ABSTRACT
Stadtluft macht frei is the defining injunction of modernity. Modern Western cities were launched as the vessels of liberation from a human era darkened by power and enchantment. Modernisation was a journey of mercantile and later industrial urbanisation that recast the human condition, not just its material setting. New powers were discovered, forged, arrogated, and a vast excess of wealth accumulated. Suburbanisation was at first escape route of Victorian middle classes from hellfire industrialism. It was opened out through the twentieth century, offering a giant blotter that absorbed working-class aspiration. The city was escape raft from a life of servitude and grubbing. Modernisation has, as related, failed miserably on many accounts and in many quarters, historically and presently. The melancholia that colours the dawn of an urban age is no immovable barrier to the task of species renewal. As dark as things seem, it is part of human continuity and cannot extinguish the natality that Arendt assured was human inheritance.
