ARTUR GLIKSON 
cross-roads are the main points of regional and inter-regional 
meetings (Fig. 3). 
Ancient trends towards a more complex settlement structure 
and trends towards a greater mobility imparting a greater 
degree of independence of the land are integrated in the town. 
The town develops into an organ of country-wide and world- 
wide material and cultural contacts. A new dimension is added 
to man’s environment. With communications on a world» 
scale, many towns may acquire wider super-regional economic, 
social and cultural functions. Potentially there are no limits 
to urban growth. A professionally and culturally diversified 
town Is essential to provide a sound basis for regional coexistence. 
This fact finds expression in the greatly diversified physical 
structure of towns, differing in principle from the village 
structure, which consists of groups of equal cells, the farmsteads. 
Space in the rural-urban regional environment is converted 
partly into an interior and partly into exterior space. Arrival 
and departure become important objects of environmental 
experience and creation. In order to communicate visually and 
audibly with the region, urban centres rise in height and towns 
become three-dimensional regional objects. 
The artificial social structure of the region becomes somewhat 
analogous to the principles of biotic structure, for in both 
cases the stability of the structure is safeguarded in the com- 
plexity of its composition by characteristic kinds and numbers of 
population. Equally noteworthy is the fact that in many cases 
the combination of sedentariness with non-agricultural settle- 
ment, both man-made situations, results in a new adaptation 
of the human environment to a natural regional framework, 
namely the watershed-basins. But at the same time, life in the 
new environmental structure becomes a matter of precarious 
balance. Only a _ step divides urban-rural mutuality 
from exploitation, surplus productivity from soil-exhaustion, 
inter-regional contacts from wars, the function of the town 
as a co-ordinating and distributing organ from that of a 
parasite. 
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