The Public Realm

The cities everyone wants to live in would be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, support a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and help heal society's divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in. This is so in part because the city is not its own master; cities can fail on all these counts due to national government policy or to social ills and economic forces beyond local control. Still, something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be.