To summarise the thesis of this book:

The results of modern cities:
Affluence leads to routine, safety, and boredom. People become isolated from one another, bound together in small family units, because they have no need to converse or rely on their neighbours for survival like the old days. Homogenous neighbourhoods lead to insular group think, insufficient opportunities to develop as an adult, with everyone remaining juvenile in their personal development. The government takes care of their problems in a top down approach, without the actual residents needing to be involved in deciding or influencing community issues. This leads to a social and cultural isolation.

The Proposed Corrective:
To artificially create a mixture of all kinds of people, domestic, retail, and industrial buildings in each and every neighbourhood. To create dense, unregulated urban areas filled with many types of people, cheap enough for students and migrants, with the rich and professional classes there too. With all forms of businesses from the brothel to the office, the pool hall to the bakery and industrial plant together. This would mean that people would be in direct contact with a greater variety of others, and would have to speak to one another, and resolve conflicts themselves so that everyone survived together and was happy. It would create a morality of necessity.

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What I thought
It’s idealistic, with many valid points of criticism for modern cities. But the proposed correctives are not practical, would be difficult to enforce, and people would perhaps move out of these cities. There are not sufficient financial or social incentives for either governments or private ventures to enforce or promote the creation of the proposed types of environment. The question that is asked, but not answered, is how people could be made to live in such conditions, when over again they have been shown in practice to self segregate toward similar others where they feel more comfortable. Quite a thought provoking book which really highlights an interesting problem in modern life, but doesn’t really convince in its proposed solution. ( )

shelved in HT Green Library - by Reception - Monograph Library (R)