The city: heaven-on-earth or the hell-to-come?

Abstract

Polis is the Greek for city; and, like so many things in our civilization, the never-ending debate about the ideal human environment began with the Greeks. To think about the ideal city, as Plato knew, is to think about the desirable, about the not-yet-achieved, about the future. There has been no end to the building of cities—from the Athens of Pericles to the Chandigarh of Le Corbusier. As I.F. Clarke shows, there is no end to the fiction of future cities for the reason that the applied sciences come like the Greeks bearing gifts; and these gifts can so affect the condition of human existence that the citizens have to plan their cities to meet growing populations, new means of communication, and ever-rising expectations. Before 1914 heaven was the organized, industrial metropolis. Since then the city of the future has moved through a history of hell-on-earth, first displayed in the dazzling images of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), to the most recent space cities of the galactic age.