to them, strangers who are ineradicably different, and difficult to understand. America's racially segregated ghettoes offered no such opportunity to learn this, nor do isolated ghettoes today, anywhere in the world. I've sought to elaborate this insight more largely. All adults in cities need to develop certain skills of living with strangers. My own career has sought to define just what are these 'stranger skills' and how cities can be designed to promote this human competence -- my pre-occupation from the book The Uses of Disorder, which I wrote just after attending the conference, to the book on cooperation, Together, which is just about to be published. You'll sense from this biographical note why my work diverges from what economists now call 'happiness studies.' Learning to interact well with strangers requires a toleration of ambiguity, the capacity to contain frustration, an ability to listen carefully to people whose speech, needs, or desires may seem alien; none of these skills falls within the domain of pleasure, if that's what happiness is; indeed, the entry into adulthood occurs exactly when people become capable of feeling connected to, and even solidarity with, other people who give them no pleasure. For these reasons, instead of happiness we should stress the concept of 'social competence' as the measure of an adult's quality of life. Because cities are complex social as well as economic and geographic organisms, they are in principle a fertile soil for developing social competence. But we know in fact that they are