Hong Kong is the top for business. Youth travel targets Dublin. Where will I feel better - Zurich, Vegas, Parma? Barcelona, Denver, Grenoble? The Roman underground is like something out of one of those films like Blade Runner. Cities, big cities, metropolises, with real but undefinable character, the enigmatic reality of the true city.
The world never lacks visionaries eager to write the obituary of the city n general. Ready to sign its death certificate without even waiting for the coroner. But symptoms of demise do not suffice. True, many are leaving the city, their cities, because of air pollution, because urban lífe is too costly, housing is scarce, public services are inefficient or terminted, and communications technology has made it possible to keep in touch even out in the sticks. But rather than succumbing, the city adapts by simply growing beyond its boundaries, as it has always done in the past. It expands out into the surrounding territory, with zones of lesser or greater density connected by a network. Today even small towns boast an urban, or modern, lifestyle. But this sort of urbanity cannot vie with the real satisfactions of metropolitan life. The city has always been the natural habitat of civilised man, because of its physical and social nature: a great quantity of heterogeneous humanity coexisting in a relatively small space. The recent transformations have their importance: the walled, compact city of the past no longer exists. And the classical era of the metropolis has also come to an end, when the big city was appreciated as a centre of intense intellectual life and advantageous anonymity. Nevertheless, these values remain intact today in spite of geographical distribution, complex social organisation, fragmentation made possible by facilitated communication.