Volume 48, Number 10 · June 21, 2001
City Lights
By Witold Rybczynski
The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century
Joseph Rykwert
Pantheon, 283 pp., $27.50
Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America
Pietro S. Nivola
Brookings Institution Press, 126 pp., $14.95 (paper)
A magazine editor compiling a millennial list recently asked me which city I thought would qualify as the Best of the Millennium. This is a frivolous question that leads to serious reflection. To begin with, what exactly does 'best' mean when it comes to a city? Once, the answer was easy—best simply meant biggest. When Samuel Johnson told Boswell, 'No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford,' he was describing the largest city in the world. Eighteenth-century London had one million inhabitants, not a large city by today's standards when there are more than twenty so-called megacities whose population exceeds ten million. Yet few would suggest that such behemoths as Mexico City or São Paulo contain 'all that life can afford.'
Review, 4053 words
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