From City Journal: Can the Polis Live Again?

There is a close relation between the care with which a particular public space has been organized and the degree to which a feeling of community exists there. The activity of the market square is various, but its artistry makes for coherent and theatrically dramatic public space: it entices people, and so helps to gather in the civic flock. Visitors experience well-wrought civic design, Goethe says, as a work of art. Venice itself was for him the “latest and best painting of the Venetian school.”