=1 "The evolving city"

The evolving city

The towns of the past were all separative – animal enclosures, castles, kraals, fortresses – against thieves from the neighboring tribes. In a planetary civilization this protective role is obsolete. What then remains as the purpose of a town?

To be a marketplace? But the market town belonged to a neolithic society of farmers and was destroyed by the invention of the automobile.

A cultural centre? In an electronic age of telephones, teleprinters, television and computers, will there be any need for cultural centres?

From the beginning towns were built for a simple reason: man contemplating and admiring his own achievements: and the best place he could do it was in a town.

But we will have a civilization less and less static, less and less separative. This period will be an age of intense urbanization – not the building of giant cities, but the growth of hundreds of thousands of relatively small functional townships which permit the new life of leisure to be lived in a complete way, intensely planetary and cultural until earth becomes a single garden city.

In the space age the city =1 will be an explosive centre of earth life,
the mother of a galactic civilization,
an electronic brain for the whole universe,
an unending renaissance of planetary cultures,
a meeting place in an ocean of island stars.