A great many cities are experiencing difficulties which are
nothing new in the history of cities, except for in their
62. ______ scale. Some cities have lost their original purpose and
have not found new one. And any large or rich city is going to
63. ______ attract poor immigrants, who flood in, filling
with hopes 64. ______ of prosperity 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-century
65. ______ London or early
nineteenth-century Paris. This is new is
66. ______ the scale. Descriptions written by eighteenth-century
travelers of the poor of Mexico City, and the enormous contrasts that was
to be found there, are very similar to descriptions
67. ______ of Mexico City today-the poor can still be numbered in
millions. The whole monstrous growth rests on economic prosperity, but
behind it lies two myths: the myth of the city as a
68. ______ promised land, that attracts immigrants from rural
poverty 69. ______ and brings it flooding
into city centers, and the myth of the 70.
______ country as a Garden of Eden, which, a few generations late, sends
them flooding out again to the suburbs.
71. ______