ABSTRACT
Many of us, who are not plagued by an anti-urban, bucolic animus but rather enjoy the hectic life in a large town, have their favorite city, or maybe a few favorite cities. Urbanity is fraught with many ambiguities. This chapter presents a study that intends to develop a theory of urbanity viewed as the economic and civic culture of cities. New York then is taken here as a true metaphor of urbanity. The chapter argues that, urbanity is a specimen of what may be called "economic culture". Prior to Puritanism, namely approximately from the ninth and tenth century on, urbanity began to develop a positive relationship with trade capitalism which in its turn put a heavy stamp on the culture of merchant cities. It is in this sense that the chapter calls urbanity an economic and civic culture. The emergent trading cities of Western Europe developed gradually into a vigorous, socioeconomic class with its own political, economic, and social interests.
