City and environment

Cities are the greatest of human inventions. They embody our histories and manifest our technological innovations, cultural and social interactions, economic structures, political systems, and our respect for (or fear of) deities. Cities contain our imagined communities, our socially constructed identities, and the spaces that shape our daily activ ities. We equate cities with progress, and in many cases cities elevate their citizens to higher social status than that afforded to their rural counterparts. As representations of who we are (and who we were), cities have been the objects of our desire, our love, and our hate. With mixed emotions we have come to imagine them as sites of comfort and safety as well as of poverty and misery, filled with vice and immorality and godlessness. Cities are the nexus of production and consumption, service provision and neglect. These dichotomies have been with us since ancient times. Judeo-Christian texts assailed the magnificent cities of Mesopotamia as places unfit for "true believers." According to these texts, God accepted the farmer's gift, burned Babylon, and ran Lot and his family out of Sodom and Gomorra. But if God frowned upon the cor ruption of cities, their denizens loved them, nourished them, and handed them down to us-their urban descendents-as gifts. Not unlike them, we seek in cities what cannot be attained in the country anonymity, economic mobility, social ascendance, money-ordered civil society, and the ability to produce and consume at the highest level pos sible. It is in cities that civilizations have been born and it is in cities that the concept of the citizen was born.