I offer here as well a few observations from some insightful writers on what makes a city.

      Jane Jacobs refers to "great" cities that are great not because of size. She contends that "they differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers." It is this diversity that gives a city its greatness.  Freidrich Engels, in "The Great Towns" in his The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 writes of "the turmoil of the streets," of "hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other," and "of all great towns," that "[e]verywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and one can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together." Noted urban scholar and historian Lewis Mumford in The City in History details the growth of the city in part due to the existence of strangers, the acceptance that would otherwise be denied in the tribal village to a newcomer with a skill that the city could use.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE AND GO TO DEFINING THE CITY.  A separate feature of the site are the Cities of New Jersey.