In a crisp vignette, the urban planner and social critic Lewis Mumford asked, “What is a City?” He answered: the city is a “Geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity  . . . It fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater.”

For Mumford, as for the slightly younger Paul Goodman and the slightly older Patrick Geddes, the city was an ark for social complexity, an incubator of human culture. They knew the urban form could grow wildly and lashed out at urbanism gone haywire: “Megalopolis is fast becoming a universal form,” Mumford wrote. And this would not be the first time it would be so. Those arguing that there were “no alternatives”  —  the recycled excuse of the addict  —  overlooked “too easily the historic outcome of such a concentration of urban power,” that it had “repeatedly marked the last stage in the classic cycle of civilization, before its complete disruption and downfall.” They did not merely forget the past. They spat upon it, embracing the forces of progress and urban concentration, as they arrived at a “universal megalopolis, mechanized, standardized, effectively dehumanized, as the final goal of urban evolution”: the city as dystopia.

Mumford presciently diagnosed the diseased late twentieth century urban form. He would have been chagrined, but probably not shocked, to find that the future had not merely borne out his diagnosis but that those charged with arresting the problem were still in denial about it. Outside the peasant international Via Campesina and its associated intellectuals, development debates are not about the relative weight of the city and the country, but about the technical minutiae of how to pack the residents of the latter into the former. This line of thinking is not just the province of Green Revolution–embracing devotees of industrial agriculture or semi-reformed apologists for capitalism like Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stieglitz but has captured the attention of a broad sweep of analysts, from the boosters of capitalism to its Cassandras.