Inhumanities of Urban Planning

Abstract

As pressure of numbers causes the rate of urbanization to increase, human populations face two pervasive threats. The first is the deterioration of the relationship between man and his physical habitat. Possibly to double to six billion by A.D. 2000, man will press hard on his natural resources. He is already interfering with life-essential metabolisms to a dangerous extent, perhaps irreversibly. The smog of Los Angeles, the growing water shortage in the northeastern United States, and the mounting pollution problems of the Great Lakes are some of the more obvious, evidence that the auspices for further urbanization in ever vaster agglomerations, notwithstanding our technological ingenuity, are not benign. The second threat is the ambiguity of our psychic habitat-that environment of ideas, values, enjoyments, aspirations, and satisfactions in which we live out our lives. This ambience, related in ways we little understand to the natural and man-made objects of our world, may be congenial to high civilization Of, dominated by degraded values, it may be inimical to life-enhancing satisfactions.