ABSTRACT
The city is the most important thing that we make from nature. We live our lives with others there and in the natural world it modifies. We share our dreams and ambitions there as we seek to live abundantly and well. We pursue our happiness there. The city's service to that pursuit has been a central preoccupation, perhaps the central preoccupation, of the classical, western tradition ever since men recognized that they are responsible for that pursuit. The city is the locus of the government that guides our life in nature, and in Federalist # 51 we found James Madison reminding us, “what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”
