CAPE TOWN: Alas, I had just a day to explore this sublime city with perhaps the world's finest setting. Time enough to be enchanted and inspired. Against the awesome backdrop of Table Mountain, Cape Town spills towards two oceans across the neck of a narrow peninsula. The buildings are a divine mix of old colonial and assertive modern. The streets seethe with a multicultural melting pot. Did you know, for example, that the Cape's Muslims have been here for four hundred years-longer than its black African inhabitants. The old Dutch stock has been here even longer. More recent arrivals are from south and southeast Asia, Madagascar, England and America.

Of course, the social tensions are many and powerful. Apartheid's ugly stain spreads well past its official termination after Nelson Mandela took charge. The crime rate is shocking. Whites blame blacks, blacks blame the system, and the mixed race "coloureds" are caught in between. But strangely enough, none of that takes away from Cape Town's eternal allure. It's in the food, the nightlife, the rejuvenated waterfront and inner city. Whatever the roaring fires of racial division and violence, Capetonians just want to have fun. And that brings me to my point. We need, in Kathmandu, to look closely at how cities succeed against the odds. More than that, we need to form alliances and find out how others progress while we rot on the vine. They face similar problems, usually on a much grander scale. Cities are the greatest achievement of human civilisation, where culture acquires meaning through interaction with others. Yet growth and success come at a price.

That much is obvious from history. The first known city of the modern era, Ur, between the Tigris and Euphrates in ancient Sumeria, collapsed and died under the sheer weight of its population, buried in rubbish, parched and polluted. That was over 2,000 years ago. The plains of history are littered with the corpses of other such failed city-states. Have we learnt so little in that time? If so, we have only our sorry selves to blame.

So back to Kathmandu and Cape Town. We have, as the capital of this Himalayan kingdom, a collection of urban treasures too precious to waste: the architectural wonders of the Newari houses, the temples, the street life, the lush hinterland, the Himalayan rampart. Understand that I refer to all of the Valley's great cities and towns here, not just to the Kathmandu municipal area. That's a boundary drawn by a bureaucrat. Mine is etched on my heart. Why, oh why, do we tolerate decline, dirt, poisonous air and water, constant noise, and the slow death of aesthetic sense in a clutter of garish filth masquerading as commerce. Surely, if Cape Town thrives despite social tensions and harshly divisive economics, if Mexico City can cope with a population more than ten times that of our Valley, then Kathmandu can reverse its decline. And I don't mention Rio De Janeiro's great poverty, Toronto's fiercely anti-social climate, Sydney's remoteness. Then there's New York, once a competitor for murder capital of the world, now barely a presence in the league table of urban violence thanks to controversial but effective urban policing and the creation of community spirit where once there was only cynicism and gloom.

I deliberately include in my thesis examples from poorer countries to stifle the defeatist cries of "we can't afford it" or "we need foreign help" because frankly, people, that's rubbish worse than you find on the streets. Kathmandu, Greater Kathmandu if you like, can do it. It takes some things in short supply in the Valley at the moment: optimism, hard work, spirit, commitment. Forget Lauda Air, hotel strikes and pessimism in general. Let's make Kathmandu into Cape Town without leaving the Valley. The other choice is to rename it Ur and surrender to the incoming tides of history.