ABSTRACT

The cities everyone wants to live in would be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, support a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and help heal society’s divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in. This is so in part because the city is not its own master; cities can fail on all these counts due to national government policy or to social ills and economic forces beyond local control. However, something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be. The public realm can be simply defined as a place where strangers meet. The difference between public and private lies in the amount of knowledge one person or group has about others; in the private realm, as in a family, one knows others well and close up, whereas in a public realm one does not; incomplete knowledge joins to anonymity in the public realm.