Other cities, such as Charleston, South Carolina, also have thrived using this approach. Led for over three decades by Mayor Joseph Riley, Charleston is best known for its well-preserved downtown, but it has also made major investments in education and critical infrastructure, such as its rapidly expanding port, which has doubled its activity in the past decade. As a result, Charleston, once a prototype of Deep South somnolescence, has enjoyed not only remarkable job growth, but also a rapid diversification of its economy. Over the past decade, professional and business-service employment in the area jumped 80 percent, twice the growth of the hospitality industry. Key blue-collar industries, such as trade, construction, and even manufacturing, which rose 9.1 percent between 1994 and 2004, also enjoyed steady growth. At the same time, Charleston has made a successful shift toward an information-oriented economy: Its ranks of college-educated people, once well below the national average, now surpass that of the country as a whole. The changes are particularly striking at the high end; since 1980, the number of Charleston-area residents with advanced degrees has expanded almost 160 percent, eight times the rate for the rest of the country. It may not be on the level of New York or San Francisco, but its rate of progress is far more rapid.

Yet perhaps the best case for back to basics may not be in the Sunbelt, but rather in the hard-hit industrial Midwest. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, places like Kalamazoo, Michigan, an industrial city in the southwestern part of the state, was told by Granholm that its future lay in attracting "the creative class." A new image, "Cool Kalamazoo," was going to remake the region of 350,000 people. It didn’t turn out that way. As Michigan’s economy has declined, the notion that being "cool" was the key to survival became something of a bad joke. Recent surveys, for example, find that one in three Michiganders considers theirs a "dying state," and four in ten are thinking of fleeing, including the young. "It’s still Depression-era around here," Ron Kitchens, head of Southwest Michigan Now, a local economic development group, told me. But one thing may be said for the hard times in places like Kalamazoo: It has spurred young leaders like Kitchens to focus on a different strategy. They are raising capital for new startups in information, life sciences, services, and other growth industries, many of them operating out of an abandoned General Motors plant. They are looking at improving the transportation infrastructure–particularly the regional airport–to better connect the city with the rest of world. Perhaps most important of all, they are investing in the skills of their people. Local foundations are financing what is now called "the Kalamazoo promise," which essentially guarantees 65 percent of college tuition costs for those who attend the city’s schools.

"Hungry people’s first priority is not to eat cake," Kitchens said. "You can have an art center but it does not sustain your city. Making a successful city is not magic. It’s blocking and tackling. Government can be a catalyst in doing that, and that’s what we’re doing. You’ve got to give the ordinary people a sense of hope. That’s what successful places always do."

Ultimately, the critical question for cities boils down to what essential purpose they should serve. Are cities to become, as H.G. Wells predicted over a century ago, merely entertainment districts–what he called "places of concourse and rendezvous"? Or have cities been rendered irrelevant as economic units by technology, as George Gilder has argued? After all, a broadband hook-up in Bismarck, North Dakota is just as connected to the world economy as one in Brooklyn. Or it could well be that cities, under current trends, will devolve into socially bifurcated regions increasingly irrelevant to America’s mainstream political culture, islands of ultra-affluence and poverty, many of whose residents are either temporary or part-time.

As a lifelong urban dweller, I don’t believe that our cities’ best days must lie behind them, particularly if we are to include more sprawling, multi-polar cities like Phoenix or Houston. Cities still possess many critical assets like historic neighborhoods, freight and rail connections, major hospitals, universities, and research institutions, which make them invaluable assets to the surrounding regions and the nation as a whole. There are also intangible assets that make the fate of cities critical to the future of the republic. For one thing, they are repositories of much of our historical memory; no matter how much the suburbs and exurbs evolve, they are unlikely to provide the sense of place and cultural focus that resides in the urban core. This is most true in older cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, but also, to a much more limited extent, in more vital places like Houston, Dallas, and Charlotte.

And as today’s aspirational cities show, America’s urban centers can still be, with the right leadership and smart policies, the engines of upward mobility that have powered this country for the past century. But to do so, they must pursue such basic strategies as encouraging entrepreneurial growth, reducing regulatory and tax barriers to business, creating efficient transportation systems, improving education, and prioritizing public safety and public open space. It would be far better to spend the hundreds of millions now wasted by many cities on convention centers, boutique hotels, performing arts centers, and subsidized condo development on these more essential services, the true sinews of an expanding urban economy.

To be sure, fancy bookstores, organic markets, sushi bars, and art galleries are important parts of urban life, but they only represent a critical factor for a small slice of the population. And they will come along naturally, as arts and amenities tend to, with economic growth and wealth creation; focusing on amenities first gets the urban equation completely backward.

Great cities are about many things, but none more than being a place for a broad spectrum of people to improve their lives and that of their families. Great cities are about real diversity of ages, family types, and incomes, not just agglomerations of the affluent. What we want for our cities is what we should want for our country as a whole: to be a place of great opportunity, hope, and a better life, particularly for those who still consider this part of their American dream.