Images of community

The cities of Britain and of other advanced industrial societies grew up without the intervention of town planners. The consequence was congestion and inefficiency, and in the long run planning proved necessary to enable them to function as economic and social units at all. Now, however, planning has entered a new phase. We are not merely asking what can be done to eliminate the obvious frustrations and contradictions which arise out of existing patterns of land use. What we find ourselves doing is deciding what kinds of community life should or should not be promoted and encouraged during the next hundred years. For better or for ill, many decisions of this kind have been taken since 1945 and, no doubt, many more will be taken in the future without any real sociological understanding of the nature of community. What I want to discuss is the possibility of making some kind of evaluative assessment of what we are doing in sociological and community terms. ¹