The city is at once an organism and an idea. As an organism, it flourishes and fades, presenting a different aspect to the beholder at each moment in its history. As an idea, the city has haunted the human imagination with a fixity equaled perhaps only by the idea of time or of God. The new industrial towns of the nineteenth century were probably as unlike the early cities of the Fertile Crescent as hell is from heaven, yet we still apprehend and describe cities in archetypal patterns that predate ancient Babylon or Tyre. Even the literature of the modern city, like modern man himself, is haunted by recollections of the gods and by the ghosts of the fallen cities they once founded.

The earliest cities were believed to be sacred in origin and to have come into being as the terrestrial counterpart of a celestial model. The golden city that the Evangelist sees at the end of the Apocalypse might stand as the type of all urban foundations: ‘And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’ (21:2). The vision still dazzles, but the mode of thought is elementally archaic.