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A great many cities are experiencing difficulties which are nothing new
in the history of cities, except in their scale. Some cities have lost their
original purpose and have not found new one. And any large or rich city is __1__
going to attract poor immigrants, who flood in, filling with hopes of prosperity __2__
which are then often disappointing. There are backward towns on the edge of
Bombay or Brasilia, just as though there were on the edge of seventeenth- __3__
century London or early nineteenth-century Paris. This is new is the scale. __4__
Descriptions written by eighteenth-century travelers of the poor of Mexico
City, and the enormous contrasts that was to be found there, are very __5__
dissimilar to descriptions of Mexico City today—the poor can still be __6__
numbered in millions.
The whole monstrous growth rests on economic prosperity, but behind it lies __7__
two myths: the myth of the city as a promised land, that attracts immigrants __8__
from rural poverty and brings it flooding into city centers, and the myth of __9__
The country as a Garden of Eden, which, a few generations late, sends them __10__
flooding out again to the suburbs.
