The emerging Great Lakes Megalopolis

Abstract

WE COMPLAIN about our cities - and justifiably so. For in spite of the much higher incomes and the much more developed technology which the present generation has in relation to those who lived before the eighteenth century, our present cities have not been able to serve us as well as did the cities of the past. Our admiration for the cities of the past is partly because of the better way of living they represented. Although we complain about the cities of the present, we continue to build in the image of existing cities, and to produce mere expansions of them. Instead of solving any problems, we create situations which worsen with every day that passes. The reason is that we do not have the ability to look ahead and see the cities in which we will live in the future which in reality are the cities we are building today. In order to escape this impasse of building the cities of the future, which in reality are the cities we are building today, ability to foresee the types of cities in which we shall have to live and try to do our best for them. This requires a twofold approach. First, we must realistically determine those basic characteristics of the cities to come which will be inevitable; and second, we must invent the type of life we want to carry out inside these cities and form the cities accordingly.