Page 8 RAIN January 1977 This is the conclusion of an article started in the December issue. Let us follow through a few of the structural effects of modern technology. Its effect on the nature of work has already been referred to. It is, I believe, the greatest destructive force in modern society. What could be rhore destructive than the destruction of people's understanding? Matters·have not improved since Adam Smith's time; on the contrary, the relentless elimination of creative work for the great majority of the population has proceeded apace_. Urban life What has been the effect of modern technology upon the pattern of human settlement? This is a very interesting subject which has received hardly any attention. Professor Kingsley Davis, world-famous authority on urbanisation, says: "The world as a whole is not fully urbanised, but it soon will be." He, like the .UN and the World Bank, produces indices of urbanisation, showing the percentage of the population of different countries living in urban areas (above a certain size). , The interesting point is ,that these indices entirely miss the interesting point. Not the degree but the pattern of urbanisation is the crux of the matter. Human·life, to be fully human, needs the city; but it also needs food and other raw materials gained·from the country. Everybody needs ready access to both countryside and city. It follows that the aim must be a pattern of urbanisation so that every rural area has a nearby city, near enough so that people can visit it and be back the same day. No other pattern makes human sense. Actual developments during the last 100 years or so, however, have been in the exactly opposite direction: the rural areas have been increasingly deprived of access to worthwhile cities. There has been a monstrous and highly pathological polarisation of the pattern of settlements. The French planners fight against France becoming 'Paris surrounded by a desert;' in the United States they have coined the term 'megalopolis' to describe the vast conurbations which have arisen while the life has been seeping out of small- and ,medium-sized country towns. There is 'Boswash' extending from Boston to Washington, DC; there is 'Chicpitts,' a conur-· bation stretching from Chicago t'o Pittsburgh; and there is 'Sansan,' from San Francisco to San Diego. Even in the United Kingdom, often referred to as a tightly-packed little island, the pattern of settlement is extraordinarily lopsided, with (Courtesy E..F. Schumacher and Satish Kumar, editor, Resurgence. U.S. subscriptions are $10 surface mail, $15 airmail, from Resurgence, Pentre Ifan. Felindre, Crymych, Dyfed, Wales, U.K.) .E. F. Schumacher Part.Two: more than half the area grossly under-populated and large parts of the other h'alf madly congested.. ·. · Do you remember this socialist demand, formulated more than 100 years ago? Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries;' gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over t}:le country. (Communist Manifesto, 1848) And what has happened during those more than 100 years? Of course, the exact opposite. And what is expected to happen·during the next twenty-five years, to the end of the century? Again the exact opposite, with a vengeance. Not urbanisation but, to use a word as dreadful as the phenomenon it denotes, megalopolitanisation, a movement that produces, as we know only too well, utterly insoluble political, social, moral, psychological and economic problems. A paper issued by ,the World Bank speaks of: the despondency surrounding the task of ameliorating urban conditions in the developing countries (which) arises primarily from the speed of urban growth and shortage of resources, human as well as financial . . . . Urban administration is woefully lacking in capacity to deal with the problems.... Yet within less than twenty years the present populations and areas of urban centres w'ill account for less than a third of the total. The paper asks whether there is a possibility "of accelerating the development of small a:nd medium-size towns or creating new urban growth centres." But it loses little time in dismissing this possibility: ' Most small urban centres ... lack the basic infrastructure of transport and services.... Management and professional staff are unwilling'to mov.e from the. major cities. This tells the whole story: "Management and staff are unwilling to move from the major city!" The proposition, evidently, is to transplant into a small place the technology which has been developed in such a way that it fits only a very large place. The people in the small place cannot cope with it; management and staff have to be imported from the 'major cities;' no one wants to come because the proposition does not make economic sense. The technology is inappropriate and that means the whole project is uneconomic. ' With a name like mine, I find it easy to understand that to be a good shoemaker it is not enough to know a lot about making shoes;.you also have to know about feet. The shoe made for the big fellow does not fit the foot of the little
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