Today is election day, an appropriate time to pause and consider the state of the city — where it's been and where it's going.

Four years ago Boston was a city in a funk. Crime and the fear of crime gripped residents and visitors. Boston's school system was in shambles and no one knew what to do about it. Some proposed blowing up the school system, others just harangued about busing. The city's economy was at a standstill and development was almost nonexistent.

Most disturbing, Boston was losing its residential base. In a seeming replay of the decline of other once-great American cities, those who could afford to leave were leaving. They were fed up with bad schools, unsafe streets, and an indifferent government.

This is a song I've sung on these pages before, but it's worth hearing one more time: a city's vitality is inextricably linked to its residential base. It's not tourists that make a city a success. It's not big skyscrapers that make a city a success. It's residents.

If residents leave, then a city collapses, and ultimately business will leave and tourists will stop coming. Conversely, if a city's residential base is strong and growing, then business will stay and expand and tourists will continue to visit.

It was through this lens that many viewed the 1993 mayoral and city council elections. Boston was in trouble, went the thinking, and it didn't have much time to fix things.

1993 saw a complete turnover in the city's government. Boston elected a new Mayor, of course, but it also elected seven new members of the 13-member City Council. Tom Menino, aptly dubbed the "urban mechanic" by Globe columnist David Nyhan, was not the only pragmatist who won that year. So too were the new councilors, each of which had stressed a vision of government focused on basic quality of life issues. Instead of battling over big ideological issues, the new Council and Mayor longed to fight graffiti, potholes, trash and crime.

And the verdict? The funk is gone. Boston looks better than it ever has. Crime is down so dramatically that the city has become a model for the nation. The economy is exploding and the benefits of that expansion are being felt not just downtown but in neighborhoods, where the government has made the renaissance of local business districts a priority. A new consensus about schools has emerged that acknowledges the importance of educational quality and is willing to commit resources to achieve it. People have stopped moving out and are now moving back into the city.

These are meaningful successes. Yes, a booming national economy helps — a lot. And demographic changes are part of the reason crime is declining. But those factors explain only part of Boston's success. The city is better off because it has, at long last, a government and a citizenry willing to pay attention to the nitty-gritty of making life better for Boston's residents.

So four years later, Boston is in good shape. Not great shape. Good. So how do we make Boston great?

A few thoughts. The single most important thing holding Boston back is its schools. Over the last four years the school system has shown the path to reform through its experimentation with pilot and charter schools. The solution to creating a great school system is ultimately to make all of Boston's schools in effect pilot schools.

City Hall itself needs dramatic reform in the way it conceives of and delivers basic city services. Boston is nearly 400 years old; regrettably, so is its bureaucracy. Basic services are still delivered by independent bureaucracies in ways that are inefficient and reactive rather than proactive.

Finally, during this time of economic prosperity, the city has a genuine opportunity to remake itself physically, to engage in planning and development efforts that will define Boston well into the 21st century. It's not doing that now; indeed, critical development efforts such as Mass Pike air rights development, are proceeding forwarding without any sense of how they will relate to the city as a whole. And related to that is the increasingly difficult task of balancing the needs of residents — including the need to make affordable housing available — against the upward surge in real estate prices and the pressure by institutions and businesses to expand.

Tough issues. The Mayor and most city councilors will win today with overwhelming support. What is the value of such political power if one is not willing to use it to take chances,x cause controversy, and make the good into the great?