Jane Jacobs, the urban thinker who died last month at age 89, might say Boston has it about half right.

That kind of change, which has come to many Boston neighborhoods, seems to make us less the urban brew that Jacobs celebrated than the kind of place writer Joel Kotkin calls the ''ephemeral city." Such outposts are no longer anchored by middle-class families with children and a broad job base, but by ''a wealthy elite, part-time sojourners, hordes of tourists, and those that serve them," Kotkin wrote last year in the San Francisco Chronicle...

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