A New Kind of City

Will the city disappear or will the whole planet turn into a vast urban hive?--which would be another mode of disappearance. Can the needs and desires that have impelled men to live in cities recover, at a still higher level, all that Jerusalem, Athens, or Florence once seemed to promise? Is there still a living choice between Necropolis and Utopia; the possibility of building a new kind of city that will, freed of inner contraditions, positively enrich and further human development?

- Lewis Mumford, The City in History