Tickets: €10,00 (€7,50 discount rate) for the whole day available online at www.felix.meritis.nl

This debate will be in English.

More people live in cities than ever before, and millions have escaped into urbanity from rural poverty (and what Marx called) idiocy even over the past twenty years. But at the same time there are complaints about the breakneck pace of life, the alienation of the contemporary urban landscape, loss of community and a sense of neighbourliness. Do modern cities bring us together or keep us apart? Make us welcome or lonely? Is citizenship just a word today rather than a reality? Something that politicians urge us to be but devoid of any real content? What does the city make of us, what becomes of us? Should we reject urban villages for real villages? Return to the rural: a slower pace of life? Is it a sense of how to live in cities that we have lost? Or is it just that there have always been those who have been able to survive and those who failed?