Generalities about towns

Abstract

It was certainly not my intention in writing this book to produce a treatise on urbanism. Nevertheless, it will be necessary to look somewhat closer into the genesis and the structure of urban areas. Some reading about urbanism would be extremely useful (for a few titles, see Pelican Books (1967) and Hall (1968)), although a few general ideas will be discussed here. This is motivated by the fact that towns are very complex organisations; to explain the methods for calculating air pollution concentrations (or by the same argument public transport economics, for example) without mentioning the basic phenomena (the town and the urban area to which it applies) would indeed be contrary to reason and difficult to understand. It would be like explaining the interpretation of an electrocardiogram without previous knowledge of human anatomy in general or that of the heart in particular.