Cities: Hope for the Heart

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"We cannot all live in cities," cautioned Horace Greeley a century ago, "yet nearly all seem determined to do so." His own classic answer to the problem, "Go West, young man," was no lasting remedy—unless one can ignore Los Angeles. Though Editor Greeley disapproved of the country's rapid urbanization, he nonetheless divined accurately one of the American's most deep-rooted traits: his hankering for city lights.

In 1966, 67% of the nation's population is jammed into 9% of its acreage. In all, 130 million people inhabit the 224 U.S. communities that are officially classified as metropolitan.* By A.D. 2000, 80% of all Americans—more than today's entire population—will be city dwellers. In those 35 years, as Lyndon Johnson has warned, "we will have to build in our cities as much as we have built since the first colonist arrived on these shores."

Johnson's Great Society is in large measure based on belated governmental recognition of the complex needs of an urban nation. Indeed, the President himself, as James MacGregor Burns points out, has become the "Chief Executive of Metropolis." Not for 50 years has the heartland of America been the physiocratic demi-Eden of American myth, the pastoral paradise hymned by Jefferson and Thoreau, limned by Eakins and Wyeth. The ganglia of history's richest nation lie today in the inchoate, intermeshed agglomerations of city, suburb and country that have become Megalopolis americanus. Such is its present rate of growth that by century's end, one concrete conurbation will reach from Portland, Me., to Norfolk, Va., in the East, another from the Mexican border to San Francisco in the West.

Diversity & Verve. Vaster in size and more splendid in promise than any other form of community in man's history, the metropolitan complex is the epicenter and embodiment of American life. In its Promethean ambit of inter ests, its cultural diversity and kinetic verve, the city's heart sets the pace for the rest of the nation, and indeed much of the world. It is an unrivaled func tional framework for finance and busi ness, a rich lode of pleasure, a superb showcase for art, theater, music, fashion. At the same time, the "oceanic amplitude of these great cities," as Walt Whitman rhapsodized in 1870, has cast up a titanic tide of troubles.

If no U.S. metropolis even approaches the appalling anarchy of far-off cities such as Calcutta, Hong Kong, Rio or Tokyo, the worst areas of urban America have in varying degrees almost every ill to which the industrial society has fallen heir: unemployment, disease, crime, drug addiction, poor education, family disintegration—and slums. The middle class, the bulwark of good government in any community, continues as a result to migrate to the suburbs, helping to create the problem of proliferating racial ghettos. Almost every major U.S. city must fight advancing physical decay and increasing squalor, particularly for Negro populations, which within 15 years may outnumber whites in at least half of the North's big cities.