It's the biggest invention we've ever had.
If you think the 747 is big, look at a city.
If you think going to the moon is big, look at a city.
It is where all inventions have come from.
It's where people meet people.
It's the most complex series of systems we've yet to devise.
It's where we have chosen to live for culture, for exchange of ideas.
This man -made environment that we're all absolutely immersed and submerged in.
We all live in a yellow submarine.
Yellow submarine.
Yellow submarine.
And our friends are all aboard.
Many more of them live next door.
And the band begins to play.
We all live in a yellow submarine.
What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? What does the word Megopoulos mean to you? It sort of sounds like a word that would get you all mixed up.
I have no idea.
None whatsoever.
Megopoulos? Oh boy.
New York, Chicago, New Jersey.
When cities come together and meet and form into just a tremendously sprawling area of urban mess.
Masses of intertwining cities that have grown so large they're combining and interchanging without even knowing which one is which.
Octopus growth cities are Megalopoulos I think is the exact pronunciation of it though.
Megalopoulos and Megopoulos mean the same thing.
A big city getting bigger.
One city growing into another.
Megopoulos.
Sounds like a bunch of stuff on the, you know, junk on the ground.
Megopoulos.
The urban environment.
Vast human settlements called New York or Chicago but stretching beyond.
The phenomenon of our age.
Incubated by technology.
The city that never stops growing.
The city is our man -made environment.
The world we build and then must live with.
Today, two -thirds of the American people live in cities.
In the next 30 years we will double our man -made environment.
We'll build another New York.
Another Los Angeles.
Another Chicago.
Perhaps, if we are smart enough, we will not double our mistakes.
We must grow in a different way than we've been growing in the past.
Our institutions are so arranged as to support congestion and inordinate profits based on congestion.
We have to change that pattern.
For thousands of years people have lived together in small communities and in relatively small houses where they knew their neighbors, where they had daily intercourse with them, they knew them face to face as we still do in the country, in country communities.
Because of the immense profit to be made by the exploitation of real estate in a great city.
And the bigger the city, the greater the population, the more valuable the real estate.
We've had the building on a large scale, not merely by individual corporate enterprises, by real estate speculators, but by the government itself.
The problem has just evolved this way and the federal government's contribution, of course, was in effect, particularly since World War II, to pay for a great deal of it.
They built the highways, they paid for the sewer systems, federal programs paid for mortgages for homes out in the suburbs, though not very many for homes in the central city until recently.
But this is something that I feel was done without really being conscious of the later impact.
That's in a sense what I mean by mindlessness.
In the past, federal programs have contributed a lot to this mindlessness.
Each man paddling his own canoe has become each man paddling his own automobile.
Our present system of one man, one car, gluts the city with cars and pavement, pollution and congestion.
In Los Angeles, 67 % of downtown land is devoted to cars, and only 33 % to people.
The auto has done us dirty in other ways, too.
It has become built into our way of life.
We have built cities and suburbs where automobiles are almost a necessity, so spread out that life is nearly impossible without one.
The unsystematic sprawl of Megapolis is made possible by the private car.
The automobile itself is probably one of the greatest liberations that we in our personal lives have experienced.
We're now into an era where almost everybody who can afford to has a car.
In families all over the country, there may be three cars even.
It's getting to the point, as we all know, where we're choking ourselves.
We really can't continue this way.
The automobile's primary advantage is freedom of movement, and movement is what a city is all about.
Architect Paulo Soleri defines a city as a plumbing system for the movement of people, ideas and goods.
Our problem is to design a system that satisfies human needs, including the need to move about quickly and pleasantly.
Several of the country's largest transportation companies are developing people movers, cars that operate at the user's command, just as the private automobile does.
Personal rapid transit systems move quietly on rubber tires or cushions of air.
The user enters a station and presses a button that indicates his destination.
A computerized control center dispatches a car that picks him up, bypasses other stations, and takes him directly to his destination.
Once empty, the car is taken to the next station.
The car is dispatched to other destinations.
The same car is used again and again by different people.
The result is more transportation, more movement of people from place to place, with less machinery, a movement system that, unlike most of what we have today, is both public and pleasant.
You here to make a personal injury claim against the Transit Authority? Excuse me, Mr.
Hopkins.
Now, what was your position at the time of the accident, would you say? Prone and squashed.
Prone and squashed, uh -huh.
Did you get the identification number of the badge and the driver? It's not a badge, it's a badge.
It's very difficult without that.
I couldn't see it from where I was.
But I got the serial number on the engine.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, I'll bet you did.
I'll bet that's emblazoned in your memory, isn't it, Mr.
Hopkins? Yeah, it's etched on my forehead.
All right.
Now, I have to make a diagram here.
A little picture.
Yes.
Now, relative to the bus here, where would you...
Well, now, you just draw a little stick figure.
Uh -huh.
Now, break all the sticks.
I'll do the drawing.
Okay, just put it between the wheel and the pavement.
Right between.
Oh, between the wheel and the pavement.
Like a sandwich cookie.
Uh -huh.
The pavement was involved in this accident.
Yeah, it was the bottom part of the cookie.
Uh -huh.
In other words, if the pavement would not have been here or there, then you would not have incurred an injury, is that correct? That's correct.
That had fallen all the way to China.
That's what I thought, Mr.
Hopkins.
I'm sorry, but it wasn't our fault.
It was the pavement's fault.
Uh -huh.
Yes, you'll have to go to Bureau of Streets on that.
Well, how do I get there? Well, it's very easy.
You take the Irving Park bus.
Oh, no! Having been conned into total dependence on the automobile, no one could realize the massive problems that would ensue.
It's not only the automobile, though.
It's land use, land price.
Three things that are determined of the shape of our cities today, beginning with the permissiveness of the rubber tire, and by the way, the invention of the septic tank, which allowed people to escape traditional movement systems.
This caused the Scatteration Sprawl in the, we were looking for the greener pasture where the land was cheaper.
And as we have this suction of dispersal out into the hinterland, this boiling the hinterland, making it farther away from the people who need to use it, recreational and all that, we have a counter element which is upward, outward and upward, and nothing in between.
We don't need any more great metropolises.
In order to make them sufficiently habitable, we have to drain some of the population away so that realty values will go down.
And on the new population pattern, with a far greater, far more even distribution, you'd have better cities all around.
Even the big ones would be much better.
There are no easy answers to the problems of the urban environment.
The pattern of development we have now, the mindless proliferation of megalopolitan areas, does not work.
Our problem is to find something that does work.
If we understood why our problems were sufficient, we'd see great growth of cities under 100 ,000 in population.
And there'd be great variety among them.
There'd be villages with no more than 5 or 10 ,000 people, sometimes new villages.
There'd be other towns with 25 or 50 ,000 people.
Basic to the solution of urban problems is the creation of new towns.
Not dormitory suburbs, but viable, self -contained, and functioning communities.
Traditional suburbs are really parasitic offshoots of a larger city.
The employment centers were still in town.
These were really refuges, escapes from the problems of the larger city.
I think it's a very sterile way to live, and it's counter to what cities have always meant and what they provide, which is a human interchange of the utmost diversity.
The modern automobile -oriented suburb, of course, is...
Architect Harry Weiss has had occasion to do a lot of thinking about what it takes to make a town.
His design for a new town is now being built in Park Forest South, Illinois.
Park Forest South is not going to be an instant Paris or anything of its kind, but it will be a community of...
big enough to encompass many activities, including employment, education.
It also provides for varying lifestyles and income groups.
And this is designed in, and so we are in a different kind of new era of community building, much more responsible than here before, where the only thing that mattered was the buck.
The people are going to move to a new town.
They expect to get something that's a little better, just something like this, a bit of nature.
We've had a wonderful response.
People come here, fathers and sons, they come to the town, sons, kids fishing.
You see today the kids are having a fishing contest.
It's a natural place.
We have only built this open pavilion and a little pier, and everything else is left alone.
And people spend, I suppose, most of their time here just walking around and feeling a peace, I hope.
It seems to me what's happening in this country very clearly, that the people are demanding better, they're demanding a more comprehensive plan, they're demanding better buildings, they're demanding a greater respect for the environment.
And the fact, quite simply, we're making a rather substantial bet that that's what people really want, and that's why we're building a new community, a totally planned new town to deal with those problems.
One of the first concerns in any new town is the movement system, how people get around.
And in that respect, Park Forest South is very sophisticated.
The town is laced with walkways that dip under main roads.
Pedestrians and bicyclists can go great distances without ever crossing a street.
Mass transit systems have been designed into the structure of the town.
How do you structure any kind of community development? Obviously it's the movement system that forms it.
Why did our early cities grow up on rivers or on harbors? Why then did they grow up on railroads? Take this diagram of the structure of Park Forest South.
First the railroad, mainline IC railroad with a new commuter station.
Then the spinal column of the community.
These circulators here, which embrace the linear town center, and which also are the path of a movement system, which is local.
Probably like those trains that you see in World's Fair, which are rubber -tired, and which after the rush hour, where they would pick up back and forth, distributing from the IC station and from the Governor's State University, located here, to the town center.
Off peak hours, this could be a dial -up bus where these vehicles could then go off into the community and pick up people who call.
The important thing being that the whole town is structured on a movement system.
It's impossible to drive right through the center of town.
In this way, the vehicular traffic is not dominating the scene.
It has to stop and take notice of the fact that this is where the town center is.
Every community has to have a center.
Every small town in Europe in the pre -industrial age had a marketplace.
Here it is a triangular space, approximately 150 on the side and 200 on the hypotenuse.
And at the very center, apex, is a television antenna, which will be a 10 -foot diameter tube, which is also sculptured, and on top are the antenna.
That is very symbolic of communication, sort of the thing that ties invisibly the whole community together, in which in former times was the spire of the cathedral.
A genuine new town needs many attributes, a movement system, industry, employment, education, including, if possible, a college, many different kinds of people, and a population that is dense enough to support transit and other systems.
The one thing a new town cannot do without is planning, a structure that provides for the spectrum of human needs, and which will allow the town to grow and develop in a coordinated way.
And now, a WOMP -TV editorial.
For some time now, public apathy toward unchecked urban sprawl has been raging through our community like fire through a dry forest.
We think it's about time that someone put it out.
After all, Mr.
Citizen, enough is enough.
This has been a WOMP -TV editorial.
And now, WOMP -TV presents a reply to a recent editorial.
Oh yeah? What do you know? This has been a reply to a WOMP -TV editorial.
Apathy has destroyed the city more than wanton destruction.
I mean, there has to be a change of attitude to save the city.
You know, Bookie Fuller describes the environment as everything but me.
And yet, we don't have any part of our education, whether in the schools or without the schools, which has to do with this everything but me that I made, or that man made.
We made all these decisions, and yet we have no sense of how we get at those decisions, how they happen, what the trade -offs were.
Technology has given us the tools to build cities like there's no tomorrow.
And because we can, we have, with little thought to the consequences.
We've continued to play the game the way it's always been played, even though technology and time have changed the stakes.
The ground rules under which we must operate and which developers must act, and builders and architects and engineers and all the rest of us involved in this have to play, is rigged.
Rigged in such a fashion that it's very hard for us to do what ought to be done, namely to build socially responsible conditions to the environment that fulfill market need.
It's very hard to find a townhouse.
That type of house isn't being built now because the land underneath it is too expensive.
So that's why the high rises are getting higher and why the suburbs are going out farther.
There is no shortage of land.
Chicago is a very undense city.
It's five times less dense than Paris, 15 ,000 per square mile versus 75 ,000.
There's no question there isn't enough land.
It's just the way we use it, the way we manage it.
I can't say that I'm against profit, but when profit becomes the paramount issue, in affairs that affect our total lives together like the whole city, I think the profit motive has to be looked at very hard.
No wonder that in Stockholm the land was always owned by the Crown and they started selling it privately in the late 30s and now they're getting it all back.
Stockholm is publicly owned.
Amsterdam owned by the Queen.
Large amounts of urban critical land I think need to be taken out of private control in order that we can control the destiny of our cities.
I won't deny that any developer goes into a development expecting to make a profit.
I do.
My partners certainly do.
I don't think the desire to make a profit requires that you do things that are inimical to urban growth, inimical to the land.
And only if we're going to be able to develop land use rules, guidelines, controls that are binding and effective on all kinds of developers, it's going to make any sense whatsoever.
I don't resent being held to pretty strict guidelines, but I think it's necessary that everybody else be held to some semblance of the same kind of guidelines.
I believe very strongly that one of the major issues of this decade is going to be urban growth policy, a term we don't even understand yet.
Urban growth is, in the short run, inevitable.
Expert estimates are that population will continue to increase for at least the next half century.
If we grow as we have, our problems may be only beginning.
The uncontrolled explosive expansion of our cities has ridden roughshod over the land and ignored many basic human needs.
The need for life.
We have a money economy dedicated to expanding power and pecuniary aggrandizement.
We need an economy in which these things are subordinate to the needs of life.
The needs of life are, first of all, to be born and to be born under the best possible conditions, to be well -nurtured, to be looked after by loving parents and well -disposed neighbors, to live in healthy neighborhoods, to have access to all the facilities, natural and cultural, that a human being needs to become human.
The ultimate purpose of such an economy is to humanize man.
Ours has been a private society, dedicated to private enterprise, private profit, private means of transportation, private goods.
The environment, both natural and man -made, is a public good.
Public goods are not our first priority, and neither are what Mumford calls the needs of life.
Consequently, both have taken a back seat.
As far as our cities are concerned, the economy has been set to produce maximum financial return.
The profits are downtown, in big office buildings, and at the city's growing edge where land value skyrockets.
Profits at both ends fuel metropolitan growth.
People frequently get caught in the middle.
Megapolis, stuck in high gear.
And the most frightening thing of all is that nobody is at the wheel.
