This essay was originally printed in the 1955 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, 10:1, 31–33.

The city is a very ancient kind of human environment. It has a history of five or six thousand years, perhaps longer, and in almost all that time the city has been the center of civilization. But, nevertheless, it is only very recently that the city has, in a new way, become the dominant type of human environment. It has become, in some of the more advanced countries, the typical environment, the one in which it is most common that people live and work. It is only very recently that it has become not only a center of consumption, a center of control, but also a center of production—the major part of production.