City Of the Future

This archipelago of cities did not fall in one cataclysmic crash, but as a result of repeated assaults by brigands and stateless hordes over hundreds of years. The attacks led to a gradual withdrawal of the Roman presence, first from the outermost parts of the empire, such as Britain, and a gradual shift of population from beleaguered cities to the rural hinterlands. By the 7th century, virtually all the great cities of the empire -- large provincial centers such as Trier, on the German frontier, Marseilles and Roman Londinium -- had either been abandoned or had shrunk to mere shadows of themselves. Rome itself, a behemoth of almost a million in the 2nd century, was reduced to a pitiful ruin populated by less than a tenth that number.

The critical importance of security to cities is evident today as well. Crime-infested Mexico City has lost jobs, businesses and educated residents to better-governed, safer places like Monterrey and Guadalajara. Concerns about safety have slowed economic growth in cities such as San Salvador, Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg.

The U.S. cities that have declined most precipitously and consistently -- Baltimore and Detroit are obvious examples -- are those plagued by the nation's highest crime rates. Attempts by mayors in these cities to be "hip and cool" have not turned them around, in large part because they are still perceived as unsafe. Baltimore's Mayor Martin O'Malley has cultivated an image of coolness for himself and encouraged other "cool" people, including singles and gays, to add to his city's "creative class." Yet as one Baltimore resident suggested to me recently: "What's the point of being hip and cool if you're dead?"

Now, cities may have to face a different menace. Sadly, many metropolitan leaders seem less than prepared to meet today's current terrorist threat head-on, in part due to the trendy multiculturalism that now characterizes so many Western cities. Consider London's multiculturalist Mayor Ken Livingstone, who last year actually welcomed a radical jihadist, Egyptian cleric Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, to his city.

Multiculturalism and overly permissive immigration policies have also played a role here in North America. Unfettered in their own enclave, Muslim extremists in Brooklyn helped organize the first attack on the World Trade Center in the early 1990s. Lax Canadian refugee policies have allowed radical Islamists to find homes in places like Montreal and Toronto, where some might have planned attacks on this country, like the alleged 2000 plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.

In continental Europe, multiculturalism has been elevated to a kind of social dogma, exacerbating the separation between Muslim immigrants and the host society. For decades, immigrants have not been encouraged or expected to accept German, Dutch or British norms, nor have those societies made efforts to integrate the newcomers. Not surprisingly, jihadist agitation has flourished in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin and Paris as well as London.

If cities are to survive in Europe or elsewhere, they will need to face this latest threat to urban survival with something more than liberal platitudes, displays of pluck and willful determination. They will have to face up to the need for sometimes harsh measures, such as tighter immigration laws, preventive detention and widespread surveillance of suspected terrorists, to protect the urban future.

They will also need to institute measures that encourage immigrants to assimilate, such as fostering greater economic opportunity for newcomers or enforcing immersion in the national language and political institutions. Militant anti-Western Islamist agitation -- actively supportive of al Qaeda, for example -- also must be rooted out; it can be no more tolerated in Western cities today than overt support for Nazism should have been during World War II.

Technological measures -- from cameras in subway tunnels to radiation-scanning devices at highway approaches to major cities -- can also help improve security, as can steps like putting more police and bomb-sniffing dogs on trains, buses and subways, as New York recently decided to do. But the notion of imposing the kinds of controls we now see at airports -- magnetometers and scanners and body searches at the entrance to every public place -- would make life in cities far less enjoyable, and anonymous, than it is today, and is to be viewed strictly as a last resort.

The kinds of policies needed to secure their safety may pose a serious dilemma for great cities that have been built upon the values of openness, freedom of movement, privacy, tolerance and due process. Yet to survive, these same cities may now need to shift their primary focus to protecting their people, their commerce and their future against those who seek to undermine and even, ultimately, destroy them.

Author's e-mail: jkotkin@pacbell.net

Joel Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow with the New America Foundation and the author of "The City: A Global History" (Modern Library).