with a soldier's nailed boots. Yet despite everything, including itself, the truly great city is the
stuff of legends and stories and a place with an ineradicable
fascination. After cataloguing the horrors of life in imperial Rome,
Urban Historian Lewis Mumford adds, almost reluctantly, that “when the
worst has been said about urban Rome, one further word must be added:
to the end, men loved her.” Uncomfortable and Unbeautiful What inspires such love and pulls people to the great cities? What
indeed is a great city? It is almost easier to say what it is not.
Except for its wealthy elites, great cities do not always provide easy
or gracious living; lesser communities are almost always more
comfortable. Juvenal could have walked peacefully in any number of
attractive provincial cities. The average resident of one of Britain's
planned new towns lives better than his counterpart in London. Yet
London, notes Robert Ardrey, author of The Territorial Imperative, was
a great city “even when the food was terrible, and you couldn't get a
hot bath.” Stockholm, Geneva and Johannesburg, by contrast, are three
of the most comfortable cities in the world, but not one of them has
even a shadowy claim to greatness.
