ABSTRACT
The spirit of a real city has subtle qualities more difficult to understand—let alone to create at will—than the quantitative aspects of an urban agglomeration. Planners are primarily concerned with the technological efficiency of the urban system with regard to industrial, economic, and political activities. They pay less attention to the psychological and emotional needs of city dwellers or to the relation between city life and civilization. One of the greatest contributions of cities is that they have provided mechanisms for making the presence of the stranger tolerable and for facilitating his integration into the social body. A real city environment depends upon an atmosphere in which the human presence is active rather then passive. The quality of the townscape therefore involves much more than natural and architectural features. People rarely visit the city or settle in it to look at parks or monuments, however beautiful these may be.
