Read the following passage and answer the question. As a place where any significant fraction of a country's population is expected to live, as a normal habitat for human life, the giant city, the…

Read the following passage and answer the question.

As a place where any significant fraction of a country's population is expected to live, as a normal habitat for human life, the giant city, the urban concentration larger than a half million, let us say, is a very late arrival in human history. Before the mid-nineteenth century an overwhelming number of people in every country, including countries thought to be "modern", lived in towns and villages. The chances are really quite overwhelming that not one of your great grandfathers was born in a large city. Even today, in practically every country, big city-dwellers constitute a minority.

Because the very recent phenomenon of the giant city has made it a symbol of modernisation and modernity, particularly for developing countries, visions of a society with few, if any, giant cities are typically brushed off as nostalgic evocations of an irrecoverable past. Yet the "modernity" of the giant city derives from the age of industrialisation, not from the more recent age of late or post-industrialisation. In post-industrial society, the giant city becomes an obsolescent, unnecessary and crippling habitat that persists less because of need than from inertia, a failure of imagination and audacity.

So much is the giant city an elephantine perversion of the city that we have no suitable name for it. As if to mock us, the Latin roots of the word "city" remind us of what is most lacking in the giant city: citizenship; while the origins of the term "metropolis" convey a meaning precisely opposed to present usage. Literally metropolis means mother city (from the Greek "metre", a mother, and "polis", a city). Unlike us, the ancient Greeks assumed that no decent city should be permitted to grow indefinitely. A large city would outstrip its own resources, become unwieldy and ill-proportioned, inconvenient, an unfit place for living, a habitat that must inevitably reduce citizens, who might hope to know their city and one another well, into anonymous inhabitants each dominated by his own private concerns and lacking common goals or interests - no true city, then no "polis", but a mere heaping up of people and buildings. To avoid this catastrophe was both desirable and possible. The "polis" invited its citizens, not least its youth, to join in establishing a new "polis". So the original city gave birth to the new, and the original thus became the mother city, a metropolis. Thus cities of human proportion could be built and preserved.

In this passage, the author has been