Do cities even have futures? Of course they do: it's just that the future isn't what it used to be.

And what exactly did our metropolitan future used to be? One thinks of the great science fictional cities of the past. Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel, vast urban constructs, the natural world excluded, populated by humans and robots increasingly hard to tell apart.

Or Robert Silverburg's urban monads from his Wold Inside series: huge arcologies climbing hundreds of stories toward the sky, self-contained worlds in themselves.

H. G. Wells, who knew more about the future than most of us, made his urban future tacit in his only original film: The Shape of Things to Come. Watch the final segment of the film as the camera pursues a long prowling pan through a fabulous science fiction city, the more fabulous for the fact that in the movie's context it has been built upon the ashes of global conflagration.

Now visit a real city.

How different the reality is: smelly, dirty, dangerous, crumbling, abandoned by business, fled by families who can afford to flee.

Who would live in such a place?

Youth, that's who.

The artistic and ambitious young have always been attracted to cities, undeterred by danger- perhaps, indeed, drawn by it. There is a pulse and a power to all but the most defeated of urban areas, a sense of risk and excitement, adventure and opportunity.

And it draws the young like magnets.

Visit any of the world's great cities: Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, Rio, San Francisco, Paris Cairo, Moscow, Hong Kong, or New York, the Apple, the one true capital of the planet- and take a walk. Don't restrict yourself to the tourist paths.

Keep your eyes open. Look at the many boutiques and shops (not just the chain outlets) catering to the young, often owned by the young themselves. Stroll through a gallery and marvel and the freshness and impudence of the new generation of artists.

Keep your ears open. Listen to the music coming from small clubs and basement apartments, kids wrestling with craft as well as art. Drop into a bookstore and eavesdrop on a pretentious but sincere conversation or two. Grab one of the many free newspapers that seem to bloom throughout every major city in the world, read it with your ears as well as your eyes. Listen to what they're saying: find out what's important to the kids, why they've come to the city, what they hope to accomplish.

Keep your heart open. Walk through a park late on a spring afternoon. Bask in the radiance given off by young lovers, in the city seeking the realization of shared dreams.

Cities call out to youth. That's been true since cities first existed, and will remain true as long as cities exist. If you want to find the next generation of anything, go to a city.

But What about the other side? The dark side of our cities? The danger? The dirt? The deprivation The despair?

In other words, the challenges we face, we who love the cities and live in them, and also those who've fled them but still must deal with the consequences that flow from urban areas.

Again, look to the youth. It is worse than a cliche to state that the young are our greatest resource, but the thing about cliches is that they generally contain a core of truth. Well, for our future cities, we need to consider those artistic and ambitious youths to be an urban core- or corps!- of truth. We need to enlist their energies in combat against the dirt and despair, in opposition to the deprivation and the danger.

Youth knows no better, you know? Youth doesn't know that these problems are insoluble, are only going to get worse. Youth- the best of youth- believes that problems are meant to be solved, and understands that solutions must be sought, not legislated. They have energy, they have enthusiasm, they have ideas- in short they possess everything that's needed to approach the dilemmas of urban life and, maybe, make a difference.

Cities also entrap youth. There are young people in our cities who aren't artistically enfranchised, who aren't ambitious in any acceptable sense. Who have not come to the city, but are trapped there. Not even or not really youth: the word does no apply because they have been afforded no opportunity to be youthful. Who've been beaten from birth and who in what is all too often a single blinding instant of violence find themselves without option other than to beat back. Their souls- their potential and promise, their chance of creating art, participating in commerce, and discovering their gifts- are lost without ever having had the chance to grow.

Too often- indeed, almost constantly- it's that blinding flash of violence that becomes, via the media, the image of our cities. Yet cities have always been violent; the violence is part of the package that comes with assembling a large population in a central area.

That violent image, though, is why, as youth moves into late youth and into early middle age, as artistic ambition becomes career, young love burgeons into family, as in other words life goes on, too much of that vibrant life leaves the cities. Leaves just as artistic peaks and primes are being attained. Leaves for the suburbs witch offer the succor of comfortabillity, but lack the pulse, the drive, the excitement of the city. They depart the domain of dreams.

And therein lies, at this moment in history, the urban rub. The people most able to do something about urban problems are those most likely- and most able- to leave urban areas.

What's needed- and I believe that we are beginning to hints of this becoming an actuality- is gathering collaboration between and among the energies and enthusiasms of the most capable of our urban young, and the potentials and problems of the disenfranchised. We must pursue a matchmaking of the capable with those who do not yet know that they, too, are capable- and capable of creating wonders.

Unrealistic? No doubt- but what could be more unrealistic in the first place than the creation of cities? Who could possibly expect conglomerations of millions, or tens of millions of that most contentious of creatures, the human being, to work at all, much less work well.

Yet they do work, and they can work well. Cities both call to youth and entrap youth. The challenge that we face is one of ensuring that those who most clearly hear the cities' call are not lost just as they become best able to approach the cities' problems, to free those who are trapped there. Then, and only then, will we get a glimpse- there, on the horizon, to be strived for, if never fully obtained- of our reams, the real cities of tomorrow.