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As a place where any significant fraction of a country's population is expected to live as a normal habitat for human life, the giant city, the urban concentration larger than half a million, let us say, is a very late arrival in human history. Before the mid-nineteenth century an overwhelming number of people in every country, including countries thought to be 'modern', lived in towns and villages. The chances are really quite overwhelming that not one of your great-grandfathers was born in a large city. Even today, in practically every country, big-city dwellers constitute a minority.
Because the very recent phenomenon of the giant city has made it a symbol of modernization and modernity, particularly for developing countries, visions of a society with few if any giant cities are typically brushed Was nostalgic evocations of an irrecoverable past. Yet the 'modernity' of the giant city derives from the age of industrialization not from the more recent age of late or post-industrialization. In post-industrial society, the giant city becomes an obsolescent, unnecessary and crippling habitat that persists less because of need than from inertia, sunk costs, a failure of imagination and a lack of audacity.
So much is the giant city an elephantine perversion of the city that we have no suitable name for it. As if to mock us, the Latin roots of the word city remind us of what is most lacking in the giant city: citizenship; while the origins of the term metropolis convey a meaning precisely opposed to present usage. Literally, metropolis means mother city (from die Greek meter, a mother; and polls, a city). Unlike us, the ancient Greeks assumed that no decent city should be permitted to grow indefinitely. A large city would outstrip its own resources, become unwieldy and ill-proportioned, inconvenient, an unfit place for living, unsuitable for primary democracy. a habitat that must inevitably reduce citizens, who might hope to know their city and one another well, into anonymous inhabitants each dominated by his own private concerns and lacking common goals or interests — no true city, then, no polls, but a mere heaping up of people and buildings. To avoid this catastrophe was both desirable and possible. The polls invited its citizens, not least its youth, to join in establishing a new polls. So the original city gave birth to the new, and the original thus became the mother city, a metropolis. Thus, cities or human proportion could be built and preserved.