The City of To-morrow and its Planning

To be youthful and full of health is to have the power to produce much, but years of experience are needed to produce well.

THIS CRISIS IS ONLY AT ITS BEGINNING

Everywhere the houses are surrounded by trees ; a charming partnership between man and nature.

Horizontals, magnificent prisms, pyramids, spheres and cylinders. The eye sees them as pure forms and the mind takes them in with delight and follows the precision of their lines. Here we have serenity and joy.

To put it shortly : if the builder’s yard is to be industrialized, it must pass from an anachronistic construction of single dwellings “to the requirements of clients,” to the construction of whole streets, indeed of whole districts. We must, therefore, analyze closely the “cell,” that is to say, the house ; we must fix its scale, and proceed to its construction in a uniform series, i.e. by mass-production. The repetitive and tranquil framework created thus from innumerable cells would lead up

The cells (dwellings) will be poised in buildings twenty, forty and sixty storeys high.3 But man, whose average height is 5 ft. 8 in., an arrangement that cannot be altered, will have some difficulty in adapting himself to the vast constructions of his city. Therefore we must furnish the painful void of this too great disparity by introducing, between mankind and his city, some proportional mean which will relate both measures and reduce them to a common scale.

The winding road is the result of happy-go-lucky heedlessness, of looseness, lack of concentration and animality.

The straight road is a reaction, an action, a positive deed, the result of self-mastery. It is sane and noble.

A city is a centre of intense life and effort.

A heedless people, or society, or town, in which effort is relaxed and is not concentrated, quickly becomes dissipated, overcome and absorbed by a nation or a society that goes to work in a positive way and controls itself.

It is in this way that cities sink to nothing and that ruling classes are overthrown.

*

The movement arose in Germany as a result of a book by Camille Sitte on town-planning, a most wilful piece of work ; a glorification of the curved line and a specious demonstration of its unrivalled beauties. Proof of this was advanced by the example of all the beautiful towns of the Middle Ages ; the author confounded the picturesque with the conditions vital to the existence of a city. Quite recently whole quarters have been constructed in Germany based on this æsthetic. (For it was purely a question of æsthetics.)

The places where the Pack-Donkey’s Way entered the town became the City Gates and the Customs officers were installed there. The village has become a great capital; Paris, Rome, and Stamboul are based upon the Pack-Donkey’s Way.

The great capitals have no arteries ; they have only capillaries : further growth, therefore, implies sickness or death. In order to survive, their existence has for a long time been in the hands of surgeons who operate constantly.

It is natural that, in seeking happiness, we should strive towards a sense of equilibrium.