PETER DRUCKER: Facing the Totally New and Dynamic

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A. I don't think you can foretell the shape of the city of tomorrow, but what $ you can say is that the city of the 19th century reached its pinnacle, its apogee, in the 20th, in the 1980s, with an enormous building boom all over the world. This also happened in the great cathedral-building era a millennium ago. But nobody would build a monastery for 600 Benedictine monks anymore. I think we have seen the last outburst of the city as we know it.

Q. Then what will we do in the cities?

A. I don't know what the function of the city will be. Look, the medieval cathedral functioned more as a town cultural center, school and governmental center than as a church most of the year. Nobody lived in Chartres. I do not see our cities as ghost towns so much as a congeries of ghettos -- the city is already becoming a place where only the very rich, the very young and the very poor live. The middle class works in the city but doesn't live there. Those enormous central offices we have built in the post-World War II period are, I think, very largely going to be counterproductive. The clerical work will move out. Our largest single pool of labor in the years ahead will be older people and part-time employees, and they aren't going to commute four hours to work. This is soon going to be a problem all over the world.

Q. Do you think we and our institutions are ready to cope with what you call "new realities"?

A. Many are still stuck in the world of 1960. What we face now is totally new and dynamic -- and we are quite unprepared for it.