When the United States was born, less than 5 per cent of its people lived in cities; today over 75 per cent live in two hundred metropolitan areas. From the standpoint of the urban historian, these simple figures comprise the single most important fact about our historical development. In less than two centuries, the country was transformed from a simple agrarian society to a highly complex urban one.

The urbanization of the continent, perhaps more than any other aspect of our past, accounts for the "comparability" which the chapters in this book attempt to assess. For we all now live in an increasingly metropolitan world where we occupy a common environment. Thus a Chicagoan quickly feels at home in London, Paris, Milan, or Amsterdam despite differences in nationality, language, and custom. Even first impressions of distinctiveness of architecture, age, and street scenes do not conceal for long the shared urban attributes of the world's important cities. To the tourist, the airport at Madrid, the hotel in Vienna, the restaurant in Sydney, or the museum in Mexico City are more like the same facilities in cities everywhere than they are like a small town or a rural village anywhere. Not only have Western countries undergone the same urban growth, but they have also had to grapple with the same consequences--slums, traffic, congestion, pollution, disorder, and the other ills usually lumped together as "urban problems." This sameness springs from the emergence of the modern city, which has not only reduced differences between nations but has muted regional peculiarities within the same country.

Urbanization in the United States is not so recent a force as is often believed. In fact, cities have played an important role from the very beginning. Carl Bridenbaugh's two books Cities in the Wilderness and Cities in Revolt develop this urban dimension of colonial life, demonstrating that the port towns exerted a disproportionate influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only did they create a kind of life that contrasted sharply with conditions in the countryside, but their strategic location made them the special workshops of the revolution. Moreover, it is suggestive that the figure so often called "the first American," Benjamin Franklin, was not a farmer, a frontiersman, or even a planter, but rather a middle-class city dweller whose life was bound up with the world's great cities. He grew up in Boston, lived his adult life in Philadelphia, and spent a large part of his career in London and Paris.

The early influence of the city is at odds with conventional expectations, for the popular symbol of the young republic's growth has been the frontier with its emphasis on the discovery and settlement of the West. Frederick Jackson Turner was the historian most responsible for shaping this perspective of the nation's past. He argued that the distinctiveness of American development was to be found in the existence of free land in the West and in the collision of "barbarism" and "civilization" along the thither side of the frontier. Thus he sought the keys to national development in the exploration of the new country, in the taming of the Indians, prairies, and plains, and in the log cabins and sod huts of the pioneers.

Turner's perspective--indeed his poetic vision--became deeply embedded not only in the popular mind but in serious scholarship as well. It was quickly challenged, however, by an apparently contradictory framework developed most persuasively by Charles A. Beard. This approach saw the development of the country as a function of industrialization, and in the broadest sense a transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. Hence, the clues to American growth were to be found in the introduction of the factory system, the appearance of an entrepreneurial class, the development of the labor movement, and in the expansion of technology. Unlike Turner's, this scheme emphasized the comparability of American experience with that of the Western world rather than its distinctiveness.

Turner and Beard looked at American history in quite different ways. But from the viewpoint of the city, they presented a curiously similar outlook. For in both schemes the city came at the end of the evolutionary process; in both, significant urban growth was assumed to be a very modern development. Turner saw the continent occupied in waves: first came the pathfinder, then the fur trader, then the extensive farmer, then the intensive farmer, and, as the final stage, the "factory and the town" appeared. In Beard's analysis the nation began as agrarian, but industrial forces slowly changed its character and produced a new and modern society. In this perspective the city's influence became a commanding fact only toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Turner and Beard not only located the rise of the city in comparatively recent times, but they also reinforced, if they did not introduce, a persistent confusion in the analysis of modern America. For they equated industrialization and urbanization, assuming that the two were integrally related and were simply two sides of the same coin. Thus such phrases as "urban industrialism" and "industrial urbanism" entered the language and became a kind of shorthand to describe modern society. Actually, the two movements simply happened to coincide in American history; in other places the timing was quite different. In Europe, for example, very large cities existed long before the industrial revolution; and in the underdeveloped nations of our time substantial metropolises have developed in essentially pre-industrial societies. The coupling of the two forces in one historic period was peculiar to the United States, yet this unusual conjunction led to analyses which attributed to industrialization things which were essentially urban, and attributed to urbanization things which were essentially industrial. Nor was the confusion confined to historians alone--it has characterized the work of political scientists, economists, and other social scientists. Just as importantly, it has inhibited the serious study of early American cities, which were commercial rather than industrial but which laid the foundation for the urban growth of the last century.

The rise of cities in the nineteenth century deepened the historic division between town and country; yet it also had, ironically, a profoundly nationalizing effect. In the first place, they appeared very rapidly in every part of the country, providing each section with important urban centers. When the "line of settlement" barely reached across the mountains in 1800, towns had already sprung up along the Ohio Valley and as far west as St. Louis. By the time the farm areas were opened up along the middle border, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle had already begun their rise to regional dominance. In the West, Josiah Strong observed in 1884, "The city stamps the country, instead of the country stamping the city. It is the cities and towns which will frame state constitutions, make laws, create public opinion, establish social usages, and fix standards." Even the South, so often thought of as overwhelmingly rural, developed a ring of cities at its perimeter which played a disproportionate role in the life of Dixie.

Second, this spread of urbanization fostered the growing nationalism by providing each region with enclaves of a similar environment. For nineteenth-century cities had much in common. They all stemmed from commercial necessity; they all developed similar political and social institutions; they all created local governments which found the same range of urban problems. Moreover, their mercantile communities dealt with each other, and their local officials consciously borrowed ordinances and techniques for dealing with city affairs from other urban places. Thus American cities tended to look alike, to foster common characteristics, and to breed a texture of life that differed sharply from farm and plantation. While many historians dwell on the regional flavor of a "Southern," "Western," or " New England" city, they usually overlook the overarching similarities.

This nationalizing influence of urbanization was facilitated, paradoxically, in part because the capital of the United States was not located in its commercial, financial, or cultural center. Unlike the Old World, where capitals dominated the nation because of their mixture of public and private functions, the American pattern has been dispersal rather than concentration. New York, to be sure, has had an unchallenged supremacy in many fields, but it lacked the political dimension which could have given it the national dominion of a Paris, London, Rome, or Berlin. The pattern meant, too, that while other places suffer from a "second city" psychology, they have escaped the "provindal city" relationship. In every part of the country the regional capital, like Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, or Detroit, is self-contained enough to exercise an independent influence over a large hinterland.

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American city, however, was quite different from the modern metropolis. It was most importantly a compact city. The rich and poor lived close together; residential and commercial uses of land were mixed; industrial facilities were located amid shops and homes. It was a "walking city." The boundaries were determined by the distance one could walk--to work, to shop, or to visit. This limitation governed both the size and the shape of the early city.

A new revolutionary agent, however, entered this historic setting. No incendiary ever looked so poorly suited to the task of creating such far-reaching change as this awkward object moving down Broadway in 1829. It was simply a large carriage drawn by a single horse. But it carried a dozen people over fixed routes, on a rough schedule, and for a single fare. Though primitive, this "omnibus" embodied the principle of mass transportation. This uncomplicated innovation blew asunder the casement of the old city and made possible the emergence of the modern city. Now it was possible for people to live quite removed from downtown and still work there. Moreover, the new system permitted greatly increased internal circulation, the ability of people to get around in a much expanded commercial center.

Soon the omnibus was replaced by the horse-drawn railway; in turn that gave way to the cable car, the street railway, the elevated, subway, the motorbus, and ultimately the automobile. Each new mode enhanced the area of urban settlement by accelerating the movement of people throughout the metropolis. just as importantly, the introduction of mass transit gave the modern city its shape. What would later be called "urban sprawl" was the result of the transit revolution which made it possible to live miles outside municipal limits and still be part of the same metropolitan community.

The first consequence of the introduction of mass transit was an enormous expansion of the city, both in its physical limits and in the growth of its population. The old confinement of the historic city was broken, and urban residents spilled outside into the neighboring countryside. The extent of the city was now determined by commuting time. The radius of Boston settlement in 1850 was two miles; by 1900 it had grown to ten miles; by 1960 the metropolitan area would stretch as far as the expressways could tap the commuter. Everywhere, the population Rowed over the old boundaries, the surrounding countryside fell to the developer, and old villages and small towns were overwhelmed by the "exploding city."

This urban expansion came at just the right time, for the mounting number of immigrants had begun to reach the shores of this country. Not only was there now room to accommodate the newcomers, but the enlarging metropolis created thousands of jobs for untrained labor. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, most cities constructed their basic municipal plants-streets, bridges, commercial facilities, schools, water and lighting systems, and industrial capacity. Most of these installations had to be built by hand, and largely by unskilled labor. The new environment was thus fashioned by the immigrant and in part shaped to his needs.

But the primary beneficiary of the modern city was the urban middle class, for the second consequence of the introduction of mass transit was the sorting out of people according to resources and taste. Since it was now possible to live outside the city and work in its downtown, those with the greatest wealth were given the widest options of where to live. Generally they very quickly abandoned downtown, with its commerce, noise, and different kind of people, in favor of pleasant residential neighborhoods. There they built large houses on generous lots and carved out an area of genteel and comfortable living. Those with fewer resources had fewer options. They built more modest houses nearer to the city center, or moved into newly erected two-and threestory flats. Those with few resources had to take whatever kind of housing they could find. They occupied large old houses which had been cut up for multifamily dwellings, or were jammed into old commercial buildings converted for residential use, or they could fill up the newer tenements designed to house the immense new numbers.

The third consequence of the mass transportation revolution was the acceleration of the inherent instability of the American city. With the growth of urban areas and the immensely increased population came a constant residential mobility. Every urbanite was involved. Not only was there obvious transiency in the congested center, but even the beneficiaries of the new city were on the move. The wealthier members of the middle class who moved out from downtown soon discovered that the city followed them; they picked up again and built farther away. Other middle-class groups expressed their rising success or expectations by moving into a better neighborhood a little more removed from the congestion and expanding commercial and industrial areas. Thus every section was in motion. This instability became characteristic of growing American cities. Indeed, it would be hard to overestimate its extent. In Omaha, Nebraska, for example, a tracing Of 450 families between 1880 and 1890 demonstrated that only fifty-two lived in the same house over ten years; many had lived in two or three places within the city during that time.

Present planners and urban critics now yearn for the "old stable neighborhoods" that they think once comprised American cities. Yet what has been the most significant fact about urban neighborhoods is their historic instability. Even the "ethnic neighborhood," which has been invested with such nostalgia, was part of the constantly changing system. The "Italian," "Irish," or "Jewish" areas were always in motion; what kept them apparently stable was the fact that the same kind of people who moved out also moved in. When one group replaced another, the neighborhood would be characterized as in "transition." But it had in fact been in constant movement all the time, though a constant ethnic flavoring had observed the persistent turnover. All sections have witnessed the same mobility and no plans, zoning, or regulations have ever been able to still them.

The sorting out of people residentially by numberless individual decisions provided the new city with its characteristic social profile. The outer edges of the city were occupied by the older inhabitants, usually wealthier than others. These pleasant neighborhoods tended to be Protestant in religion and northern European in extraction. At the center were the newcomers, fresh from foreign lands, Catholic and Jewish, lower class in occupation and income. Between the two were the "zones of emergence," increasingly comprised of second- and third-generation immigrants on their way out of the central city and on their way up socially and economically. But the situation was never static; each area was enlarged as the urban population mounted and as the metropolitan area expanded.

The social profile of the new American city was quite different from that of Old World cities. For the early European development found the wealthy in the center of the city, near the public and religious buildings, with the poor huddled at the outskirts. Moreover, this tradition was brought to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese, who built their new cities around the traditional plaza. The American urban shape was less planned and depended on a relatively free market in real estate and a largely unrestricted practice of land use. And it was the function of a highly mobile society where upward movement dissolved fixed class' lines. In the twentieth century, especially since World War II, cities around the world have begun to assume this American shape. Mexico City and Paris, for instance, are witnessing the flight to the suburbs, the problems of decay at the center, and the frustration with "urban sprawl."

This new city refashioned American society and increasingly dominated national affairs. Not only were immigrants from abroad attracted to it, but young people from the farms and country were also caught in the urban undertow. The census takers, of course, could measure quantitatively the numerical shift from country to city, but the novelist Harold Frederic saw the change on a more sensitive gauge. "The nineteenth century is a century of cities," he wrote bitterly. "They have given then one twist to the progress of the age--and the farmer is as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps there was a time when a man could live in what the poet calls daily communication with nature and not starve his mind or dwarf his soul, but this isn't the century." The end of rural supremacy, symbolized by the searing discontent of the Populists, took place long before the census bureau counted over half the people living in "urban places"--a watershed not reached until 1920.

Indeed, the conflicts within the new urban society soon displaced the old city versus country antagonism. For the metropolis had its own divisions. The process of growth had divided the city. The newcomers appropriated the inner city, in areas where people were afflicted with great congestion, irregular jobs, and pervasive and persistent poverty. Strangers in a new land and new environment, they struggled to keep some kind of social organization and identity. None of their old institutions seemed wholly relevant to their new predicament; but they utilized what they could, and through voluntary associations they met some of their important needs. Still the newcomers remained economically weak and socially insecure.

But they found some protection in numbers. These numbers were in most cases a curse; housing never caught up with demand, the job market was always flooded, the breadwinner had too many mouths to feed. Yet in politics such a liability could be turned into an asset. If the residents could be mobilized, their combined strength would be able to do what none could do alone. Soon the "boss" and the "machine" arose to organize this potential. Feeding on the vulnerability of the neighborhoods and the hostility of the outside world, the boss system became a distinctive feature of American politics. It succeeded because it was rooted in the realities of block life--the clubhouse, the saloon, the cheap theaters, and the street. Moreover, it met certain specific needs. The boss helped recent arrivals to find housing, secured them jobs, mediated with public authorities, managed families through bad times, and somehow gave the recent arrivals a sense of belonging to their new land. To be sure, the cost was not small--laws were bent and broken; officials corrupted; funds embezzled; the franchises sullied. Essentially, however, the boss system was simply the political expression of inner city life.

Conditions, were, however, much different in the pleasant residential areas which ringed the new city. Here the residents lived in detached houses on large lots or in new two- or threestory flats within commuting distance to downtown. Neighborhood life revolved around churches, schools, and voluntary societies. The men hurried for the streetcar every morning and joined the business and professional life of the expanding city. Political organization in these white-collar residential areas was as much. an expression of the neighborhood as the boss system was of the congested center. "Reform associations" grew up to protect and advance the concerns of the middle-class constituents of the outlying wards. Thus the characteristic instrument of reform was "the committee of one hundred," or the "committee of seventy-five," etc. Since the neighborhoods were scattered and the interests diverse, unlike the more compact and monolithic center, the periphery found the broadly based committee more appropriate than the "boss."

As the machine scored increasing successes around the country in what one writer described as "the Irish captivity of American cities," reform groups gathered forces in an effort to reclaim the city. Initially, urban reform centered on an attempt to clean up municipal corruption and to find some better means of coming to grips with a wide range of pressing local problems. Only later was this impulse translated into a national movement. The enemy of this civic uprising, of course, was the city boss and his machine. Local business interests which had working arrangements with this political system also came under attack, especially traction magnates, gas rings, and utilities companies. The connection between "bad" politics and "bad" business became one of the most significant problems for urban reformers; indeed, little was said later by national progressives on this question that had not already been argued in the metropolis. But in the municipal context, the central target was the boss and his control of city hall.

The drive for improvement began sporadically in the seventies; toward the end of the century reform administrations appeared with increasing frequency. Though this municipal agitation contributed to the general discontent of the period, it grew independently of the rural protest embodied in Granger and Populist activity. It addressed itself to different objectives. Moreover, when the agrarian revolt failed in 1896 and new conditions calmed the countryside, urban reform activity continued at an accelerated pace. The years between the failure of Bryan and the accession of Theodore Roosevelt, so often left dangling awkwardly between Populism and Progressivism, were in fact filled with significant successes on the municipal level. When the twentieth century opened, the basis for a new surge of national liberalism was present in cities all across the country.

Progressivism in this phase was an intra-urban conflict, and, although not without economic overtones, it was essentially political. Reform found its major spokesmen and greatest support in middle-class residential areas on the outer ring of the city. These were the wards occupied by the older inhabitants who had abandoned downtown for the more pleasant, less congested spots. Ethnically these sections were white and heavily Protestant. The boss's strength was in the city's core where the newcomers had settled. These were the tenement, tenderloin, and transient precincts. Low income, irregular employment, and overcrowding prevailed. The people were predominantly immigrants; neighborhoods developed strong ethnic flavorings; large proportions of the residents were Catholic or Jewish. Hence, reform was a movement of the periphery against the center.

The two camps divided over many questions. The formal issues usually had to do with "charter reform" and attempts to change existing structures of municipal government. But the real cleavage went much deeper. The contest was to determine whether the oldest residents or the newcomers would shape the life of the metropolis. Behind the attack on the boss lay thinly disguised hostility to the hyphenated population of the central city. The drive for a civil service system always carried an implied attack on immigrant leaders and their modest educational qualifications for public office. Charges of corruption in city hall, whether true or not, usually suggested that the natives and foreign-born had different standards of conduct and honesty. And the sporadic raids on vice and gambling, generally directed at saloons and beer halls, carried a judgment on the private habits of the downtown neighborhoods.

The attack usually strengthened the boss and the machine, permitting them to pose as the protectors of oppressed segments of the city's life and the defenders of persecuted minorities. Nor was this wholly a pose. At a time when others preached self-help and limited government, the boss practiced paternalism and municipal service. People in his area felt they needed help--getting housing, jobs, relief, leniency in court judgment, even exemptions from the law. Reformers thought assistance in these fields was harmful both to those who received and to the public agency that provided it. The boss had no such inhibitions. He did what he could, and when successful he expected recipients to show their gratitude by supporting him. When a city-wide showdown came, they seldom disappointed him. To the people of the neighborhood he had become a symbol of both their predicament and their hope. His enemies were somehow theirs; his triumphs would also be theirs.

Political patterns in the Progressive era reflected this split between the middle of the city and its outer edges. Voting results could be plotted, on, a map; reform majorities dwindled, then disappeared, as they crossed over the lines demarcating the oldest parts of town. The balance between the forces was close enough to afford victories for both sides and to make no defeat permanent. In the first decades, reform succeeded often enough to make improvements, in municipal government. Boss rule, however, was so deeply rooted in the needs of the neighborhood and the requirements of newcomers that it could only be tamed, not killed. Yet the battle itself had led to a valuable discussion of city problems. The competence of local government was greatly widened and the standards of municipal service measurably raised.

These internal urban political struggles had a broad significance for national Progressivism. Reformers active in local affairs often moved onto a wider stage, and they carried the same attitudes into the national arena that informed their approach to municipal problems. Hence, Progressivism found it difficult to appeal to the crowded center of the cities. Historians have observed, usually with some surprise, that neither labor nor immigrant groups responded very enthusiastically to progressive programs or leaders. The answer to this riddle is not only that Progressivism was essentially a middle-class movement, but also that it was led by the same people whose local activities had been directed against the residents of the downtown neighborhoods. Having rejected such leadership in the city, tenement dwellers could scarcely be expected to embrace it in the nation.

The gap between the center and the periphery remained a constant factor in local and national affairs for nearly three decades. The first major figure to build a bridge across this chasm was Alfred E. Smith of New York. Himself a product of the tenement and immigration section, he had a claim on the support of the machine; but he also developed strong ties with the reform community. His extraordinarily successful career in New York reflected an ability to join the traditional antagonists. What Smith accomplished within one state, Franklin Roosevelt was able to accomplish on a national scale. Standing prominently in the famous New Deal coalition were the boss and the reformer, neither exactly comfortable, but together making very formidable what political scientists came to call the "urban consensus."

The 1920's however, brought to the cities a much more disturbing element than any which exercised the public life of the decade--the automobile. Initially a plaything of the rich, then a mode of incidental travel, it became the common carrier for subsequent generations of urban dwellers. As it did so, it altered the face of the metropolis. Previously, growth had a kind of controlled development, since the means of transportation had governed the shape of the city. The spread was concentric, or nearly so, depending on the capacity of public conveyances to handle increased demands. Even suburban expansion had hugged railroad lines and radiated out from the commercial focus. But the automobile destroyed even this semblance of order. The old restraints burst; the age of megalopolitan sprawl had arrived.

But not quite yet. The depression of the 1930's did not deprive Americans of their cars, but it did inhibit wide-scale building outside of the established cities. Later, wartime shortages further prevented any substantial residential construction. With the coming of peace, however, the pent-up pressure was suddenly released. Almost uninterrupted prosperity provided an affluent economic base; the automobile brought the remotest spots within reach of the bulldozer. A sharp rise in the birth rate gave an added impetus to these centrifugal forces. For fifteen years, virtually without interruption, suburban development dominated American economic, social, and political life.

The term "exploding metropolis" scarcely seemed to encompass the full range of changes. Not only did the surrounding countryside fall to the suburbs with all that that meant, but the old city faced a series of drastic crises. Its physical plant needed repairs that bad times and war had deferred; public transportation no longer competed with the private vehicle; downtown had somehow to service an immensely increased area and population. Furthermore, all these problems had to be met on a shrinking revenue base, for many of the well-to-do had led the flight into the green ghettos beyond municipal boundaries, taking shopping centers and even some industry with them.

To be sure, some of the old elements were still there. Particularly the historic antagonism of the center and periphery broke out again. Though somewhat obscured by the spillage of population outside the town's formal limits, the new battle lines were simply the older ones on a larger scale. Within the metropolitan area, the urban-suburban clash was essentially the one which had characterized the city alone for a half century. Now, however, the core had moved out toward the boundary. The flow of low-income newcomers from abroad had been stopped, but the movement of Negroes from the South and Latins from south of the border replaced it. As a result, the old ethnic bitterness was heightened by racial divisions. Dreams of metropolitan government became the analogue of the old charter reform hopes of an earlier time.

Suburban growth reduced markedly the previous domination of the city in Presidential politics. In the 1950's, Republican majorities outside municipal boundaries overwhelmed traditional Democratic urban successes. Though Eisenhower's personal popularity magnified this shift, observers understood that the conditions which produced the Roosevelt and Truman victories no longer existed. Any Democrat who hoped to win would have to penetrate the crabgrass curtain which surrounded every urban center. The genius of the Kennedy campaign of 1960 lay in its appeal to the inner ring of communities just beyond the city line where it either divided the vote with Nixon or contrived small margins. The New Frontier's and later the Great Society's domestic programs, with their emphasis on urban problems, represented attempts to consolidate and extend these gains.

The rise of metropolitan power brought a new orientation to national politics. The states, once the focus of local government, lost much of their influence, and the new axis ran between Washington and the cities and suburbs. Congress established the Department of Housing and Urban Development and a Department of Transportation designed to give coordination to old federal programs and to invent new ones that meet the new issues. The Supreme Court's reapportionment decision gave a firm political underpinning to the new arrangement by reducing the disproportionate representation of rural areas in legislatures. The new relationship has not always been happy, and disputes over local control are frequent. And a new drive to strengthen state government, perhaps by returning some federal revenues to the states, represents a reaction against the new system. Yet the Washington-metropolitan axis reflects the changing demographic facts of life and is not likely to be broker.

Despite new federal help, the "urban crisis" still bears down on the country. Most of the problems are neither new nor unsolvable. Indeed, in general the contemporary metropolis is a cleaner, safer, and more pleasant place to live than its predecessor fifty or a hundred years ago. The complaints against the city stem less from worsening conditions than from rising expectations; and for nearly all questions, American society already has the resources--the technology and the money--for alleviation or correction even if it lacks the will at the moment.

But one problem which is new and dangerous is the development of large Negro ghettos in American cities. The ghetto itself was not new, for every immigrant group had historically occupied similarly congested and confined neighborhoods. However, for white newcomers the ghetto was temporary, and second and third generations escaped and dispersed around the metropolis. For the Negro the situation is quite different. The ghetto does not break at the edges, few even successful residents can find housing outside all-colored areas; instead, Negro districts simply expand block by block. White neighbors either resist incursions or flee to other parts of the metropolitan area.

Meanwhile the ghetto festers. Middle-class Negroes resent the hostility which prevents them from moving into the pleasant white communities with better homes and schools, and they turn back into the ghetto to organize the more deprived. And among the young there is a growing despair and hopelessness. They can see that even if they do everything that is asked of them, they will still be confined to the ghetto. Immigrant slum dwellers had often known poverty, joblessness, and deprivation as bad as this, but they also know that with ambition, drive, and some luck it was possible to get out. The young Negro, however, finds the walls higher and the prospect of escape slim. Thus motivation is low, energy wasted, and the alienation deepens. From time to time the ghetto erupts in riot and terror, not only as a signal of bitterness but as a warning of a more formidable explosion.

The growth of the ghetto is the central domestic problem of American life. Not only does it stand mockingly as a symbol of the unfulfilled promise of equality, but it also frustrates the attack on other metropolitan issues. For decisions on such questions as education, housing, and poverty are caught up in the controversy over civil rights and are often deflected or postponed.

Despite the persistent problem of the ghetto, American cities have witnessed a general renaissance in the past decade. Critics might speak of the "sickness," even death, of the city, yet the facts belie the pessimistic diagnosis. Nearly every major metropolis is working on a new skyline, with higher skyscrapers, larger apartments and office buildings, enlarged suburbs, and usually a civic center. Urban renewal, for all its faults, has removed some of the worst slums, while new construction and better code enforcement has substantially reduced the proportion of substandard dwellings. Many people who had once given up on the city are returning, bringing back not only their wealth but considerable talent as well.

The urban renaissance, however, is simply the American expression of the "modernity" which has characterized the postwar world everywhere. The new technology harnessed to a new economic vitality has greatly altered the pace and texture of life. In the old capitals new glittering (and sometimes garish) glass and steel structures rise over the city, dwarfing established landmarks and puncturing familiar skylines. The new forces extend around the globe--into Soviet Europe as well as into many of the new nations--creating a new metropolitan world which will be the common environment of a large part of every future generation.