ABSTRACT
Planning is endemic to fully modernized societies. Karl Mannheim would have called it "planning for freedom". Sometimes the concept of urbanity and, more often, that of urbanism occurs in discussions and publications about urban policy, urban design, and urban planning. If the present analysis is correct in presenting urbanity as an empirical phenomenon with a historically traceable origin and development in the Western world, we must deal with it rationally and scientifically. Cities cut up into ethnic ghettos lose their socioeconomic and cultural coherence, disintegrate into a plurality of bazaars, lack urbanity, and suffer in the end from the paralysis of a pervasive anomie. Without urbanity European cities will remain disorganized and anomic bazaars, habitats doomed to sociocultural and political lifelessness, if not death. The money poured into these cities by the central government will be all for naught if the plans for urban renewal do not somehow incorporate the cultural factor of urbanity.
