The Trouble With Paternalists Is

There Are Fashions In Building. Behind The Fashions Lie Economic And Technological Reasons, And These Fashions Exclude All But A Few Genuinely Different Possibilities In City Dwelling Construction At Any One Time.

The Primary Conflict, I Think, Is Between People Whose Interests Are With Already Well-established Economic Activities, And Those Whose Interests Are With The Emergence Of New Economic Activities.

There Are Two Ways You Encounter Things In The World That Are Different. One Is Everything That Comes In Reinforces What You Already Believe And Everything That You Know. The Other Thing Is That You Stay Flexible Enough Or Curious Enough And Maybe Unsure Of Yourself Enough, Or May Be You Are More Sure Of Yourself - I Don't Know Which It Is - That The New Things That Come In Keep Reforming Your World View.

Lowly, Unpurposeful And Random As They May Appear, Sidewalk Contacts Are The Small Change From Which A City's Wealth Of Public Life May Grow.

In Trading With Each Other Cities Can't Be In Too Different Stages Of Development, And They Can't Copy One Another. Backward Cities, Or Younger Cities, Or Newly Forming Cities In Supply Regions, Have To Develop To A Great Extent On One Another's Shoulders. This Is One Of The Terrible Things About Empires. Empires Want Them Only To Trade With The Empire, Which Doesn't Help Them At All. It's Just A Way Of Exploiting Them.