The City in the Future of Democracy

Abstract

I need hardly remind this audience that one of the characteristics of our field is the large number of old and quite elemental questions—elemental but by no means elementary—for which we have no compelling answers. I don't mean that we have no answers to these questions. On the contrary, we often have a rich variety of conflicting answers. But no answer compels acceptance in the same way as a proof of a theorem in mathematics, or a very nice fit between a hypothesis and a satisfactory set of data.Whether the obstacles that prevent us from achieving tight closure on solutions lie in ourselves—our approaches, methods, and theories—or are inherent in the problems is, paradoxically, one of these persistent and elemental questions for which we have a number of conflicting answers. For whatever it may be worth, my private hunch is that the main obstacles to closure are in the problems themselves—in their extraordinary complexity, the number and variety of variables, dimensions qualities, and relationships, and in the impediments to observation and data-gathering.However that may be, a question of this sort often lies dormant for decades or even centuries, not because it has been solved but because it seems irrelevant. For even when no satisfactory theoretical answer exists to a very fundamental question, historical circumstances may allow it to be ignored for long periods of time. Even specialists may refuse to take a question seriously that history seems to have shoved into the attic. What seem like fundamental controversies in one age are very likely to be boring historical curiosities in the next. And conversely it is my impression that a great many of the elemental political questions regarded as settled in one age have a way of surfacing later on.

Ganglioneuroma with leiomyomatosis of the urinary bladder: A rare tumor causing frequent micturition and dysuria

“…The neural crest differentiates into cells, such as ganglion cells, Schwann cells, melanocytes, and adrenal medullary chromaffin. 8 Ganglioneuroma is generally a unilateral disease; if both sides are involved, a genetic history should be considered. It is mainly associated with autosomal dominant.…”

The Making of Middle Indonesia

“…Many human geographers take this as the size beyond which a town becomes 'urban,' meaning it has grown beyond a small agricultural service centre and begins to host higher order services, such as government administration, education, health and commerce.16 The political scientist Robert Dahl (1967) once proffered that 50,000 may also be the minimal size for a town to host an effective urban civil society. Any smaller and its associational life was likely to dissolve into factional strife.…”

In Press We Trust? A Comparative Study of Three European Press Systems

“…Accordingly, if the media (and the information they provide) are not considered to be credible and are mistrusted by the citizens, then citizens' opinions of their political systems risk being profoundly undermined. Dahl (1967) interestingly notes that due to population increases, the forms of communication between political leaders and citizens become more blurred and indirect. Moreover, this communication tends to become increasingly asymmetrical.…”

“…Moreover, this communication tends to become increasingly asymmetrical. Indeed, while radio and television allow a more direct -contact,‖ they also favor the establishment of a unidirectional, one-to-many flow of communication (Dahl, 1967). The widening gap between leaders and citizens also represents one of the contributing factors to the rise of democratic malaise across America and Europe.…”