Agenda for the Humanity of Cities
                                                  -John Gulick

The agenda proposed here is intended for all behavioral scientists who want to commit their urban research to deepening and extending our knowledge of how the humanity of cities may be augmented and enhanced and,
correspondingly, of how the inhumanities that afflict life in cities may be minimized. It is also intended to stimulate and encourage anyone who is concerned about the quality of life in cities.
Previous chapters have presented many detailed examples of the humane and inhumane in city life, often intertwined with each other. Let us summarize six major conclusions derived from these studies:
(1) Most of the negative assumptions about the intrinsic nature of city life contained in the bipolar moralistic model are contradicted by empirical findings on occupational communities, connections, and subcultures.
(2) Destructive vicissitudes are evidence of the fragility and vulnerability of the urban fabric, but they do not mean that cities are doomed because they are inherently evil.
(3) Stereotyped groups are not monolithic but are, rather, internally diverse. Intergroup contacts, while they can generate conflict and tension, can also increase awareness of diversity and therefore counteract monolithic stereotyping.
(4) The humanity of cities can be adequately comprehended only from both the small-scale (microcosmic) and large-scale (macro cosmic) perspectives. Observing urban life from only one perspective results in a distorted view of reality.
(5) Among the large-scale components of urban life that impinge on small- scale life are powerful interest groups which tend to be greedy for profit and more power, frequently to the detriment of the lives of the powerless who may remain helplessly exploited or may respond with grass-roots movements.
(6) Megascale components of urban life exist beyond any particular city. We refer to them as societywide, national, or international factors that are not intrinsic to cities. They include overpopulation, rural socioeconomic deterioration, water and topsoil depletion, and worldwide national budget allocations that deflect huge armaments expenditures from more constructive needs and purposes. All of these affect cities, mostly adversely, al- though armament manufacture, from a limited perspective, can be beneficial in terms of jobs.

In previous chapters, we have repeatedly mentioned the various research methods and orientations urban scholars use. Instead of summarizing that material here, we highlight it and the urban agenda by noting some new directions proposed for urban anthropology. Essentially, they can be distilled into refining small-scale research on the one hand and, on the other, under- taking research on the large-scale dimensions of urban life.
    Lawrence Watson (1981) and Owen Lynch (1979) call for greater sensitivity to the differences between "etic" and "emic" research. These terms have not been used heretofore because they are anthropological jargon. However, the actors' perspectives discussed at the very beginning of the book are essentially what is meant by emic perspectives. Etic research, in contrast, imposes a theoretical model external to the behavior being observed. The modernization model, with its marginality corollary, and the bipolar model are two etic constructs that have required emic modifications. Watson (p. 444), in criticizing his own previous research on Guajiro Indian migrants in Maracaibo, Venezuela' shows that emic perspectives on his data yield more realistic results. Lynch (pp. 20-21) reaches the same conclusion about squatters in Bombay who turn out to be far more diversified than the Marxian model of exploited slum dwellers would predict. Although he does not mention the emic/etic issue by name, Kerry Feldman (1975:365) shows that well-established concepts of the nature of squatter economics do not stand up under detailed ethnographic scrutiny that is free of older preconceptions.
    The need for anthropological, and basically emic, research in the large-scale arena has been expressed in different ways. One is research on formal organizational life:

An understanding of how everyday activities, decisions, factions, and relationships actually work within an organization requires an analysis of informal social networks. Inside formal organizations, and often cross-cut- ting them, are systems of social relations that develop because people have "natural" affinities to others. . . based on class, sex, education, age, common interests, or whatever. No matter how or why they form, they are always there and affect organizational activity in a major way (Britan and Cohen 1980:14).

Applied anthropologists attempting to become cultural brokers for ethnic groups in their relations with a city power structure must study the power structure itself to be effective brokers as Carole Hill (1975:344) concludes in her research on the inadequate services provided ethnic groups in Atlanta.
    While the understanding of a city's power structure involves the kinds of insight Gerald Britan and Ronald Cohen mention, it also involves a broad, holistic view. Joseph Bensman provides such a view of New York in his conclusion to The Apple Sliced:

Any examination of all the types of communities, whether based on race, ethnicity, deviancy; profession, occupation, or class; or leisure, the arts or avocation; or . . . residence, spatial concentration, or ambience would suggest an almost uncountable number of specific communities in New York City and in the outlying areas into which these communities extend. Given these myriad of often unknown, unrelated, and conflicting communities, a central problem for the study of the city and for all urban sociology is the means by which these separate communities coexist and are integrated, at least to the extent that such integration exists. . . . [T]he basic question is, Why do all these separate communities and cultures not fly off in all directions or erupt in a war of all against all? (1984:341).

Megascale phenomena that are components of human nature, such as greed, fear, and hatred of the "other," are, as we have repeatedly seen, very much part of urban life, but they are not specific or intrinsic to cities, and their genesis and control are far beyond the expertise of urban scholars or, for that matter, any behavioral scientists.
    What are not beyond scholarly expertise, however, are those megascale phenomena that are products of human actions, such as overpopulation and others mentioned above. Among them is deindustrialization, the decline in employment in industrial production that has reached major proportions in the United States and Great Britain, the two earliest societies to become industrial. In the 1980s, this process has involved plant closings, disastrous to many cities, and the flight of capital and manufacturing to Third World, low- wage areas. The immediate causes are the decisions of corporate executives. Katherine Newman (1985:6-12) and colleagues devote a triple issue of the journal, Urban Anthropology, to this subject. They emphasize the need to study and understand better the macroscale operational factors and the microscale effects.
    The remainder of this chapter reviews a variety of ways in which the humanity of cities is asserted-bridges between subcultures, positive adaptations to distemic space, grass-roots movements, and the megascale phenomena that must be coped with rather than succumbed to.

DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES

Conflicts between subcultures are typical of urban life but not necessarily permanent. Ronald Bayor (1978:chapters 8 & 9) shows how the conflicts among Jews, Irish, Germans, and Italians in New York City that peaked between the 'two world wars were resolved with effective leadership (often slow in coming) and recognition that there were vitai interests in conflict resolution. Gentrification processes in Auckland, New Zealand (Loomis 1980:193-95), and in a northeastern United States city (Williams 1985:270-71) have placed into juxtaposition groups differentiated by social class and ethnicity. Still in the process of change and adjustments, barriers remain among these groups. Whether the barriers would be breached remained to be seen at the times of observation.
Ethnic barriers can be weakened by attenuation and at the same time leave intragroup support systems intact. For example, among members of the nuclear Japanese community of Seattle, there has been extensive marriage to outsiders. Nevertheless, the women, in particular, maintain contacts in the interest of group solidarity (Leonetti and Newell-Morris 1982:31). In Hong Kong, Gregory Guldin distinguishes between ethnic neighborhoods and ethnic communities and illustrates them with examples of two minority Chinese groups. One is composed of immigrants from Shanghai, the other of people originally from Fujian who had sojourned in the Philippines (part of the extensive "overseas Chinese" presence in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific). At an earlier time, both groups had their own ethnic neighborhoods (geographically concentrated multifunctional support systems). In time, the Shanghainese neighborhood dissolved, but an ethnic community, a dispersed network of kin and friendship ties, remained (1980:257). Guldin sees this process as a kind of evolution in which the intensity of ethnic ties, and changes in it, needs to be measured.

THE SPIRIT OF ACCOMMODATION
Howard Becker and Irving Louis Horowitz claim that in San Francisco a "culture of civility" eases tensions among various "deviant" groups, although it does not characterize social class and ethnic differences. Its achievement, they admit, is problematic, but it is not a figment of utopian imagination.
"Accommodation requires, as a first condition, that the parties involved prize peace and stability enough to give up some of what they want so that the others may have their desires satisfied as well" (1971:15).
    An innovative type of accommodation in United States cities is the communal household that does not "accord with stereotyped notions of what living in a group is like. Members of these groups haven't withdrawn from society- they don't follow a guru or require one another to hold any faith in common. Their goal is simply to live together in a way that is caring and fun" (Raimy 1979:4). These households have a great diversity of membership arrangements other than conventional family groups. Communal motivations are economic help, housekeeping efficiency, concern for the environment, and concern about personal growth. "There is one underlying motivation that is the most important reason people join or start communal households. . . 'companionship, security, and a supportive atmosphere' "(Raimy 1979:14-15). These ties counteract the subcultural identities we have considered.
    Community newspapers often heighten awareness of local issues in American cities. An unusual one is The Tenderloin Times, serving San Francisco's Tenderloin district and published in four languages: Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, and English. Indochinese immigrants now amount to half the district's population.
Given the diverse nature of the area, the paper has to "promote a greater sense of understanding of the different communities," Waters [the editor] says. "We've tried to break down some of the cultural barriers that exist just by letting people know who their neighbors are, and what kinds of things they went through." The Tenderloin Times English section, the bulk of the paper, often runs stories about the refugee community, while the Asian pages frequently explain the various kinds of social services available (Quinones 1986:16).
    Local response to the paper has been "amazingly good," and it is highly regarded by the city's mainstream media.
    Generalizing from his observations of Levittown, Herbert Gans suggests a living arrangement that seems feasible and could be widely applicable:
Putting together all the arguments for and against homogeneity suggests that the optimum solution, at least in communities of homeowners who are raising small children, is selective homogeneity at the block level and het- erogeneity at the community level. Whereas a mixture of population types, and especially of rich and poor, is desirable in the community, as a whole, heterogeneity on the block will not produce the intended tolerance, but will lead to conflict that is undesirable because it is essentially insoluble and thus becomes chronic. Selective homogeneity on the block will improve the tenor of neighbor relations, and will thus make it easier-although not easy-to realize heterogeneity at the community level (Gans 1967:172).
    By "block" Gans means "an area in which frequent face-to-face relations take place, in most cases a sub-block of perhaps ten to twelve houses" (p. 172).

THE PROXIMITY OF HETEROGENEITY

Morris Milgram, a developer of integrated neighborhoods, reviews what has been accomplished in open housing and the difficulties that must be overcome by continually vigilant organized action. Where integration has been most successful, different groups have perceived important interests or characteristics that they have in common (1977:65).
    "Dover Square" is a multi ethnic housing project in a large northeastern American city. In 1975-76, about half of its resident families were Chinese, one-quarter black, 12 percent white, and 6 percent Hispanic. In 1976, "it had the highest per capita rate of robberies and assaults in the city. . . . Yet in a survey of 101 residents, 75 percent said they did not think the project was dangerous" (Merry 1981:9). Nevertheless, 56 percent were afraid to walk around the neighborhood at night. Sally Merry analyzes these and other apparent anomalies. The physical layout of the project makes surveillance of distemic space difficult (discouraging the self-policing of neighborhoods Jane Jacobs emphasizes), and members of the four ethnic groups are scattered evenly throughout the project (contrary to Gans's recommendation of block homogeneity combined with community heterogeneity). Merry believes that crime and fear of crime operate in Dover Square in a self-reinforcing system that is fundamentally fear of strange and unknown "others" (p. 14). Dover Square residents have more otherness than, perhaps, they can cope with, coupled with the neighborhood's being in a transitional area where economic depression is a major problem. A variety of avoidance strategies prevents residents from learning to interact with members of other groups (p. 224).
Greater intergroup knowledge and recognition of common interests despite differences are needed to reduce intergroup hostilities:
The two successful interethnic organizations in the project are an infant care center and a day care program for older children, . . . essential for working mothers. People who work long hours are probably less inclined to devote time to organizations that satisfy only diffuse community needs or purely social or recreational ends if these organizations appear to be at all unsafe or uncomfortable.
The solution to urbanites' and suburbanites' fear of the city is not. . . more locks, bars, and guard dogs, or an enhanced police presence, but greater knowledge of the city and its residents
(p. 241).
    Ignorance exacerbates fear of the unknown, which exacerbates intergroup fears and hostilities.
Annemarie Bleiker, comparing her own and another study among working- class people in Cambridge, Mass., finds that close friendships and kin ties are not necessarily localized, as formulated by the "proximity model" others espouse. Members of the neighborhood she studied established strong relation- ships among one another but retained kin ties and friendships with more distant people. A sense of commitment to the neighborhood was the bridge across ethnic and other differences such as being old-timers or new-comers (1972: 172).

CROSS-CUTTING SUBCULTURAL BOUNDARIES
We have already cited several cases in which actors' interests and the characteristics they share with members of other groups override subcultural boundaries. This situation seems most frequently to occur when members of
different racial/ethnic subcultures realize that they belong to the same social class subculture. Although this process may, one hopes, reduce the virulence of intergroup prejudices, it would seem to extend and augment social ties rather than replace one type with another as is certainly the case in three cities of sub-Saharan Africa. Jos (Nigeria), Kampala-Mengo (Uganda), and Nairobi (Kenya) are inhabited by a great variety of tribal and regional groups, and all remain intact as support and identity systems for their members. However, in each city some people have also developed wider social ties. In Jos, ethnic groups attempt to project a favorable image. Since they intend to stay, they want to remain on good terms. They may donate their assembly hall for some civic purpose or rent it to other ethnic, social, business, or political groups. Through fines or other sanctions, they attempt to control their members' behavior so as not to damage the tribe's reputation in the community. Ethnic groups express pride in their traditions by holding public performances of plays, masquerades, and native dances. When they seek to raise money by staging formal dances, they may court community good-will by inviting prominent individuals of other ethnic groups to serve as hosts or masters of ceremony (Plotnicov 1967:292).

Much of Leonard Plotnicov's presentation on Jos consists of interview material with a small number of individuals, of whom he says:
Regardless of the strength of tribal loyalties and the depth of parochial village sentiments, even the most traditional men relate positively, as individuals, to Jos' conditions. For example, the Yoruba informant could express both humaneness and friendship when asked to intercede and help settle the family disputes of his Hausa neighbors. The Tiv shared the delightful pastime of African drafts [checkers] with Yoruba men of his age, and had established a joking type of relationship with an old Hausa woman who lived across the street and who was friendly with his wife. The Ijaw informant's closest personal friends reflected a variety of ethnic back- grounds, and he also demonstrated civic responsibility when he occasionally gave (upon invitation) free professional advice to the Township Advisory Council and to his church congregation (p. 291).

In Nairobi, political participation since Kenya gained independence has evolved into a complex interweaving of ethnic and social class identities.
Social class and tribe are not necessarily incompatible with each other as principles of social and political division. In fact, the two can operate at the same time in producing political divisions in a society. . . . [I]ndividuals tend not only to be associated with other people of their own ethnic group but also with people from their own social status. [The] . . . well educated tend to have friends who are also well educated, while poor people also associate with other poor people. At the same time, they also tend to associate with people from their own tribe.
Class and ethnicity have a different importance in different areas of political life. . .. .........[P]olitical participation and information are related to class and not ethnicity, . . . attitudes toward the government since independence are a function of ethnicity, . . . assessments of living conditions since independence are determined by both class and ethnicity, and. . . formal group membership and the belief that politicians are overpaid are related to neither class nor ethnicity (Ross 1975:135-36).

In Kampala-Mengo, residents have evolved a citywide political system, including kinship modes of interaction, not identical with any intratribal political system. At the same time, specific tribal patterns of behavior continue to operate in the domestic sphere in two structures: "a first-order one of the widest level concerning the distribution of power, authority, and economic opportunity in the single urban system of relations; and a second-order one of the urban domestic life of individual ethnic groups whose rural home systems of land tenure, marriage, residence and descent have great relevance" (Parkin 1969:192).

GATEKEEPERS AND BROKERS
Gatekeepers, and, especially, brokers, mediate between minority individuals and bureaucratic agencies. Peter Snyder, introducing his data on the gate- keepers of five ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles, reviews the considerable cross-cultural literature on the subject and makes a clear distinction between gatekeepers and cultural brokers. Both provide links between members of a local ethnic enclave and the larger society, but the broker has a greater role as an innovator and mediator between the small subculture and large dominant culture. The broker is able to function in both contexts. The gatekeeper is more likely to be a member of the minority ethnic group and facilitates adaptation rather than innovation.
Snyder interviewed Anglos, Arabs, blacks, Chicanos, and Native Americans who had migrated to Los Angeles. The percentages of them who know of gatekeepers in their midst are, respectively, 48, 52, 70, 43, and 61, and actual use of them is, respectively, 10,40,40,30, and 10 0976:43). The main services gatekeepers furnish are locating housing and employment and providing legal, medical, and general advice including economic counseling. The most frequently used service is giving medical advice and aid. For example,
Ms. G. was born in a small village near Guadalajara, Mexico, and came to the United States eight years ago. In Mexico she had some training as a nurse's aid and as a midwife. People came to her for medical advice, medical care, and mid-wifing services. Ms. G. on occasion dispenses store-bought medicines, but usually sends her "clients" to one of two Spanish-speaking doctors who she says are good and will charge only nominal fees. When asked why she does not send people to the local county public health agencies and clinics she responds, "They don't like Mexicans there. They give bad treatment. They do not speak Spanish very much and do not explain well to the people what is the matter with them" (p. 46).
Snyder interviewed 18 gatekeepers. They have an average of l5 gate-keeping contacts a week, and about half of them also have full-time jobs. So gate-keeping involves them in considerable extra work. When asked why they do it, most indicate that they don't know or they want to help their people. While some gatekeepers are busybodies or status-seekers, others are truly altruistic (pp. 46-47).
Bernard Wong's monograph on New York City's Chinatown mentions the increasing activity of cultural brokers in its behalf (l982:97). From a population of 500 in the 1870s, Chinatown now has grown to 75 thousand people, and newcomers continue to arrive, many by way of San Francisco (p. 27). The community is highly organized and has formal associational links with Chinese communities in a number of other North American cities. Its inhabitants are highly diversified. They include people whose families have been in America for generations and recent refugees from Vietnam, a few upper- class people, and many middle- and working-class ones (p. 35).
Chinese cultural brokers in New York have been motivated by several developments since the 1960s: availability of Affirmative Action and Community Development Program funds, the influence of black and Hispanic ethnic movements, and realization that they are still a discriminated-against minority. The brokers have a variety of occupations, but they are well educated, aged 20 to 40, mostly middle-class American born, and living outside Chinatown. Knowledgeable about Chinese and American culture, they are dissatisfied with the traditional leadership structure of Chinatown with its patrons and coteries of poor clients (p. 97).

BUREAUCRATIC SUBCULTURES AND THE "OTHERS"
Whether individual bureaucrats do or can mediate between their institutional rules and perceptions of reality, on the one hand, and their clients, on the other, is a crucial question for the humanity of cities. As yet, there is no definitive answer because there is very little reliable information about it, only fragmentary glimpses. One such glimpse is a study of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) (Pynoos 1986).
Regarding processes of tenant selection, the BHA faced a situation in which "over the years, family public housing has experienced a shift from poor white tenants, either temporarily unemployed or working, to primarily welfare- dependent minority tenants" (p. 190). This change exacerbated a dilemma: whether to follow the first come-first served rule and thus treat everyone evenhandedly or to break the rules and give priority to applicants in the direst need. John Pynoos is concerned with how a bureaucratic agency wrestled with this dilemma. That it did so is a plus for the humanity of cities.
Nevertheless, gaps in empathy and understanding are enormous, and Lyle Shannon expresses this problem passionately:
Rather than to take the position that the culture of poverty must be accepted as an explanation for the failure of programs supposedly designed for the less fortunate, isn't it just as feasible to conclude that these programs were planned by persons with too little understanding, too little vision, too little scientific knowledge?
[H]ave we really planned for the movement of people from the South and Southwest to urban industrial communities? Have we attempted to help immigrants find a place in the community? Is the middle-class, suburban Welcome Wagon or its equivalent found in the inner city? Are state employment offices, the more or less official arm of the establishment for workers who are in transition. . . , located in imposing edifices, mainly staffed by middle-class, Anglo, English-speaking professionals, or are they decentralized, even decentralized to storefronts adjacent to bars and taverns? Are they staffed by persons who have the slightest ability or interest in empathizing with the less fortunate? . . . Is the neighborhood or community school seen as a community center for persons of all ages rather than an institution for children, a place to have them deposited while adult Anglos, both male and female, participate in the exciting world of professional and skilled work? . . . Are ADC [Aid to Dependent Children] mothers seen as prolific leeches on society or as loving, compassionate mothers, who, if given the opportunity to learn, may show us that they are as responsible and as capable of contributing to society as anyone else? (1979: 61).

DISTEMIC SPACE BEHAVIOR

Stressed Behavior and Its Remedies
Jonathan Freedman's landmark book, Crowding and Behavior (1975), refutes some long-held notions, based on experiments with rats and human beings under extremely artificial laboratory conditions, about the evil effects of high- density living. Extrapolations from these findings to everyday life in crowded cities fit neatly into the assumption that cities are inherently unlivable. Freed- man's experiments and observations led him to conclude that
crowding by itself has neither good effects nor bad effects on people but rather serves to intensify the individuals' typical reactions to the situation. . . . Thus, people do not respond to density in a uniform way, they do not find it either always pleasant or always unpleasant. Rather, their response to density depends almost entirely on their response to the situation itself. Density acts primarily to make this response, whatever it is, stronger (pp. 89-90).
Sitting in a doctor's waiting room, taking a test in a class, waiting on line at an airport, or traveling in the New York subway are usually unpleasant experiences, and most people would agree that crowding makes them even more unpleasant. In contrast, watching a football game or a play, riding on a cable car in San Francisco, spending a day at an amusement park, and attending a cocktail party are pleasant experiences and for most people are made even more exciting and enjoyable when the density of people is fairly high. Crowding intensifies the normal reaction-making a bad experience worse and a good experience better (p. 93).   
    Freedman addresses his situational view of crowding stress to distemic space in New York City. While recognizing (as have others) that having to deal with too many anonymous people can have negative effects, he points out that encouraging interaction among different people is very important in connection with housing design (pp. 123-27). He also points out the vicious circle that fear of danger in distemic space can create. "[S]treets are dangerous. . . not because there are too many people on them, but because there are too few. . . . There is a self-fulfilling prophecy-you are afraid of the streets so you stay off them, so they become dangerous, thus providing a reason to be afraid of them" (pp. 132-33). Freedman makes the same point that Jane Jacobs and Sally Merry do.
Their points are valid, but there are serious problems regarding people's behavior in crowded distemic space. One reason may be that "once crowding is believed to produce stress, it becomes a negative influence and would be expected to have all sorts of bad effects" (Freedman 1975:82) but there seem to be other reasons as well.
    Criminal violence aside, public incivility is a serious problem in Western industrial cities, and in all cities of the world (except for the revolutionary industrial ones) as far as vehicular traffic behavior is concerned.
    A newspaper column notes Richard Valeriani's list in the New York Times (Cooper 1985:B-l) of 100 reasons why, "although New York is a swell place to visit, you wouldn't want to live there." The items include some that might well deter visitors: rampant incivility, graffiti, crosstown traffic, honking horns, cabbies and bicycle riders who run red lights, refuse and animal excrement on streets and sidewalks, diplomats who double park, obnoxious cops, Central Park after dark, men urinating in public, the subway, box radios, Times Square, potholes, and cabbies who tell you they don't want to take you where you want to go. The tone is humorous, but there is no question that the problems are real, and the distinction between legal and illegal incivility has become blurred. The following excerpts from an article in New York Magazine make the point forcibly:
    Civility has begun to collapse just as surely as the city's services and the FDR Drive. Drivers. . are breezing through red lights as never before. Mass transit passengers, many of them middle class, have suddenly begun smoking in subway trains and on platforms with impunity. . . . Midtown- office-building plazas, once considered an amenity of incentive zoning and a boon to strollers, have been so overrun by vagrants, drunks, and dope dealers that their owners. . . have begun closing them down or fencing them off. . . . The police department's 911 emergency number no longer automatically brings cops. When rookie transit cop Victor Sims broke up an attempted bank robbery. . . last July, the worst resistance he reported
came from the 911 operator, who needed five minutes of persuasion to believe that the call was not a joke. Subways are not only twice as late and twice as likely to break down but they seem twice as filthy. . . [and] the decay, stench, and filth that permeate the system are intensifying passenger anger and disgust. . . . Last year, the police issued more than 500,000 summonses for such incivilities as leaving garbage cans uncovered, playing loud box radios, obstructing sidewalks, disorderly conduct, unleashed dogs, harassing pedestrians, loitering, and drunkenness. Seven out often people summoned never even bothered to show up in court. Two-thirds of the city's parking violation summonses were also ignored last year. Only 2 percent of the more than 29,000 fines assessed for illegal peddling were actually paid. With fewer people feeling compelled to obey the law, enforcement recedes. Cops turn their backs on petty crimes and misdemeanors. . . . Police and court officials insist that violent and major crimes have to take priority, but the price paid by New Yorkers for trivializing minor crimes has been a tangible coarsening of city life (Pileggi 1981:27-28).
    This account comes from an article whose main theme is that the deterioration of life in New York City arises to a major degree from the city's budget crisis and its dire effects on all public services. However, Mayor Edward Koch is quoted as saying that the deterioration derives also from the general permissiveness beginning in the 1960s in which values that did make sense were indiscriminately flouted along with those that did not make sense. Of course, the presence of a large, entrapped, poverty-stricken component of the population is also a cause, but it does not account for the middle-class misdemeanors. It does seem clear that positive feedback is at work, that a system of behavior is in operation into which no corrective factors are being introduced, and therefore the behavior grows and intensifies. If the feedback metaphor is valid, then the solution begins with introducing corrective factors that induce negative feedback in which the behavior contracts and diminishes. Roger Starr (1985) suggests a strategy focused on crimes committed mostly by members of poor, minority families, but it should be applicable to middle- class misbehavior, too. Starr recommends that each city "must pick the area or activity important to its very life that is most adversely affected by random crime. It must start by attending to that sector. As part of what it does there, however, each city must make basic changes in its police forces, courts and prisons that will help battle crime throughout the city" (p. 25). Starr chooses New York's subway system as an example of such a target sector, and proposes nine priorities for corrective change. Some are very far-reaching, such as "the whole population must support the efforts of leaders in the current crime- prone population to strengthen family structure and educate the young in the mores of an urban society, the better to survive and prosper constructively" (p. 20). Such education seems clearly to be needed, also, among other segments of the population. More specifically, Starr proposes that "the public must see that in the crime target area, no breach of law is so trivial that it can be ignored" (p. 20). Starr ends on this note:
    There will be times in the future, as . . . in the past, when the price of the effort to repel the criminal threat to the traditional city will seem too high. People will ask themselves why they should defer more humane uses of public funds. . . to build jail cells, buy advanced technical weapons for the police, and install bigger computers to keep track of the repetitious crimes of habitual offenders. Why not simply move to the country, taking what can be carried of the great achievements of urban civilization? That's exactly the problem. What are the greatest achievements of urban life? Surely one means the rewards of talking to many different kinds of people, the ready presence of uncountable varieties of goods and services, the treasure houses in which both the world's fine art and its popular culture are displayed and performed, the parks, the institutions of learning and health, the architectural landscape-to take a few samples. They cannot simply be dispersed and yet remain the same. If the city is to be deprived of them by loss of civil peace, love of those same treasures demands that attention, ingenuity, and resources be dedicated to restoring it (p. 60).
Neither Nicholas Pileggi nor Starr is nostalgic for some mythical, non-urban past. On the contrary, both are concerned with vicissitudes, though neither uses the term. They are concerned with on-going urban evolution, using, as it happens, New York City as their example. The points they make and the issues they raise are applicable to other cities as well.
    Colin Ward (1978) is also concerned about vicissitudes of urban distemic space. His subject is the adaptation of children to life in cities, in particular British industrial cities which have been suffering negative vicissitudes since World War II. The violence and neglect featured in the lives of many poor urban children come in part from lack of positive adaptations to vicissitudes.
Watch the scrimmage at the bus stop when the city child comes out of school, interview tenants on a housing estate terrorized by its children, learn that the annual cost of vandalism in England, Scotland and Wales is, at a minimum estimate, well over 114 million pounds, or read that one out of every eleven children in the city of Atlanta will be murdered if he or she stays there, and you will be in no doubt that the city has failed its children. It fails to awaken their loyalty and pride. It fails to offer legitimate adventures (p. 203).
    Citing a personal conversation with Roger Starr (then housing administrator of New York), Ward shows his awareness that the city does not do anything, but rather the people who inhabit it do things. Starr told Ward that he was mystified by the way urban land values remain high even when the land itself has become derelict (p. 203). Obviously, such land should be reappraised at its real market value, and then it would become available to poor people who can realize their "aspirations for housing at human densities, for domestic and public open space, for low-rent premises for small businesses, and for all those activities which are the very essence of urban civilization but show a low rate of return on capital invested" (p. 203). Ward discusses many ways in which children's activities that allow them to discover their own skills have been facilitated by using vacant city land. These projects include vegetable gardens and raising chickens for the experience and earning money.
    Real involvement in the adult city world is another goal for children on which experiments are being made in Great Britain. For example, a school- teacher in the inner city of Sheffield arranged for her class to visit an unusual house about which they were curious. Visits to the elderly owner and the library revealed that the house was 200 years old and scheduled for demolition to make room for a parking lot. "This distressed the class because they had become involved with the old lady and her husband and because they had come to see that it was valuable to have one building that was in some way special in their district" (p. 185). Against considerable odds and setbacks, the children eventually saved the house. The headmaster of their school said they had enjoyed their involvement and realized that "democracy depends on 'us' being able to tackle 'them' about 'our' heritage. . . . But to my mind the most important thing is their realization that they can actively playa part in shaping their surroundings, that what they say about where and how they live will be listened to and that the key to their future lies in their own awareness" (p. 185). Multiplied thousands of times, such new learning might well be the corrective feedback factors that the urban distemic space behavioral scene needs.
    Ward sees a special problem in the restricted use of distemic space that is the experience of most girls and women, and his view of this restrictiveness has wide implications:
The problem of the girl in the city is a male problem. If she is deprived of her fair share of environmental contact because she has household tasks which her brothers are able to evade, the answer is a more equitable sharing of these tasks in the family, especially since her mother too probably feels oppressed by the same assumptions. lf it is because of a patriarchal religious tradition, the patriarchs have to change. If it's for fear of sexual exploitation, it is the exploiters rather than the girls who have to change their ways. And if the liberation of girls brings in its train an explosion of female crime, it is the equation between anti-social acts and bravery which has to be broken. The environmental liberation of girls, far from implying that the girl in the city should become hard and tough in the way that the city boy aims to be, demands that the boy too should pride himself on those allegedly feminine qualities of care and tenderness. One of the discoveries that Urie Bronfenbrenner made in Moscow, was that the taboo on tenderness had not infected the children of that city: ". . . I recall an incident that occurred in a Moscow street. Our youngest son-then four-was walking briskly a pace or two ahead of us when from the opposite direction there came a company of teenage boys. The first one no sooner spied Stevie than he opened his arms wide and, calling. . . 'hey little one!', scooped him up, hugged him, kissed him resoundingly, and passed him on to the rest of the company who did likewise, and they began a merry children's dance, as they caressed him with words and gestures. Similar behavior on the part of any American adolescent male would surely prompt his parents to consult a psychiatrist."
The liberation of the city girl from the expected norms of passivity and docility implies also the liberation of the city boy from the pressure to be a predator (pp. 158-59,163).
The messages carried by our discussion of stressed distemic space behavior are: its causes are many; the stress appears to be a self-reinforcing process; a considerable variety of corrective inputs must be made into the process; and much thought, care, and experimentation has been devoted to the design of such inputs.

Public Space/Proxemic Space
Distemic space is usually, though not necessarily, publicly owned. That ownership is one of the reasons why there are distemic space behavior problems: too many people using the space ignore norms of conduct that most would presumably follow under other circumstances.
    Given the unprecedented size of cities in the world today, crowded distemic space is here to stay. Therefore, new norms, variously appropriate to each of the different cultures of the world, are needed to make inhumane distemic behavior exceptional rather than commonplace. Various conscious experimental efforts to achieve this goal are discussed above.
There is also evidence of what is probably largely unconscious behavior on the part of individuals and small groups to make distemic space more manageable for themselves. The effects are not necessarily benign or even neutral for others, and therefore the behavior in question may not suggest solutions to the macroproblems of distemic space. Indeed, some of them may be part of the problem.
    Lyn Lofland, in A World of Strangers (1973), devotes two chapters to "privatizing public space." These chapters
focus on some of the devices that urbanites use to avoid the world of strangers and thereby reduce the necessity to use or even acquire complex urban know-how. . . . [E]ach transforms public space. . . into private or semiprivate space. Each allows its user, for long or short periods of time, to a greater or lesser degree, to avoid the difficulty and the challenge that are the essence of the city as a world of strangers (p. xi).
    We have previously considered some of them, such as creating "home territories" in bars, shops, and some open spaces and "concentrated urban villages" (pp. 119-35). These are essentially transformations of distemic into proxemic space, and we have said that a good portion of the humanity of cities exists in them.
The same cannot be said, however, for the creation of "dispersed villages," by which Lofland means the urbanites' use of the automobile to move to various places where they are personally known in such a way that they "almost never [have] to enter any truly public space" (p. 136). Lofland does not connect this behavior with the traffic problems mentioned above, but it may well be connected, particularly if it is true that the .city of strangers stimulates some actors to play fantasy roles (p. 158; Sennett 1974a:175). "Traveling in packs" is another device of urbanites for taking their privacy along with them:
    They use public space with abandon, in such a way that, for example, a group of adolescents can choose to play running games in an air terminal. They feel free to indulge in backstage behavior, calling each other by name, yelling at one another across the expanse of the setting, using obscene language and laughing loudly at private jokes. And they express proprietary attitudes. If their numbers are plentiful enough, they may even force others to depart, as when the overflow from a convention invades a city's nightspots (Lofland 1973:139).
Lofland's chapters on defensive body management and adventuring in the city are highly descriptive of actual behavior, and so are instructive, but they do not move us much toward coping better with crowded distemic space beyond' asserting that a desired goal is cosmopolitan persons' "need to know a great deal more than the simple fact of common humanity about the people who surround them" (p. 176).
    John Ottensmann (1978) has reviewed a dozen published studies that indicate predictability in the presence of street life in social class and density contexts. The clear conclusion is that street life and neighboring are associated with working-class, high-density areas; lack of street life is associated with low-density, middle-class areas. In the former situation, proxemic space ex- tends into public space; in the latter, it does not. Ottensmann emphasizes that his study is preliminary and that research in a greater variety of scenes is needed. Research on whether people accustomed to street life at home are or are not better adapted to problem-prone crowded distemic space would be valuable. Not all users of crowded distemic space create problems there.
    The development of more other-oriented caring in distemic space behavior must not wait for some miraculous efflorescence of utopian mass altruism, for such a miracle will probably never happen. Other-oriented caring combined with individual self-interest is a real motivation; it exists, and it can be put to use, as Raquel Ramati's How to Save Your Own Street (1981) attests. Ramati describes streets that actually have been saved; hers is not a visionary "how- to" book but a practical one based in part on her own experiences in New York City. She says:
Streets take up about a third of the land area in our cities. Yet many Americans think of streets as places to avoid or endure, not as places to enjoy and remember.
    The most obvious reason for this waste is that cars, buses, and trucks dominate the street and often seem more important than people. Fortunately, this is not a completely accurate image. Many streets. . . have yet to be reduced to mere roads, and increasing numbers of people are deter- mined to keep their streets from such a fate.
[T]he nation's urban policies have. . . begun to emphasize the revitalization of existing neighborhoods. Streets are their core and countenance. Making sure that streets take on a new life is basic to this neighborhood strategy.
[N]eighborhoods and streets form existing resources. . . . [W]e all have a stake in making the most of what exists-conserving and improving upon and maintaining investments made over the years. Streets, not to mention the buildings edging them, are a reflection of such past expenditures. Caring for them, we conserve a reflection of ourselves, of our fellow citizens, and of a shared cultural heritage.
[N]o one else is going to undertake and pay for this process unless you ( . . . an owner of a building along the street, a community leader, a government planner, a city commissioner, an architect, a real estate developer seeking a zoning change, or any individual or group having an interest in their street) take the lead, create a constituency, and learn how to tap the resources of both government and the private sector (pp. xi-xii).
    Scattered in Ramati's book are references to open areas other than streets- parks and derelict, vacant land (often resulting from the abandonment and demolition of buildings). That parks are an urban amenity is universally agreed, but it is not widely enough recognized that many of them, such as Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in New York, exist only because of the foresight, courage, and persistence of dedicated persons in the past, or, as in the case of London and other European cities, the noblesse of bygone aristocracies.
Established parks have the same needs and problems as other distemic areas, such as maintenance and control of crime and incivility. But the expense of meeting these needs is not a sufficient reason for not creating additional parks to accompany the continuing growth of cities. Joseph Shomon's book is primarily a practical guide on how to acquire and maintain additional urban parklands. He is concerned with the loss not only of undeveloped land to urbanization but also of already existing city parkland to highways and other construction.
The deterioration of urban lands and watellS is part of the greater problem of environmental deterioration in the United States. . . . When urban design is dominated by the profit motive, some very sterile and monotonous urban patterns are likely to result. . . . There is growing recognition that if our cities and suburbs are to be livable and pleasant, some semblance of open- ness and naturalness, even some measure of wilderness, are essential (Shomon 1971:6-9).
    Shomon (pp. 96-104) briefly describes two successes in New York City: the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens and tiny Paley Park on East 53rd Street, Manhattan. .
    Paley Park also is featured, among many other "small urban spaces," in William H. Whyte's richly illustrated book (1980). He leaves no doubt that they are immensely enjoyed by many people, and he raises the question of why there are not more of them:
    The biggest single reason is [that] . . . many businessmen have an almost obsessive fear that if a place is attractive to people it might be attractive to undesirable people. So it is made unattractive. There is to be no loitering- no eating, no sitting. . . . [B]enches are made too short to sleep on, . . . [and] spikes are put on ledges; most important, many needed spaces are not provided at all. . . .
Who are the undesirables? For most businessmen, curiously, it is not truly dangerous people. It is the winos. . . [and others who are] a symbol, perhaps, of what one might become but for the grace of events. . . .
The preoccupation with undesirables is a symptom of another problem. Many corporation executives who make key decisions about the city have surprisingly little acquaintance with the life of its streets and open spaces. From the train station, they may walk only a few blocks before entering their building; . . . some don't venture out until it's time to go home again. To them, the unknown city is a place of danger. If their building has a plaza, it is likely to be a defensive one that they will rarely use themselves (pp. 60-61).
    The best way to handle. . . undesirables is to make a place attractive to everyone else. The record is overwhelmingly positive on this score. . . . Seagram's management is pleased people like its plaza and is quite relaxed about what they do. It lets them stick their feet in the pool; does not look to see if kids are smoking pot on the pool ledge; tolerates oddballs, even allowing them to sleep the night on the ledge. . . . The place is largely self-policing, and there is rarely trouble of any kind (p. 63).
In nine years of studying New York City plazas and small parks, Whyte found a serious problem in only one, and in well-used places, none whatsoever.
The exception is a plaza on which pot dealers began operating. The management took away about half the benches [and] . . . constructed steel-bar fences on the two open sides of the plaza. These moves effectively cut down the number of ordinary people who used the place, to the delight of the pot dealers. . . .
[I]t is characteristic of well-used places to have a "mayor," . . . a building guard, a newsstand operator, or a food vendor. . . . [Y]ou'll notice people checking in during the day-a cop, bus dispatcher, . . . street professionals, and office workers and shoppers who pause briefly for a salutation or a bit of banter. Plaza mayors are great communication centers, and very quick to spot any departure from normal. . . .
One of the best. . . is Joe Hardy of the Exxon Building. . . . Joe is very quick to spot real trouble. . . . Teenage groups are an especial challenge. They like to test everybody-with the volume knob of their portable radios as weapon. Joe's tactic is to go up to the toughest-looking person in the group and ask his help in keeping things cool. . . (pp. 63-64).

Whyte treats these small parks and plazas as extensions, if not parts of, the streets and sidewalks they adjoin. And so, his observations and critiques are concerned with street life, and it is very important to be aware that this is not the street life of working-class, ethnic subcultural residential areas, but of business district streets, distemic space that is not the turf of any particular group. These passages epitomize the humanity of cities, and its ramifications. Here we have macroscale behavior (corporate decisions) affecting microscale everyday life adversely and positively, and we catch a glimpse of the corporation not as an anonymous mass but as an organization of fallible individuals like the street-ignorant executive. Here we have the self-fulfilling prophecy working for good and ill. Here we have caring, or at least personal curiosity, humanizing an otherwise anonymous scene. Probably most of the people frequenting these midtown Manhattan open spaces on weekdays are office workers and retail business employees enjoying lunchtime and other break periods away from nearby buildings; many are regulars, and so the scene is not completely anonymous.
William S. Paley, whose foundation created and maintains Paley Park, expressed the hope that such parks would spread and multiply (Shomon 1972:104). The result would be more corrective factors introduced into the feedback system of distemic space behavior. Another example besides Paley Park is First National Plaza in downtown Chicago where people sitting on benches and parapets can look at a large mosaic mural by Marc Chagall, paid for by a private foundation.
Formal parks and plazas have always been typical amenities of Mediterranean and Latin American cities, serving very much the same functions as those noted above. A famous: example in North America is Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The streets of the quarter are laid out in a grid pattern, and the square is actually a plaza surrounded on three sides by important buildings: the cathedral, two ornate structures that once housed important government offices, and two rows of elegant residential buildings once the homes of upper-class families (all reminiscent of Latin American cities). The French Quarter survives from pre-industrial, colonial times, thanks to the efforts of many people, and it would be foolish and futile to try to reproduce it elsewhere. But to create spaces and opportunities for the kind of public sociability it provides is a necessity for the present and future humanity of cities.
Elegance is nice, but it is not a necessity for the humanity of distemic space. Three examples will suffice. One of them is the "adventure playground" that originated in Copenhagen and has spread widely in Europe and Great Britain  (Lambert and Pearson 1974). Instead of immobile play equipment set in concrete, the adventure playground provides natural ground and shrubbery; lumber, bricks, and other construction materials; and the appropriate tools. With these items the children can build, tear down, and rebuild to the limit of their imaginations. The other two examples consist of the conversion of derelict urban space to vegetable gardens and small livestock farms. The ultimate goal is enlarged community life, based on productive work. The two examples are the Inter-Action Centre, Kentish Town, Borough of Camden, London, and the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation, New York City.
    Ed Berman founded Inter-Action in 1968. City farms and self-help gardening clubs are only some of its activities, the others being a wide variety of educational programs and activities and community building projects. These creative efforts have produced positive humanity where it did not exist before, using derelict land. "According to Berman, the caretakers of the surrounding [housing projects] say that vandalism has plummeted since the opening of this City Farm. That in itself is surely recommendation enough" (McKean 1977:50). Charles McKean describes many other organizations in Great Britain that use abandoned land to create jobs for the unemployed and build multidimensional community lives for participants.
    The Bronx Frontier Development Corporation has been active in the South Bronx since 1976. By 1984, it had reclaimed 80 abandoned lots and helped convert them into garden plots by providing topsoil produced from manure from the Bronx Zoo and various Bronx riding academies and discarded vegetables from the Hunt's Point Terminal Market. The corporation has other activities, including coordinating the many other gardens in the South Bronx (Flanagan, c. 1984). Another such reclamation organization is Glie Farms Inc., founded with corporate venture capital; it grows herbs for New York restaurants (Agins 1985b:1, 25).

Planning
Many city and regional planners seem unconcerned with everyday life in distemic space. The result can be that carefully made and well-meaning plans may lead to unsatisfactory outcomes. A case in point is the South Commons urban renewal project in Chicago. Designed with a mix of high- and low-rise buildings intended for upper- and lower-income families and, implicitly, a variety of racial/ethnic-groups, the project did not facilitate social integration. On the contrary, various groups segregated themselves from the others, partly because, of their differing patterns of using distemic space. Furthermore, un- wanted visits from youths living in the area surrounding the project became a problem. They regarded the project as an intrusion on their territory.
Deborah Pellow raises these issues with respect to what was wrong with the planning process. One possibility is that mistaken idealism led to accommodating too much heterogeneity in a small space. Another is that needs and interests of the surrounding population were disregarded. Pellow argues for anticipatory research focused on the location and the people who will live in a development. No social impact assessment or cultural profile was made for South Commons (1981:23).
There is a problem with designer/user separation. . . . What an architect views as kitsch, the masses, for whom the architect is designing, may regardas perfection. And what the architect regards as attractive and functional, the users may find discordant to their needs and tastes. The public space at South Commons, the mall, which few would use, is a case in point (p. 24).
The architectural profession is prone to fads, and when they are followed on a large scale, as in housing projects, the result can be highly adverse, particularly when the architects' priorities are set on professional ambitions, rather than on livability of the buildings. The LeCorbusier fad, for example, inspired the Pruitt-Igoe project and other housing disasters (Fishman 1977; Kimmelman 1987). Architects' and planners' ignorance of, or insensitivity to, their clients' cultural patterns can reach almost unbelievable depths, as in the case of Indian professionals' failure to design in terms of other Indians' housing needs for accommodating extended family and gender-segregated res~ idential patterns in Bombay (Choldin 1976:312-13).
It would be inaccurate and unfair to convey the idea that all architects and planners are deficient in such knowledge and sensitivity. For example, there is an increasing amount of research on precisely what are the impacts, positive and negative, of high-rise dwellings on various categories of people (Conway et al. 1977; Gillis 1983). There are also sophisticated, sensitive, and thorough studies of the interrelations between people and the constructed environments in which they live (Porteous 1977; Rapoport 1982). A section of Amos Rapo- port's first chapter is called "users' meanings and designers' meanings"; in it he shows how divergent they can be (pp. 15-19). Equally insightful is a book- length critique of British urban planning policies and projects which invokes the great need for openness, opportunities for choice, listening to those who will use or live in the buildings, and identifying the rights and needs of silent, as well as vocal, client populations (Eversley 1973:324).

GRASS ROOTS
Grass-roots efforts involve the mobilization of ordinary people to achieve group interests against more powerful organizations such as corporations and government bureaucracies. In much of the literature, grass-roots groups appear to be the good guys against the bad guys. While this is frequently so, small groups also are quite capable of pursuing selfish ends to the detriment of other small groups, and bureaucracies are not always as monolithic as they appear to outsiders. On the latter point, we have noted the dilemma the Boston Housing Authority faced regarding two conflicting policies both of which were in the public interest. Furthermore,
many governmental decisions involve ambiguous legal and moral considerations . . . when the public interest and interests of organized interest groups are in conflict. Often an administrator's personal interest is involved. In these situations, the ethical considerations are more hazy and complex, and the governmental administrator may have to assess:
1. The impact of interference by politicians and pressure groups on the administrative process;
2. The waste of public resources and the degree of public accountability for actions affecting individuals and groups;
3. Provisions for equal citizen access to government services even to those who cannot afford them;
4. The impact of secrecy in governmental decision-making upon the public and upon rational discussion of alternative public policies; and
5. The use of insider knowledge for private gain (Murphy 1977:33).

With these cautions in mind, we proceed to an overview of the grass-roots dimension of the humanity of cities. We have previously referred to grass- roots efforts in a number of contexts. One of the most important of these references is squatter settlements in Third World cities. Connected with squatter settlements is the serious and technically pragmatic effort to rationalize the processes of self-built house construction using cheap, locally available materials and structural features that are pleasing and suited to the environment (Fathy 1973; Turner 1977). Such efforts have been vigorously opposed by those who gain from corporately built housing.
    Manuel Castells's The City and the Grassroots (1983) gives detailed accounts of citizens' struggles against urban power structures from sixteenth-century Europe to twentieth-century America. An example of the type of struggle Castells chronicles is the sustained tenants' movement in New York City that has gone through many phases throughout this century, seeking not only equitable rents but humanization of the entire landlord/tenant relationship (Lawson et al. 1986). The protracted nature of this struggle carries an important lesson: the quick fix is not to be expected when the power structure remains intact.
    Existing grass-roots movements can be inhibited by factors less obvious than direct opposition. For example, Bryan Roberts (1973:281-85) shows that consumer cooperative and neighborhood organizations in Guatemala City, while providing opportunities for social support, are too localized to have any impact on large-scale political issues that affect the actors. Different reasons among the actors for participation can also deter sustained action. Karl Hess, who for several years tried to establish hydroponic gardening in the Adams-Morgan district of Washington, D.C., attributes what he sees as the limited effective- ness of the Adams-Morgan Organization to the conflicting motivations for participation among early members.
The counterculture people were. . . looking for a new way to make social decisions. . . without social exploitation of one group by another. The idea of a town meeting-with people who make decisions being responsible also for carrying them out, and not merely for getting someone else to do it- was understandable and inspiring to them. . . . Blacks in the neighborhood had a clearly different view. The rhetoric of participation was accepted and so was the form. But the reality behind it was. . . power. Blacks. . . wanted . . . to have the power to make those decisions-to have power in, not power to change, the system. Whites who do not understand this can make fear- some mistakes in assessing the meaning of black-white alliances for social change (1979:41-42).

In 1985, the author was a member of a group that visited Adams-Morgan and talked with a spokesperson for the Adams-Morgan Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC). A brochure said there are 30 ANCs in the District of Columbia, established by Congress on the model of the original Adams-Morgan Organization. Each ANC has an elected council which can lobby for public issues. ANCs receive a 3D-day notice on all district government actions that may affect them and have 30 more days to react. The ANC coordinates a variety of community activities and services, and it has direct access to the mayor and city council of Washington. Regardless of motives for participation, these are much needed innovations in bringing ordinary, mostly poor and disadvantaged, people into direct communication with the government.
Lack of two-way communication between people's small-scale everyday lives and the large-scale bureaucratic context of those lives contributes greatly to inhumanity in cities. The Hatikva Quarter in Tel Aviv, for instance, has a stigmatized reputation as a violent, lawless slum. While it awaits government "rehabilitation," Hatikva is "under-administered" (Marx 1982:39), meaning that government services are supplied poorly and irregularly.
    Authorities tend to know little about local affairs, and occasionally treat the area as if it were foreign territory. Thus the police from time to time raid the area, arrest a few drug peddlers, and then withdraw. Because they lack local contacts, authorities depend on local political brokers whose influence depends on the patronage they can offer to clients. Few such people have a permanent following, but the authorities often assume that they lead factions (p. 39).
    A large proportion of Hatikva's population consists of Jews from Yemen, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries (Deshen 1982:32), and the Jews of European origin who dominate the society tend to look down on Oriental Jews. Hatikva lacks a grass-roots movement such as the Adams-Morgan ANC that emerged from a deteriorated socioeconomic situation. Emanuel Marx tells us some of the reasons why:
    The inhabitants do not perceive joint interests and therefore do not join forces. Sources of employment, and even most entertainment, are located outside the area, and people disperse daily in all directions. Neighborhood networks are the potential basis of political organization for the inhabitants. ,
But they engage in mutual aid and cannot unite because there is no communal issue to rally around, and no single authority to oppose. The rehabilitation project could have become a focus for local organization, but its community workers quickly made the residents of each neighborhood de- pendent on their assistance. Central government works against voluntary associations that could represent the inhabitants. While associations can be set up relatively easily, they are then co-opted by the authorities and thus lose their power. Or if they persist in remaining independent, the authorities fear them and put obstacles in their way (p. 44).
    The essentials of the Hatikva situation are not peculiar to Tel Aviv. The seemingly benign cooptation of bureaucrats that sabotage grass-roots movements are found everywhere. Consider the case of Karl Hess and his associates when they sought funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a
science center that would provide an infrastructure for their project to develop local food production in Adams-Morgan. The NSF sent a sociologist to look into the project and turned it down cold. Hess's group "did not meet the government-approved definition of a neighborhood self-help program" (1979:46). Even at NSF such programs focus on enhancing neighborhood people's ability to obtain welfare assistance more effectively, not to produce their own wealth and future.. '
    Government programs aim at getting money for poor people. Our hope was that knowledge would in the long run be more useful, provide more money, and eventually strike at the system-causes of poverty. We felt, and continue to feel, that poverty is actually a lack of skill, and a lack of the self-esteem that comes with being able to take some part of one's life into one's own hands and work with others toward shared---call them social-goals (p. 46).

In a quite different way, the efforts of Nora Harlow (1975) and her colleagues to establish and maintain a cooperative day-care center and school in Morningside Heights, New York City, were continually obstructed, though not killed, by a variety of bureaucratic maneuvers. The center was to be in a storefront owned by Columbia University which owns most of Morningside Heights and (in conjunction with other large institutional owners) has succeeded in evicting more than ten thousand residents to make way for nonresidential buildings. Court suits and demonstrations held up total demolition (p. 3). One example of the obstructing behavior they encountered follows:
The district consultant for city daycare was the first. . . to pay us an official visit. . . . A sweet middle-aged woman who sat on a tiny nursery chair with her knees up to her chin and talked to us about better ways to make play dough and about hiring professionals who really knew about children and about applying for government funding. . . . We would not learn anything from this woman or teach her anything. Her group was hierarchical, written record-making, money-exchanging, impersonal; our group was circular, verbal, work-exchanging, personal. . . . Our district consultant was pleasant over the phone. She asked if we were still opposed to hiring teachers and getting funded and she said that most of the last fifty violations could be disregarded. The rules were being changed. She said she would record our violations as "in the process of correction." . . . (1975:144-48).

Harlow and Hess, and their associates, are well-educated, sophisticated, middle-class people who, though they have no political power, have political know-how and are not handicapped by racial/ethnic discrimination. Try to imagine the countless unrecorded obstructions experienced by people who lack the advantages of Hess and Harlow.
    Harlow mentions mass evictions in Morningside Heights, and we have previously mentioned other such cases of urban inhumanity, notably the demolition of Boston's West End. We should add two verifiable nineteenth-century examples: massive demolitions of poor peoples' neighborhoods to make way for railroad stations in London and Baron Haussmann's boulevards in Paris, both now regarded as historical treasures. The feelings of the nineteenth- century dispossessed are as forgotten now as they were probably disregarded at the time. It is a plus for the humanity of cities in the twentieth century that some large, powerful organizations have exercised great care and com- passion in the relocation of tenants from properties they wished to redevelop. One case is the expansion of the campus of the Mother Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston. The church advised the tenants many months in advance rather than 30 to 60 days, paid relocation expenses, and also paid a reputable rental agent to help the tenants find new quarters. Several hundred people living in 42 old buildings "found new quarters-and did so without the rancor so often associated with evictions brought on by 'urban renewal'" (Marlin 1973:39).
    Local grass-roots movements are necessarily political. They require leadership, organization, and persistence. Often, if not always, they are triggered by a crisis; in the Green point-Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in 1975, the threat that the city would close the local firehouse, at a time of high arson rates, resulted in its occupation for 18 months by an activist family. An already existing network of politically active, working-class women made this effort possible (Susser 1986:112-13). In Durham, N.C., in 1978-79, a coalition of blacks and middle-class whites (with somewhat different goals) successfully prevented completion of an expressway which would have destroyed a black neighborhood (Luebke 1981:256).
    Subcultural homogeneity-be it social class or ethnic-is not a prerequisite for effective local grass-roots political action. In fact, some observers might argue the reverse. Matthew Crenson, for example, in his study of politically active neighborhoods in Baltimore, found that it is frequently the relatively rich people, living in relatively poor neighborhoods, who provide the leadership (1983:301). Crenson also has some hopes that sustained local political organizations may eventually have various beneficial effects on governance of the city as a whole (pp.296-97).
    Lisa Redfield Peattie, an American city planner (and daughter of the anthropologist Robert Redfield), lived for an extended period in La Laja, a working-class neighborhood in Ciudad Guyana, Venezuela, a new city being built by American and Venezuelan engineers and bureaucrats to produce steel from nearby iron mines. Peattie had roots in La Laja, but she also had contacts with the city's power structure that people of the barrio did not. And so she was able to play an important role in a grass-roots movement to prevent the pollution of the barrio's water supply by the construction of a sewer (1968:85-89).
    Besides leadership, an essential element in organizing for local livability is a well-defined locality in which some residents have pride and where people are willing to look out for one another (Young 1981:30). How its inhabitants view the neighborhood is, however, a complicated issue, as Roger Ahlbrandt (1984) has shown in connection with the great diversity of neighborhood inhabitants' attitudes, social statuses, and styles of political activism in Pitts- burgh.
Diversity, between and within neighborhoods, sometimes results in conflict within the local community. Such was the case with the Manhattan Valley Development Corporation (MVDC). Manhattan Valley is a deteriorating working-class area south of Columbia University between Central Park West and Broadway. Local citizens formed the MVDC primarily to work for more low- cost housing in the area. Nevertheless, it made local enemies, one charge being that it was seeking power for its own sake (West 1981:29-32). Such conflicts may inevitably accompany social action. The research of Tridib Banerjee and William Baer among blacks, whites, and Hispanics in Los Angeles leads them to believe that the familiar model of the homogeneous neighborhood as the basic building block of urban social life may be insufficient because it is too narrow and too static. They propose the design of residential areas that consist of dwelling clusters for people of different income classes, combined with public facilities, mixed private and public facilities, and private commercial establishments. Such arrangements, recognizing the reality of social heterogeneity, would make better services available and make the area more adaptable to change (Banerjee and Baer 1984:188-89). Admittedly utopian, such areas, if realized to the extent possible, might mitigate the protractedness of many grass-roots movements and the hopelessness of people who are not able to undertake them.
    Meanwhile, there is no scarcity of ideas on how to organize grass-roots movements, particularly at the neighborhood level. Among the substantial books on this subject are Robert Cassidy's Livable Cities (1980), Rolf Goetze's Building Neighborhood Confidence (1986), 8Jld Howard Hallman's Neighbor- hoods: Their Place in Urban Life (1984). There are also surveys of neighborhood satisfaction and dissatisfaction, such as one which covered the entire city of Flint, Mich. (Charles Stewart Mott Foundation 1979).
    Many of the sources cited in this section on grass roots mention interactions between individuals, and so they help to counteract the well-entrenched feeling that bureaucratic organizations are dehumanized, anonymous monoliths. Four books that further reinforce this important point are Mario Cuomo, Forest Hills Diary (1974); John Goering, Maynard Robison, and Knight Hoover, The Best Eight Blocks in Harlem (1977); Chester W. Hartman, YerbaBuena (1974); and Nick Wates, The Battle for Tolmers Square (1976).
    In 1972, Cuomo (subsequently governor of New York) was an attorney in private practice in New York City. Mayor John V. Lindsay asked Cuomo, an experienced negotiator, to serve as the city's fact-finder among all the disputing parties in a prolonged confrontation between citizens' groups in Forest Hills and other parts of New York City. The city, backed by the federal government, had made plans to build three 24-story apartment buildings in Forest Hills for low-income, inner-city families. The project was part of a "scatter-site" program based on the theory that if poor people, previously heavily concentrated in inner-city slums, were relocated in smaller concentrations in different, more affluent areas of the city, they would enjoy beneficial results. The Forest Hills people, mostly middle class, Jewish, and politically liberal, op- posed the project primarily on the grounds that a large influx of poor, black families would bring with it such an increase in crime that their community would be destroyed. After much bitter turmoil, a compromise was finally reached: three 12-story buildings, one of which would be for elderly people.
    Cuomo's book is in diary form, and although he labels many of the actors with pseudonyms, he makes the Forest Hills affair come alive as a dispute among real individuals, not as a war between impersonal forces. His diary also includes numerous insightful observations and thoughts.
    At about the same time, the Upper Park Avenue Community Association (UP ACA) had been formed to build low-cost housing and rehabilitate older buildings to restore East Harlem as a residential area for poor families. UP ACA was locally controlled but also supported in various ways by foundations and government agencies. It made a good start, but eventually failed because the federal government's reduction of funds for urban housing was a catalyst for the surfacing of insurmountable differences in policy between local and externally interested participants. Furthermore, the new housing was priced beyond the means of poor people who were pushed elsewhere, as typically happens with such projects (Goering et al. 1977:188). This book, like Cuomo's, takes the reader step by step, and person by person, through the career of the project and, in doing so, it is very informative about motivations, pure and mixed.
Hartman chronicles the 20-year struggle (1953-73) between Tenants and  Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TO OR) and the San Francisco Re- development Authority (SFRA) over an SFRA proposal to build a convention center on the south side of lower Market Street, necessitating complete destruction of the area:
    About 4,000 persons were living in the South of Market area slated for destruction to make way for Yerba Buena Center. Apart from about 300 families, residents of South of Market were for the most part single, elderly, male and poor, surviving on the meager proceeds of Social Security and small pensions. Some were alcoholics. Most, however, were retired or dis- abled working men who had come to the South of Market to spend the remaining days oftheir lives. The area and its 48 residential hotels provided them with inexpensive housing and eating places. It was sunny and flat, in a city where hills and fog abound. It was downtown, near Market Street, the city's transportation hub, and other facilities they needed. Most of all, it provided them with a community of other single men with common back- grounds, experience and problems. People looked out for each other and took care of one another. Men gathered to talk, watch television, and just be with other people in the hotel lobbies, streets, restaurants and bars. South of Market was their family and their home (1974:96-97).

Hartman does not refer to single-room occupancy (SRO) in discussing the 48 residential hotels, but it is very likely that SRO was frequent in them.
    TOOR brought suit against SFRA to insure that relocated housing in other parts of the city be provided, but even with such provision, the social fabric of South of Market would be destroyed. Hartman is specific in delineating who all the major actors were. Knowing what kinds of people can organize movements like TOOR and what other kinds of people can disregard the humanity of South of Market in the interest of speculative profit is valuable information for those who believe in the essential humanity of cities. One of the causes of the great increase in the number of homeless people in American cities in the 1980s is the reduction in the amount of available low-cost housing, and the priorities that destroyed South of Market are major factors in the increase in homelessness.
    Like Hartman, Wates provides a chronology of events (1957 to 1976) in The Battle for Tolmers Square. Tolmers Square is a neighborhood near the University of London campus. Already crowded by high-rise office buildings (which have become a glut on the London market), Tolmers Square residents were, beginning in the 1950s, invaded by buy-outs and evicted by speculators planning to build more office buildings. They organized and eventually succeeded in getting the government to buy back the land from the speculators and make plans for a mix of office and residential buildings, some new, some rehabilitated. Wates's account of events, in which he was a participant, is notable not only for the interplay of specific individuals, but also for the involvement of different levels of government, including shifts in power between the Conservative and Labour Parties..
    All four of these books provide small-scale perspectives on large-scale events, and thus humanize them. As to the effects of grass-roots movements on the humanity of cities, we close with Cuomo's final sentences:
I believe there is much to learn from this significant episode in the history of urban government. Forest Hills tells us a great deal about the true feelings of the people actually involved on both sides of the issues. It points up the huge gap between abstract sociological propositions and their efficacy-or lack of it-when nailed down to the Procrustean bed of urban reality. It shows up dramatically the difficulty of attempting to sell by means of homily-and the brandishing of moral obligations-social cures that require sacrifice by some for the good of others. It shows, painfully, the need for more effective devices of communication between centralized urban government and the communities affected by governmental projects. And it reminds us that one of the serious impediments to the resolution of complex confrontations is the tendency of the parties to maintain fixed and extreme positions, the lack of subtlety in dialogue and argumentation, the loss of reasonableness. . . . In the end, any description of the Forest Hills experience will inevitably raise more questions than it answers and will necessarily be in part depressing and in part hopeful. But then, that will always be true: there will always be more problems than solutions; more to be done than has been done; more quests than conquests. The game is . only lost when we stop trying (1974:150-51)

CONCLUSION
During the 1980s, the American people were bombarded by political rhetoric largely composed of mindless optimism and threats of international disaster. The optimism glossed over most of the social issues emphasized in this book, and the threats were used to justify the expenditure of more money than the federal budget could afford on military armaments. The point of view under- lying this book is that there will indeed be national and international disaster (including urban disaster) unless many people apply well-informed and innovative optimism, backed by ample resources, to ameliorate the issues we have discussed.
Greed for money and power and fear of others' greed are the prime movers behind humankind's being in many ways its own worst enemy. Social science, including anthropology, provides little insight into how these powerful emotions are generated, and the religious explanation (original sin) has no pragmatic value in this world. Social science has, however, delineated the complexities of the effects of these emotions, and it has shown how those effects can be combated, as for example, in the grass-roots movements we have considered.
Throughout this book, we have referred to national, international, and worldwide problems of humankind's own making that affect life in cities but are not city specific. Effects of these megascale phenomena are felt even at the receptive microscale level of the individual city dweller. The least we can do is to face them, to accept their reality, in a spirit quite different from that of mindless optimism. Only by facing them can people combat them.
What's on humanity's agenda for the 21st century? In a series of interviews . . . leading thinkers have identified. . . the first-intensity items. . . to which humanity must devote its full attention and its unstinting resources. . . .
(1) The threat of nuclear annihilation.
(2) The danger of overpopulation.
(3) The degradation of the global environment.
(4) The gap between the developing and the industrial worlds.
(5) The need for fundamental restructuring of educational systems. (6) The breakdown in public and private morality (Kidder 1987:D-1).

The nuclear threat affects cities in two obvious ways. One is that the arms industry diverts enormous amounts of money and brain power from constructive purposes including the needs of cities. One percent of the world's annual military expenditures amounts to about $6 billion. This sum spent each year for the next 15 years could improve world food production and health measures so that the widespread malnutrition among the world's poorest people (including millions of urban squatters) could be alleviated by the year 2000 (Grant 1983: 49-50). One percent!
Ironically, arms manufacture provides millions of jobs in many cities of the world, and there are vested interests in maintaining this situation quite apart from strategic military ones.
Military expenditures include much more than arms manufacture, of course, but nuclear arms manufacture is a major part of this entire world scene in which power seeking, greed, and fear are prime movers. Who can turn the situation toward different, more constructive goals? Clearly, powerful people who are able to persist in innovative leadership must be involved. James MacGregor Burns, the distinguished historian and political scientist, has said:
I am trying. . . to develop a theory of leadership that embraces power but is much more subtle and realistic than crude theories of power. Leaders recognize common needs. As the leaders tap those motivational bases. . . [and] reach down to the genuine and authentic needs and wants of the people, then there is a transformation of leaders as well as . . . followers. The great distinction between the power wielder and the leader is that the power wielder is trying to achieve his own purpose, separate from that of the follower-to be a governor, to make a million, to lead a movement. . . . The leader is leading-arousing, recognizing, and satisfying the followers' fundamental needs. In turn, the followers are being raised up to higher levels of self-fulfillment and self-realization and self-actualization and the higher levels of moral judgment-and all this rebounds back on the leaders and affects them (1981:9).
    An example of power wielders, in Burns's terms, are the real estate developers who were transforming the shape of Manhattan in the 1980s solely for their own profit. "There are the bad guys, and then there are the extraordinarily bad guys," Joe Klein quotes one of his respondents as saying, "Some of these guys think that if they can't make $100 million on a building. . . it's not worth doing" (1986:32).
Ordinary people need not remain passive in the face of such power wielding, and indeed there are growing efforts at resistance and the bending, at least, of some priorities:
[C]ities are facing increasing pressure from community activists to redistribute the spoils of booming downtown development. . . . [C]ity planners are linking more new building permits to commitments from developers and new businesses to provide jobs, open space, child-care facilities and other amenities. San Antonio, for instance, pressured builders of a Hyatt Regency Hotel into allowing a Mexican-American group to invest $1 million in exchange for an equity stake in the project. The District of Columbia is considering requiring outside banks that want to acquire banks in the city to establish branches in poor neighborhoods, provide up to $100 million in loans to city-sponsored projects, create up to 200 jobs and sell food stamps. . . . Hartford, Conn., Chicago and Seattle. . . are waging campaigns for. . . "linkage" fees, that would be levied on downtown developers. The taxes-already levied in San Francisco and Boston-would then be used for projects designed to ameliorate the social and economic dislocation [such as gentrification] that activists claim downtown growth causes throughout a city (Waldman 1987:1).
    This discussion has led from the nuclear threat to greed and fear to urban power wielding, and at this point, we should take note of the Marxist critique of Western industrial urban dynamics, including its effects on Third World cities. This critique must be taken seriously by anyone who cares about the humanity of cities, and one need not be an ideological Marxist to do so. Simply put, the Marxist critique is that the capitalist profit motive determines the morphology, growth, and social relationships of cities, with social class exploitation as one of the results; in the form of international conglomerates, capitalism has contributed to lessening necessary, but unprofitable, food production in rural areas of the world, resulting in massive migration of poor people to cities. There is enough evidence supporting this argument that non- Marxists should accept it as a serious and legitimate challenge, rather than belligerently and thoughtlessly denying it. A very thorough presentation of the Marxist critique as applied to cities is David Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1975). The Marxist solution is revolutionary destruction of the capitalist system. What alternatives are there? This chapter is suggesting some that are actually being tried, but none of them is perfect. Can they be improved?
    Overpopulation is discussed at many points in this book. It directly affects cities in various ways, the most conspicuous being growth rates and magnitudes unprecedented in human history. The only humane solution to the over- population problem is, obviously, drastic reduction in worldwide birth rates, and that depends on most of the world's child-producing couples' having no more than two children. So far, only a small proportion of those couples have realized that reduced fertility is in their own interest and that of their off- spring. Many of these couples live in cities, but it is not true that city dwellers as a whole have low fertility-as we have pointed out previously. Many people in the world still believe they should have a large number of children-to achieve social status among their peers, to maximize the family work force to augment its income, to insure (they hope) support in old age, or to please a deity. Finding effective ways to counteract these values and behavioral pat- terns is one of the tasks of family planning agencies and institutions in almost all parts of the world. Until these efforts become noticeably successful, people must live as best they can at the same time that expanded efforts are made to control the problem. Chronic unemployment and its dire consequences, ultimately including starvation, may lead to a much more widespread realization that low fertility is in one's own self-interest, regardless of contrary considerations. For example, in Mexico, if the average number of children per couple were reduced from 4.61 to a projected 2.62, urban growth would be reduced by 14 million people by the year 2010, and there would be 200 thou- sand fewer job-seekers by the year 2000 (Nesmith c.1985-86:23-24). Such abstractions do not influence behavior very much, but the realities they rep- resent can do so.
One observer contributes an encouraging note that has megascale implications:
    Now, quite unpredictably and unexpectedly, and in just the last three or four years, out in most of our two million villages, we are showing a startling capacity to change. Suddenly, human fertility is falling; and agricultural productivity, rising, often spectacularly. . . . One can date the change. . . to about 1974-1975. Although I was given different local reasons in each country, the scope of what is happening is too broad to be coincidental. . . . Yearly population growth rates are plummeting, from 2.5-3 percent in the 1960s to 1-1.5 percent now, in village regions as scattered as India's Kerala and Mysore states, Sri Lanka, China and the Chinese-cultured countries from South Korea to Taiwan and the islands of Java and Bali. Scientific farming (high-yield, quick-maturing grain, multiple cropping, nitrogen- fixing crops, year-round irrigation) is spreading very fast. . . . An exodus of villagers from cities and back to the land has begun, catching most governments by surprise. India's Planning Commission has just ordered it studied. In Djakarta, it is overwhelmingly evident; more food in villages being the pull, fewer unskilled jobs in the modernizing city being the push (Critchfield 1979:18).

Richard Critchfield's demographic data come from areas where, in many cases, family planning programs have been particularly intense, unlike other areas where population trends are not so encouraging; and costs, as well as benefits, of "scientific agriculture" are a matter of serious controversy. Nevertheless, Critchfield's presentation suggests future developments that could bode well for humanity, including the humanity of cities.
In the meantime, there is the worldwide problem of environmental degradation, a problem many people, because of short-term self-interest, choose to ignore. For millions of city dwellers, however, the problem is coming closer and closer to home, and the necessity for remedial action more and more obvious. Consider, for example, garbage disposal. American cities are running out of space for landfills, and the most feasible alternative disposal method is burning. The garbage-burning business is profitable, for the process can be harnessed to generate electricity. However, garbage-burning plants threaten the environments of blue-collar neighborhoods in some cities. One of their byproducts is toxic waste of various kinds, according to some experts (Paul 1986). If harmless waste disposal were to become technically impossible, then waste disposal itself might become an agent that, like permanently diminished water supply, might stop further growth of cities.
    Developers and politicians typically deny such a prospect, but despite such opposition, water planning is increasingly frequent. We have already mentioned the mandated 10 percent nationwide decrease in water consumption in Israel, and cities as different as Phoenix and Atlanta are making plans and taking steps to conserve water in the future. These actions are, or will be, extremely expensive and do not predict unlimited amounts of water in the future. The farsighted planning and the expensive and probably widely un- popular measures needed to adapt successfully to these vicissitudes will entail the kind of leadership Burns describes, and the eventual results could be an enhancement of the humanity of cities.
    The gap between the industrial and developing worlds-basically a North/ South gap-refers to the problems inherent in the gross disproportion between the wealth and power of industrial nations and the poverty of Third World ones whose people constitute the majority of humankind. We have seen how this situation affects Third World cities, with their dual economies. The formal economy is tied in various ways to Western industrialism, while the informal is composed of the millions of efforts of poor people to survive by means of marginal jobs. Milton Santos (1979) refers to these two economies as the upper and lower circuits of Third World urban economies. We have noted the resourcefulness and ingenuity of lower-circuit work and criticized its denigration by some development economists. However, we have also noted the concern expressed by observers like Peter Lloyd that the types of informal work by which squatters have typically supported themselves relatively well may diminish. Santos says that increases in productivity and better life conditions of the people now in the lower circuit are needed (p. 205). Virtually the same recommendation is made in a report prepared by the Urban Development Department of the World Bank (1985:3).
    Santos refers to several concepts and processes whose importance for the humanity of cities we have frequently discussed: evolution, vicissitudes, and the interactions between macroscale phenomena and the microscale realities of everyday life.
Santos discusses needed changes in the "south." Erhard Eppler, minister for development cooperation of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1968-74, discusses needed changes in the "north":
It is not our job to make countries of the South self-reliant-that is what they can only do for themselves-but it is up to us to give these nations a basis for interdependence in the future. We have not yet done so. . . . We have to change our model of development to give the Southern countries a chance to change theirs. . . . (1) We have to stop or even reverse [the arms race]. If we fail to do so . . . economic mechanisms. . . will crush all the attempts at a new model of development. Debt servitude and self-reliant development contradict each other. (2) We have to overcome the obsession with growth, even. . . with GNP. What matters is not the rate of growth but its direction and quality. . . . It is not the consumption of energy or raw materials or land that should grow, but every production or every service that can help us to save energy, to save or re-cycle raw materials, to prevent waste, to save or restore ecological cycles. . . . Changing our own pattern of development can have three positive effects on the South: (1) We are no longer forced to export destruction. (2) We liberate the elites of the South from the compulsion to imitate our traditional model and increase their chances of finding their own. (3) Once we are less occupied with the disastrous results of our development, there might be some resources left, material as well as human, to help others (pp. 62-64).

The fifth and sixth high-priority twenty-first-century issues Rushworth Kidder lists-the need for fundamental restructuring of educational systems and the breakdown in public and private morality-have clear implications for city life. To mention only a few, Starr's and Pileggi's discussions of misbehavior in distemic space include questions about improvement. New methods and content of teaching livable urban behavior, including on-the-spot law enforce- ment, are necessary. Fundamental changes in education, for the sake of public and private morality, were included, too, in the deliberations of a 1985 con- ference at which violence in American culture was perceived as a public health problem (Holden 1985:1257).
New kinds of learning-learning that directly affects behavior-are implied

in our last two examples involving misbehavior in distemic space. In March 1987, The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article on the "rampant rude- ness" in American society. The article is long on anecdotes by infuriated victims of public rudeness and rather short on analysis. Nevertheless, it cites materialistic preoccupation, high stress levels in a competitive "me first" environment, and boorishness carried over from interethnic conflicts of the past as contributing to the problem. Judith Martin (the newspaper columnist, "Miss Manners") is quoted as saying, "We're a half step above rock bottom"; the good news: "Only recently, we were at rock bottom." She adds: "I see some hope because the problem has been identified" (The Wall street Journal 1987:22). A Roman taxi driver stated another identification of the problem (a first step in finding solutions): " 'We should do things more intelligently, less selfishly. People ought to be better mannered,' he said at the end of a nerve-wracking but spirited drive" (Eisner 1987:A-2).
    Cities and their inhabitants are affected not only by worldwide phenomena such as those Kidder reviews, but also, as we have repeatedly seen, by national policies and cultural patterns. Two very different discussions of urban growth policies in the face of economic problems come from the World Bank (1987) on Third World cities and Marc Levine (1984) on United States cities. Levine's article has a Marxist, but not revolutionary, orientation.
Racism is clearly an issue involving profound moral concerns, but it is more virulent in some societies than others, and it is still a very serious issue in the United States and its cities despite all the real progress toward integration that has been made. At the end of their book on the Miami race riot of 1980, in which 18 people died, Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn say:
The lesson brought home most vividly by Miami seems to be the same one offered up by the earlier riots. . . . That keeping blacks in a position of economic and social isolation and of political disenfranchisement and where they feel deprived of basic human justice can be allowed to continue only at greater and greater peril to the health, safety and peace of mind of every member of American society (1984:178).

Here, then, is part of the challenge. What present policies should be rein- forced, and what new ones should be adopted, to meet the challenge? David Schplz, in his Pruitt-Igoe housing project study, says:
    Do away with the basic economic injustice and. . . the odds are that a style of life more closely resembling that of the core culture will emerge because there is no longer any need to adapt to isolation and deprivation. . . . [A]s Andrew Buchanan put it, "Don't ask me why I eat chittlins, I eat chittlins because I can't afford steak."
Project dwellers. . . want very much to be able to live like the average American. However, because they cannot and because it is painful to continue to evaluate oneself by norms that are unattainable, they have accepted an alternate set of norms that enables them to maintain some sense of self-esteem in the midst of their isolation and deprivation. Chittlins are now a significant part of what is called "soul food" in a further attempt to make desirable what is most readily attainable and to provide a concrete sacrament bestowing identity within a black brotherhood.
Some form of income maintenance that goes beyond providing a minimum subsistence level of living for poor Americans seems. . . the most just. . . and most likely. . . means of eliminating poverty and. . . its culture. . . [I]f the black American is to benefit equally from such reforms, racial dis- crimination must cease. . . . The most acceptable form of such a program . . . is one that ties income as closely as possible to a job. The majority of project dwellers would rather work than receive a dole and, in fact, the majority of the poor do work and still remain in poverty.
American cities are in crisis, the need is pressing to rebuild the American dream concretely in cities once more fit for human habitation. The economic and technological resources necessary to meet the poverty problem }lead- on are at hand. This problem must not be evaded any longer (1969:193-95).

During the 1970s and 1980s, the problem continued to be evaded, partly for reasons of national-level political ideology. The need continues to be as pressing as ever, if not more so. As far as the fiscal aspects of national urban policy are concerned, Richard Morris (1978) blames the Federal government and the national banking system for the fiscal crisis, and the social science journal, Society, devoted a whole section in one of its 1986 issues to "coping with cutbacks." The introduction to this section emphasizes the innovative responses that have evolved (MacManus and Clark 1986:49). Martin Sable (1984:42-48) lists and briefly describes a number of urban research and action programs active in the United States.
    Under the heading, "Partnerships for Urban Problem Solving," Gail Schwartz sets a positive tone:
    American cities present rich and varied experiences in dealing with urban problems. The belief that diversity of problems demands a diversity of solutions has been translated into a number of creative approaches. Federally funded demonstration grants have supported diverse experiments in neighborhood preservation, economic development, [and] manpower training. . . . Demonstration grant programs. . . use the community as a social laboratory; their purpose is not necessarily to replicate successful procedures but. . . to generate a variety of models. . . . Private philanthropic foundations. . . have also played a pivotal role in assisting community groups to implement programs and to leverage public funds. Banks, insurance companies, retailers, and utility companies are taking major parts in most restoration efforts. Voluntary agencies. . . often initiate community action. Many cities. . . have also taken steps to decentralize responsibility for planning, programming, budgeting, and delivering services. But aspirations toward self-help and self-management in neighborhoods and demands for more direct citizen control of local government are sometimes at odds with equally strong demands for increased efficiency in government. The potential conflict between these objectives is very great. . . . [C]onscious efforts must be made to achieve a balance in government processes between negotiating (a bargaining process) and steering (a directing process). . . .
Still a long way from evolving into primary vehicles of local government, community groups do have a recognized role as intermediary organizations. . . . [A]n inevitable tension exists between the institutionalization of such organizations and the traditional responsibilities of local government. Intermediary organizations are extremely diverse in origin, objectives, com- position, organization and accomplishments. . . . Some are national in scope and have their origins in large social movements and organizations such as the Urban League, which represents the interests of black Americans. Some are limited in scope to a few blocks and focus on the welfare of the immediate residents. . .. For simplicity, intermediary organizations. . . [are] categorized as neighborhood preservation groups, public-private re-development organizations, human capital/human resource organizations, comprehensive community development organizations, and network organizations (1981:69-70).
    Some organizations of the sort to which Schwartz alludes can, in time, be- come static "establishments," and so it is important to be aware of the ability of city dwellers to mobilize in response to new communal needs~ often crises. For example, the earthquakes that struck Mexico City in September 1986 killed more than four thousand people, injured thousands more, and left about 300 thousand homeless.
The calamity occurred in a country. . . already in the "adjustment process" imposed by its 100 billion dollar debt, and in a city in permanent crisis- where the. . . "marginal people" account for more than half the population and where pollution, traffic congestion, housing and public services deficit . . . are growing continually (Esteva 1986:73).

And how did the citizens of this already beleaguered city respond?
On September 25, just 6 days after the first earthquake, more than 100 grass-roots organizations, encompassing both victims and support groups, decided to constitute the Self-Help Network. . . to serve as the liaison between those needing support and those who can and want to give it. It . . . has already enabled the joint implementation of various emergency actions (p.74).
    A very different kind of crisis is the growing epidemic of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS is affecting many people in other parts of the world including heterosexual and homosexual persons, infants and children, and blood transfusion recipients of both sexes and all ages. One example of community mobilization in response to it comes from Greenwich Village in New York City. Greenwich Village is an affluent old Manhattan neighborhood with a population of about 61 thousand. It has long been famous as the residence of artists, writers, and bohemians, and in the 1980s it was assumed to have a homosexual population of 25 to 30 percent, or about 18 thousand per- sons. In 1987, at least seven hundred people with AIDS, out of more than nine thousand cases in the city as a whole, were concentrated in the Village. Ac- companied by the unprecedented frequency of young adults' deaths and incapacitation, the epidemic has had a powerful impact on the community. Sixty AIDS support groups meet each week in the Village: healing circles, bereavement groups, and groups for parents of AIDS victims, for women with AIDS (one provides baby-sitting), for veterans with AIDS, even a group conducted in Spanish (Graham and Ricklefs 1987:1).
    In conclusion, let us once again open up our perspectives in space and time: [O]bdurate factors of the economy and national policy work against cities. But there is a distinct danger in being so mesmerized by the pathology of cities that one fails to see the rich opportunities in them. . . . [C]ities have always had problems of poverty, decay, exploitation, and sometimes, actual starvation and mass death. Even in their most golden periods, appalling physical and social conditions existed within cities. None of this is surprising; cities embody the best and the worst of the human condition. Arts and advanced mercantilism often exist side by side with every evil of exploitation, from addiction to alcohol and drugs to poverty. But somehow, cities have survived through the centuries, with new social hierarchies, new economic functions and new physical profiles (Peirce and Hagstrom 1981:144).

This sense of dynamism-of the ever-presence of vicissitudes-is one of the essentials of urban life, and it is important that city dwellers maintain a positive view of it.
To assert that the humanity of cities is real is not to claim that cities ever were, are now, or ever will be, utopias. What is claimed is that the humanity of cities requires the constant striving for the best by and for all city dwellers, rich and poor, and that this striving, to be successful, must be informed by knowledge and awareness of all the options offered by life in the cities of the world.

SUGGESTED ADDITIONAL READING

Appleyard, Donald. Livable Streets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Advocates        planning and activism in conjunction. Many photographs.
Breines, Simon, and William J. Dean. The Pedestrian Revolution: Streets with- out Cars. New York: Vintage, 1974. Acknowledging Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, among others, for their inspiration, the authors write in the same spirit as William H. Whyte (1980). Excellent photographs.
Fornos, Werner. Gaining People, Losing Ground: A Blueprint for Stabilizing World Population. Washington, D.C.: The Population Institute; Ephrata, Pa.: Science Press, 1987. A succinct, factual, and eloquent presentation of the magnitude of the population problem; its various threats to the survival of humanity, including city dwellers; and the political obstructions that make coping with the problem more difficult than it would be otherwise.
Huth, Mary Jo. The Urban Habitat: Past, Present, and Future. Chicago: Nelson- Hall, 1978. Discusses British "new towns" in some detail, as well as other experiments in improving urban life. Photographs.
Perin, Constance. Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Perin emphasizes the effects, for good and ill, of American cultural values on housing and urban land use, consistent with a theme of this book that cities are parts of larger systems of values.