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p The sense of contentedness places urbanisation high in the list of threats. Cities are growing steadily. Today they have approximately 25 per cent of the population. Some futurologists estimate that at the turn of the new century the proportion of urban dwellers will be between 70 and 54 90 per cent of the total population. These figures are now almost a fact in industrialised countries.

p But what sort of life is to be observed in big cities and megalopolises? On the one hand, it is quite evident that the growth of towns is historically not accidental. The simultaneous employment of a considerable mass of means of production and labour power in a limited territory yields unquestioned economic benefits. In the towns with their concentration of industry it is easier than in other forms of settlement to co-operate labour, combine production and maintain contact with research institutes.

p All forms of human activity are integrated and the threads linking all forms of association are tied into knots in the towns. Knowledge is produced in them, creativity proceeds and impulses are received for new forms of social organisation and for surmounting stagnation of all kinds. Social mobility is more developed in towns and the links of society and the individual are closer and more ramified.

p On the other hand, to the sense of contentedness urbanisation is a fiend. The evil stemming from settlement in towns is summarised on several counts.

p The rapid growth of towns is an ominous threat to health. The air is polluted by exhaust gases and industrial smoke. Smog, containing hundreds of thousands of tons of poison and absorbing nearly half of the ultra-violet rays of solar irradiation, hangs over industrial towns as though it were a mammoth bell-glass. This has given an expert grounds for saying that either people reduce air pollution or air pollution will reduce the number of people. But the “increase in air pollution is just one dramatic aspect of a continuing deterioration of our environment”.  [54•*  A weightless and invisible danger lies in street noise that constantly rends the air of big cities. The fast rhythm of life and work has made people’s hearing more acute. For that reason the head of a tired person is compared with a cave echoing the least noise. Auditory pollution intensifies the exhaustion of nerve centres, breaks the rhythm of the organism’s activity, leads to heightened irritability, nervous disorders and general 55 fatigue, affects mental development and exposes people to grave diseases.

p Further, the nervous system suffers from the rhythm of work and from the conditions of urban life. Congestion and transport difficulties constantly encountered by town dwellers cause concealed fatigue and exhaustion, which are not allayed even during leisure hours. As a result, there is a growing incidence of industrial and everyday accidents, and it requires very little to throw behaviour adaptation out of gear.

p Urbanisation brings with it negative consequences of a socio-psychological order, too. Unlike villages and small towns, the large modern cities destroy the psychological sense of nearness, “informal relations”, as a sociologist would say, weaken big families hallowed by the tradition of close relations. Changes of this nature intensify the sense of loneliness and lead to an anonymous existence.

p Upon finding itself in the chaos of such assessments of urbanisation, the sense of contentedness goes from one extreme to the other. It sees cities as concentration points of all of civilisation’s most acute contradictions, as the source of all evils. The cause of these ulcers is allegedly not capitalism, but the city as such. Hence the deurbanisation projects motivated by Rousseauian utopianism. The attempts at deurbanisation are unrealistic and mirror the inability to halt the spontaneity of the process and effectively direct it on a humanitarian basis in the interests of society.

p At the same time, it must be acknowledged that a trend projected not into the past but into the future is more characteristic of the sense of contentedness. However, from beginning to end urbanisation is regarded as a technical or an administrative problem, as an autonomous process isolated from society. All the hopes for bringing it under control are pinned on administrative decisions and technical means. State allocations and town-planning are the main levers of the reconstruction of towns. In the opinion of the sense of contentedness, capitalism is able gradually to eradicate the vices of the modern city with the help of the achievements of some sciences and by correspondingly orientating public opinion. It is asserted that it will be possible to plan the growth of towns. The police, it is said, will be able to abolish urban crime. Measures instituted in transportation 56 will put an end to traffic bottlenecks and to the sources of air pollution. Scientists will help to verdurise the huge megalopolises and provide adequate supplies of fresh water and acoustic comfort. Industry will be set apart from residential areas, while slums will be pulled down. Cultural centres will in time become accessible to all people. “Social engineers" will eliminate the horror of loneliness by promoting informal association. Psycho-analysts will help to allay phobias and lessen the wave of suicides. When smog, bustle and noise disappear, there will be a decline of the incidence of nervous disorders. In short, urban life will retain its benefits while ridding itself of all its shortcomings.

p In the arguments of the sense of contentedness all the problems of urbanisation have a happy ending. With the removal of the threats harboured in urbanisation all the other problems still causing anxiety will be settled.

p The dose of anxiety smoothly injected into the sense of contentedness by the ideological machine, and also anxieties springing from analyses and generalisations of its own observations are allayed and neutralised. The feeling of disorder gives way to a feeling of certainty in the future and, consequently, in the present as well. In an amazing manner prognostication exercises a reverse influence on people, and the utmost use is made of this by those who mould the sense of contentedness. No special action is required of the latter. All one has to do is to take an “unbiased” view of the threat (urbanisation or any other from the spectrum of anxieties), abide by conformist public opinion’s assessment of the threat and subscribe to the therapy applied by the bourgeois organisation to that threat. For the sense of contentedness the “struggle” against the threat of urbanisation proceeds with the maximum conveniences.

p How realistic are the expectations of the sense of contentedness? The very fact that to give effect to only the technical plan of modernising American cities will require a thousand billion dollars, or as much as the USA has spent for military purposes during the past 20 years, makes it plain that these expectations are unfounded. Of course, one can believe in a miracle. But if one looks at things realistically, it must be obvious that under the existing structure of ownership and power there is no hope that the state 57 and, still less, impecunious municipal councils, will suddenly cease economising on drives against poverty and on social insurance, education and health programmes.

p But there is much more to this. Let us assume that noise, smog, congestion and traffic bottlenecks have been eliminated. That still leaves socio-psychological problems. Do crime and drug-addiction grow in cities only because the police force is much too small and inadequately operative? However, if the air becomes crystal pure and the noise background is normalised but unemployment remains can the threat harboured by urbanisation be considered as having been eliminated? What about the problem of education, high rents or racial segregation? What about the misery in the ghettos, which are “economic colonies"  [57•*  of the socially privileged urban districts? Technical and administrative decisions cannot remove fear, extinguish uncertainty, assuage loneliness or dilute the bitterness of the lower strata of capitalism’s urban population. This requires something more than reformist aspirations.

Town improvement is, above all, a social problem, although it has a technical aspect as well. Urbanisation is not the cause but a manifestation of social troubles. Capitalism has squeezed everything possible from the spontaneous growth of towns. Today, in the age of the scientific and technological revolution, the organised development of towns has become one of the key conditions of social progress. The finest plans of modernisation and the most interesting technical town-building ideas come into conflict with private interests. Capitalism gives the essentially progressive process of the concentration of material and cultural values in towns ugly forms that, parallel with some development, bring people new suffering.