Developers seem ever more keen to label a place a „tech city“, a „media city“ or a „smart city“ to connote this notion of exchange and innovation. But true cities are dense, messy, uncontrolled and cosmopolitan – the opposite of garden cities or self-styled „office hubs“. The architect Sir Terry Farrell’s recent recommendation to government, that each town or city should have an “urban room” to debate its own future, is a reflection of a decline in these genuine common grounds and the rise of privatised “public” space.

Ultimately, perhaps the true definition of a city can be found in the phenomenon of “urbicide” – the deliberate destruction of cities. In war and in peace, this happens where the cosmopolitan is treated with suspicion and where strangers, differences and otherness cannot be tolerated. True cities should never have such smalltown mentalities. Their inhabitants are worldly citizens, not parochial townsfolk.