What our libraries teach us about a good city

There are not many places left where you can sit for hours without buying anything. The library is one of them, and the queue at the door of the central library at eight o'clock on a weekday evening tells us how much that matters.

A good city is not only roads and towers. It is the warm, quiet room where a student finishes an essay, a pensioner reads the newspaper and a child discovers that books can be an adventure.