ABSTRACT
The leitmotif of this part is the conquest of space, a conquest in its early phase coinciding with the search for food. Both form a single entity. But the methods of achieving the former end are various. They range from an apparently unsystematic procedure to systematic planning, from a gradual and plant-like growth to a rational application of science and technology. But whatever their characteristic features are in detail, they are all influenced by man's habit of striving for changes in the existing order if and when the inter-dependent social and economic forces are out of gear. This leads either to readaptations on a smaller scale and within a limited space or to large and revolutionary changes embracing a whole country. We are apt to believe that planning is something new and that in the past reshaping of environment always took place in a haphazard and piecemeal fashion. Although this may have been so in many cases, the need for an orderly procedure was never entirely absent from man's mind. It would be wrong to assume that even in early periods man always followed the line of least resistance or that he was not anxious even under primitive conditions, just as he is to-day, to adapt his works to Nature in a systematic way. Many Negro settlements in Central Africa are laid out so methodically that they are in no way inferior to planned villages in Europe.
