Ive been reading a lot about cities lately: Carlo Rotellas excellent book The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Pulling Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood, for instance, but also a number of others that are variously maddening. Imagine writing an entire book about How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City (the 400 pages of Barrio America, from which I learned a lot) and hardly mentioning Christianity. (But a large image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is featured on the cover!)

This has set me to thinking about city writing more generally, and the way in which some of the vexations of the genre present certain recurring temptations that many writers have failed to resist.

Here follow, for starters, some gems from Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, edited by Richard Sennett (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969; Sennett was only in his mid-twenties when the book appeared). Max Weber (The Nature of the City): Neither the city, in the economic sense, nor the garrison, the inhabitants of which are accoutred with special political-administrative structures, necessarily constitute a community. An urban community, in the full meaning of the word, appears as a general phenomenon only in the Occident. Oh, dear. Robert Park (The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment; savor that subtitle for a moment): The old adage which describes the city as the natural environment of the free man still holds so far as the individual man finds in the chances, the diversity of interests and tasks, and in the vast un-conscious cooperation of city life the opportunity to choose his own vocation and develop his peculiar individual talents. Louis Wirth (Human Ecology): The studies showing significant differences in such phenomena as delinquency and mental disorders between different areas of the city are of the utmost importance for the advance of scientific knowledge. But of course!

Cities invite hubrisnot only outsized political ambitions (a l Boss Daley) but also intellectual ambitions. A big city is large enough and sufficiently complex to serve as a comprehensible surrogate for the whole world, a sort of laboratory of the human. And the overweening rhetoric of the generic City attaches itself even to projects that claim a mystique for particular cities. I have on my Kindle an e-galley that will be published by Viking this summer: Peter Lunenfelds City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. My nomination for The Worst Book of the Year in 2004 was Alex Kotlowitzs Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago. (That title! Lead me to the vomitorium.)

In August 2001, I wrote a couple of pieces marking the fortieth anniversary of Jean Gottmanns book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Gottmann was a French geographer who lived in the U.S. for some years, and his book generated a great deal of attention; its title was, for a while, a concept to conjure with. Nowadays, as I wrote in 2001,

I would love it if my friend Noah Toly and an interesting range of fellow urbanologists would convene to talk about the way we talk and think about cities and the City now. A conversation with Gottmann, so to speak, that might avoid the hubris that seems to attend so much thinking and writing about the city.

John Wilson is a contributing editor forThe Englewood Review of Books.

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