Eugene Goodheart
ALL OUR CITIES
The occasion was unprecedented. On its 350th anniversary
Boston was the host of a week-long conference of representatives (many
of them mayors) of "the great cities of the world." Never before had so
many mayors (thirty-odd) and city representatives from all over the
world come together to discuss the modern city. The conference was
partly funded by a federal grant and donations by local hotels and
private citizens. The trips were paid for by the mayors or by their cities.
The schedule consisted of panels, walks, a visit to the waterfront, a boat
trip in Boston harbor, and parties large and small. Though the
principal hosts (apart from the city of Boston) were M.I.T. and
Harvard and the five days were mostly occupied by panel discussions,
the conference, as one might expect, had very little intellectual sub–
stance. The mayors for the most part ignored the problems posed for
the panel discussions (city design to deal with ethnic conflict, preserv–
ing the city's past while using contemporary design, cities growing on
their outskirts, etc.) and used the opportunity given to them to puff up
their own cities. The experience of sitting through the panels was often
not unlike evenings spent with friends who have just returned from
foreign lands and are eager to show off their slides. ("Problems? Must
be some other city," a
Boston Globe
headline aptly remarked.)
Many of the representatives were clearly "provincial" politicians
unused to the international stage and a number did not speak English.
It
is doubtful whether most of the delegates had a genuine knowledge
of the basic facts of most of the other cities. What river runs through
Lisbon? What is the name of the famous lake of Hangzhou? What are
the "sister" cities of El Paso, San Diego, Johannesburg? The audience
was given a telescoped round-the-world tour.
Problems inevitably emerged from the presentations and attitudes,
if not serious intellectual speculation. The specter haunting many of
the cities (Caracas and Bombay spoke with particular poignancy) is
overcrowding. The need to disperse the population and to attract
people to places outside the city implies political and economic
