The Form of the City

Abstract

The principal concern of the physical planner is to understand the physical environment and to help shape it to serve the community’s purposes. Outsiders from other disciplines would ordinarily assume that such a profession had developed some ideas concerning the diverse effects of different forms of the physical environment (not to mention the reverse effects of nonphysical forces on the environment itself). And they might be equally justified in expecting that intellectual leaders in the profession had been assiduously gathering evidence to check and reformulate these ideas so that they might better serve the practitioners in the field. A systematic consideration of the interrelations between urban forms and human objectives would seem to lie at the theoretical heart of city-planning work.