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But alas for satirical intent! The picture is beautiful.

We have the centre; we have the confines, the city walls. So could many cities have been described even as late as the end of the nineteenth century; while others had clearly burst their banks, as it were. It became harder to define what a city was. Attempts to arbitrate what is and what is not the city are various. In London it might be the post codes ("London its post codes spread out like fields of wheat" as Larkin writes in Whitsun Weddings). In Buenos Aires, outside the unambiguously demarcated Capital Federal the urban fabric, according to the Ediciones Lumi Ciudad de Buenos Aires, just fades away in a way that would be unthinkable in the London A-Z which doggedly follows the dissipation of the city to its most ignominious reaches: Chigwell or Bushey or New Addington (places so far away, indeed, that the people there probably wear coloured clothes.)

The idea of a city concluding tidily is, today, not only impossible; it conflicts with what experts conceive to be the "Future of the City". I have difficulties with the idea of the 100 Mile City, to use the title of Deyan Sujic's book. I recognise it as a possible future but my urban vision is an old-fashioned one, a nineteenth century one; the density, concentration, crowdedness of the nineteenth century is something I find it difficult to relinquish. The city of the
future, we are repeatedly told, will not in fact be a city; it will be a suburb; yet cannot be a suburb because it will be suburban to no urbs.

Who am I to question this supposition for the future? But New York remains dense; the centre of London is becoming denser each year. There is Los Angeles, yes. But there is also Tokyo. Who is to say the former is to be the model of the future, not the latter?

A public information film about the post-war rebuilding of Glasgow: planners point the stems of their pipes at a map revealing the undesirable density of central Glasgow and describing the way in which this is to be alleviated by an even spread throughout the whole city. The Abercrombie plans for London in the 1940s enshrine an early attack on density; the Model for Bermondsey (1943) is a chillingly vacuous suburbanization of a dense, central zone of London. But the anti-density lobby really came into its own in the 1960s with The Greater London Development Plan and other projects.

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