Community and Communication

Abstract

If we ask, in Socratic fashion, ‘What is a city ?’, it is tempting to answer, in the fashion of Le Corbusier, ‘A city is a machine for communicating in’. But ‘machine’ would be wrong. A city is not a machine. It is not normally designed; it grows. Often you cannot stop it growing. When things go wrong with cities, they are less like the breakdowns which affect machines than like the diseases which afflict animals and plants. The town planner is not like an engineer (he cannot repair a city like a motor-car); he is like a doctor looking after a living organism, which he keeps healthy if he can, or, if he cannot, tries to restore it to health — by surgery if he must. But even surgery is not like repairing a car; the organism has to grow well again after you have interfered with it. The car comes back from the garage as good as it was before the trouble started; when the man comes back from hospital it may be months before he is really well again.