ABSTRACT
When anyone attempts to represent what a city is, he almost inevitably begins to interpret also what the city has been in the past and will be in the future. Thought and speech about cities are replete with temporal imagery. Cities and their citizens can be, and often are, represented as oriented toward the past, the present, or the future. They can be represented, too, as of some symbolic age, being characterized as young or old, or settled or conservative, or by some other set of significant adjectives. Since age and trend are relative matters, any placement of a city in symbolic time necessitates that a comparison be made with other cities. Since high financial and social stakes rest upon correctly assessing the present and future prospects of cities, it has made a crucial difference which images or models of city-change guide one's assessment.
