298

p The rapid development of electronics and cybernetics and the astounding advance of science and technology in general, the beginning of the conquest of outer space, the quantitative and qualitative leap forward in the development of air, land, over water and underwater transport—all this has turned the problem of transport and communications into a complex socio-political factor greatly influencing the path of further scientific, technological and social progress.

p Alongside this the problem of town planning has also grown considerably more complex. The growth of towns today exceeds considerably even the unprecedented growth of the world population as a whole. Millions upon millions of people are moving from the villages to the towns. Everywhere the area of urban development is spreading rapidly. The towns are concentrating an ever-growing section of the population within their limits not only in the economically developed but also in the developing countries. Many large towns in the northeast of the United States and the industrial areas of Western Europe and Japan practically converge upon one another to form huge “megalopolises”.

p In a capitalist economy this uncontrolled process of urbanisation results in population concentration of unprecedented size: several million people concentrate on several dozens of square kilometres.

p This, in its turn, gives rise to a number of new problems, such as providing accommodation for the millions of families flocking to the towns; slum clearance; supplying the towns with fresh water, the lack of which is becoming increasingly acute in many industrial areas throughout the world; fighting cardio-vascular, carcinogenic and nervous diseases caused by bad living conditions, atmospheric pollution, the pressure of work at modern factories and the pace of life in general in a modern town, and, finally, the fight against the rising crime rate—that dark shadow that falls on every town in the capitalist world.

p It is small wonder that the question of the concrete prospects for finding homes for the thousands of millions of new inhabitants of our planet who will appear in the next few decades should attract the attention of Western scientists.

p Here, again, we find two conflicting conceptions: those who are in favour of checking population growth advocate the 299 principle of disurbanisation, the arrangement of large towns in such a way as to give an increasingly large number of people the opportunity to live in their own small house with a small garden; their opponents argue that the present growth rate of world population and the now firmly established trends of urban development make disurbanisation unrealistic and predetermine the future development of towns in general and large towns in particular.

p An indirect reflection of the first point of view can be found in the works of Fritz Baade who declares that by 2000, given the right conditions, a considerable number of families will be able to live in their own cottages with a small garden.  [299•1  Among the supporters of the opposite viewpoint is the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, head of the Centre for Ekistics (the science of human settlements) in the Athens Institute of Technology. He predicts that in many industrial regions big cities will eventually amalgamate and an increasingly large number of families will live in densely populated belts of urban development stretching for hundreds of kilometres.  [299•2 

p The famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright suggests solving the problem of urban overpopulation by building huge 500-storey skyscrapers 1,600 metres high. The English engineer W. Frischmann proposes the construction of 850-storey blocks of flats, each of which would accommodate hundreds of thousands of towndwellers.  [299•3 

In all the cases quoted, transport (particularly urban transport) could evidently cope satisfactorily only if there were some important qualitative advances. This question occupies a considerable place in nearly all the general works on scientific and technological forecasting. Proposals are made to split up the big cities into self-contained units, within which there would be local transport systems so that people spent as little time as possible on travelling.  [299•4  The prospects are assessed for “air buses”, monorails, transport on air cushion, “moving ways" and freight and passenger rockets on inter-city and inter-continental routes.  [299•5 

300 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1973/FS375/20070619/375.tx" Discussing the more long-term prospects, A. C. Clarke predicts that not later than 2050 man will learn to control gravity and then all means of transport will undergo a qualitative change.  [300•1  Special attention, however, is paid to the prospects of “replacing” the means of transport by communications.

Norbert Wiener and A. C. Clarke agree that in the future there may be competition between transport agencies and communications firms. The appearance of large stereoscopic and stereophonic TV colour screens will allow people to “meet” one another at a distance or “visit” various places, experiencing fully the sensation of being there, which could reduce the need for travelling considerably. Moreover, the development of radio-video-telephonic and phototelegraphic communications should help the public to pass on necessary information quickly and in private, which will also render some travelling superfluous.