Man’s Relationship to His Environment 
the central areas contrasts with the urban periphery where the 
growth of suburbia represents an attempt to escape from both 
the problems and the idea of the city The enormous confluence 
of human life and interest in the metropolitan city has resulted 
in self-destructive building densities, and haphazard overlap- 
ping and mutual hampering of areas of habitation, industry, 
business, storage, recreation and education. The private car 
has expelled civic life from its natural centres and from many 
residential and recreational areas. Unsolved traffic problems 
are only a physical expression of the confusion ruling all human 
communication and interaction in the metropolis and even in 
smaller towns. 
As the urban environment becomes a dangerous nuisance, 
the same civilization provides the individual with protection 
from direct social and environmental contact by means of 
telecommunication, drugs, and the provision of an illusory 
environment through illustrated papers, the cinema and 
television. Technology is thus used to prevent, sterilize or 
substitute direct contact. Technological inventiveness in itself 
is not the disturbing factor in metropolitan life, but its use, 
first for raising environmental fears, then for creating protective 
measures which wreck vital relationships of man to environment. 
Finally the escape of the metropolitan population to the natural 
or historic environment is being progressively cut off by the 
commercialization of recreation or by the recreational mass- 
movement itself, defeating its own purpose. Only the richest 
classes—and outsiders—can afford to get away far enough from 
the great concentrations of population, and then only so long 
as their number is small. 
Huge quantities of human work, materials and energy from 
all over the world are invested to maintain life in the highly 
developed urban centres of the world. This environmental 
over-development must be put in the context of the under- 
development of urban agglomerations in Asia, Africa and South 
America; there the economic surplus and technological stop-gap 
measures are not available, and therefore an even graver crisis 
of environment incompatibilities has developed. The number 
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