ABSTRACT
To a sociologist, the preceding four papers have three important general implications. The first deals with economic realism. If you review the writings on "urban economics" over the last five years, published in the context of urban planning and primarily written by architects and urban design folk, you find one common message: cities are for people, not for machines. This approach poses a false dichotomy. It implies that we must make the city a place in which people can live in maximum comfort, and the machines must take a back seat whenever they get in the way. The four papers presented here reaffirm the old and very important idea that the metropolis is a mechanism for getting a livelihood, that as an economic mechanism it operates by established principles, and that men and machines must coexist in an environment that meets the needs of both.
