Untitled Excerpt on City and Civilization

Each civilization is born, it culminates, and it decays. There is a widespread testimony that this fact is due to inherent biological defect in the crowded life of cities. Now, slowly and at first faintly, an opposite tendency is showing itself. Better roads and better vehicles at first induced the weathier classes to live on the outskirts of cities. Up to the present time, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this new tendency placed the home in the immediate suburbs, but concentrated manufacturing activity, business relations, government, and pleasure in the centres of the cities. The homes were pushed outwards even at the cost of the discomfort of commuting. But, if we examine the trend of technology during the past generation, the reason for this concentration are largely disappearing. Still more, the reasons for the choice of sites for cities are also altering. Mechanical power can be transmitted for hundreds of miles, men can communicate almost instantaneously by telephone, the chiefs of great organizations can be transported by airplanes, the cinemas can produce plays in every village, music and speeches can be broadcast. Almost every reason for the growth of cities, concurrently with the growth of civilization has been profoundly modified.


Evidently, this piece of statement on city and civilization has long been outdated and supposedly it was a product of the early or mid 20th century.
15.4.06 08:41
 


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