The Globe and Mail

What is a modern metropolis but a collection of towns, an unruly mishmash of main streets that started out as stops on a rail line or farming burgs or local parishes, and just kept spreading until they all collided, and decided to call themselves a city? It may not be a planner's dream, but it seems to me that the fortuitous, relentless jostling together of many villages, with many identities, is not only the foundation of a great city, it is also - strangely - its best hope for the future. New York has its boroughs; London its councils; even Paris, bulldozed by Baron Haussmann in the 1800s for the sake of tidy modernity, has its local, idiosyncratic arrondissements. These cities celebrate their distinctive districts, preserving their names and often governments because they know that rigid central administrations are anathema to the thing that keeps mammoth urban centres vital, livable and many-textured - the power of local bonds.