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Density is "bad". Idealistic city planners abhor it because of their insistence on space, light etc. Health workers find it unhygienic. The police hate it because it breeds crime and impedes (in its labyrinthine escape routes) the detection of the criminal. The State does not like it because it breeds political insurrection; indeed this was one of the main motives behind Haussmann's disembowelling of medieval Paris, and the rationale behind his wide boulevards (which have, interestingly enough, became a perfect and generously spacious theatre for political protest in the twentieth century.)

Certainly there were grave problems with the density that resulted from sheer poverty, the kind of thing described by Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor, as depicted by Dore in his views of London. Certainly the old Glasgow tenements did not harbour families as happy as the cartoon strip Broons. But there is nothing wrong per se with levels of density, as Tokyo and New York can show us; true there is an apparent density that shocks us on our visits to cities of the third world; but, as Germaine Greer points out in Sex and Destiny, we may actually be dealing with another problem here, of our own making: the crowdedness of the Indian city may alarm us but, Greer suggests, probably because it is a crowd of the poor and, above all, the brown.

I have never experienced the full shock of density as I did in India. In the market lanes and streets of Kalbadevi, Bombay or parts of Calcutta, in Cairo or Rio even I have felt faint at the press of people and traffic, the sheer impaction of human presence and activity; this could, to an anti-urban zealot, be seen as incontrovertible evidence of that great fear of the late twentieth century: over-population. But high concentration of population in cities, and in particular corners of cities is an entirely notional illusion of over-population. I feel nothing sinister, dangerous in it, nothing that is in itself ominous. I like density, like the press of people in the street, in the buses, almost always a mutually protective press.

Even ecologically density is a good thing. Paulo Solari writes: "Life is where crowding is immense. Death comes when the system uncrowds…No eco-thinking can ignore the miracle of crowded living. To do so is to indulge in incoherent fantasizing. Worse it is to betray Gaia."

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