ARTUR GLIKSON 
To connect specialized areas of land use and production with 
marketing and transportation centres and with the compara- 
tively small number of great urban population concentrations, 
the net of country- and world-wide communications has spread 
enormously. But the contacts thus established with communities 
and landscape have led to crude colonial and commercial 
exploitation of population and land. Economic inequalities 
between industrialized and colonial or developing regions have 
increased and must increase further, as long as these world-wide 
relations are controlled merely by the free play of market forces. 
Technology and international communications have spread 
only the meanest cultural achievements uniformly over the 
whole world. Equally, the increase of mobility has not led to 
increased contact with and access to landscape and towns. So 
far, the space crossed by transportation is not considered and 
treated as a new field of human experience, but as a vacuum 
or an obstacle to be bridged by streamlined channels of 
mechanized movement, planned with the single aim of con- 
necting several focal points of interest. 
Some metropolitan centres have become, to an unprecedented 
degree, the meeting grounds of populations, products, cultures, 
knowledge and materials from all over the world. In principle 
this meeting of opposites might breed a new cultural integration 
and an enrichment of life. In the contemporary metropolis it 
leads to fighting among groups and individuals to the extinction 
of less resistant elements. It does not necessarily appear as 
physical murder; but increasing uniformity and mechanization 
bring about the same result in respect to the quality of life, 
the annihilation of social and environmental complexity. 
Uniform housing and town extensions designed for the fictitious 
“average” family and citizen turn urban conglomerations into 
“anti-town”’. They contradict the raison d’étre of urban life, 
the co-existence and co-relation of diversified elements. 
Fortunately, however, metropolitan mechanization is far 
from achieving its end, and we have the more hopeful condition 
of metropolitan chaos. The almost complete confusion and 
interference of all kinds of movement with all kinds of rest in 
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