ABSTRACT
For the past few years, the author have been living in New York City, having spent the previous twenty years in a suburb of Chicago. Not since they first went to Cairo in 1957 have they been so confused and challenged by any city. Thus, it would be presumptuous for me to cast himself as an ‘expert’ on New York. First, from the street level, there is the small-grain character of each, the diversity, the mixing together of different land uses in a highly complex way, the mixing together of people in a not quite predictable fashion, the vitality of the street life. Both Cairo and New York are cities where walking is fun, where one is never sure what lies around the corner. Chicago, possibly because it began later, was destroyed by fire in the latter nineteenth century, and experienced its maximum growth during the post-zoning phase, is built on a larger grain.
