Building the City on Top of the City

Critics of the city who are nostalgic for nature could with equal justice be nostalgic for a city created out of streets and squares, a city with a sense of place. Criticisms of the urban concentration are overheated, radical, and often desparate, for people often cannot imagine that things could be otherwise. For the city destroys the little nooks where one might hide or have privacy: courtyards reserved for their special tenants, gardens, parasitical greenery, storehouses, and workshops concealed in the residential neighborhoods. Urban development has filled up space in the most distended and cowardly manner, under the banner of ideology, pure air, hygiene. The political and cultural stakes are high in such a conception.