ABSTRACT
This book, addresses a set of problems that are pre-empting more and more of the attention of our society and confounding its collective wisdom—the birth of a metropolitan civilization. The scope of its impact on today's citizen and the institutions which order his world, the visions of a future so vastly different from our past, and the speed with which it is taking place attest to the fact that this is revolution, and all revolutions are painful. That conventional prescriptions have not eased this transition is the core of what has become known as "the urban problem." High on the agenda of national policy is the question which, bidden but unexpected like Banquo's ghost, attends this affair—can cities be planned so that this metropolitan future will be a progression toward higher levels of material, aesthetic, social, and even spiritual satisfaction for the urban citizen?
