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A great many cities are experiencing difficulties which are
nothing new in the history of cities, except in their scale.
Some cities have lost their original purpose and have not found
new one. And any large or rich city is going to attract poor (S1)
immigrants, who flood in, filling with hopes of prosperity (S2)
which are then often disappointing. There are backward towns
on the edge of Bombay or Brasilia, just as though there were (S3)
on the edge of seventeenth-century London or early
nineteenth century Paris. This is new is in the scale. Descriptions (S4)
written by eighteenth-century travelers of the poor of Mexico
City, and the enormous contrasts that was to be found there, (S5)
are very dissimilar to descriptions of Mexico City today—the (S6)
poor can still be numbered in millions.
The whole monstrous growth rests on economic
prosperity, but behind it lies two myths: the myth of the city as a (S7)
promised land, that attracts immigrants from rural poverty (S8)
and brings it flooding into city centers, and the myth of the (S9)
country as a Garden of Eden, which, a few generations late, (S10)
sends them flooding out again to the suburbs.
