HABITATINTL, Vol. 3, No. 3/4, pp. 3X1-391 Pergamon Press 1978. Printed in Great Bntain.

The Urban Prospect: Re-examining the Basic

Assumptions

LESTER R. BROWN

President, Worldwatch Institute

This conference* has convened because of a concern over the condition of human settlements throughout the world. The problems are myriad, ranging from the much publicized fiscal plight of New York to the chronic human poverty of Calcutta. The purpose of this series and the other activities of the Habitat Forum, the non-governmental proceedings paralleling the official conference, is to mobilize the thinking of individuals independently of governments. It is in this context that I introduce the topic of “Human Needs and Natural Limits”.

Existing U.N. projections show urbanization trends continuing unabated over the final quarter of this century. A world which was 29% urban in 19.50 and 39% in 1975 is projected to be half urban by the year 2000. Can this rate of urbanization continue? Our research at the Worldwatch Institute on food and energy prospects and the future employment situation raises doubts as to whether projected urbanization rates will materialize. We do not expect the trends of the quarter century now beginning to be a simple extrapolation of the one just ended.

The basic premise that urbanization trends will continue unaltered, leading to a world of huge agglomerations by the end of this century, is underpinned by three implied assumptions: food surpluses produced in the surrounding countryside or imported from abroad will be sufficient to feed the burgeoning urban populations, cheap energy will be available to underwrite the additional energy cost of urban living, and sufficient productive employment will become available in the cites. Neither these underlying assumptions nor, therefore, the basic premise are likely to hold.

THE FOOD ASSUMPTION

In order for people to move from the countryside to city, there must be a surplus of food produced in the rural areas that can be used to feed the dependent urban populations. These surpluses may come from domestic supplies or from foreign sources. From the first urban settlements several thousand years ago until the middle of this century, cities were sustained largely, if not entirely, by the food produced in the surrounding countryside. Since then more and more cities have come to depend on food imports, largely from North America. Accelerating urbanization since mid-century has been closely paralleled by the vast growth in food shipments from North America.

Forty years ago North American grain exports averaged five million tons per year. As of 1950 they had increased to 23 million tons, and by 1970 to 56 million tons. During the

*Introductory comments at the session on Human Needs and Natural Limits, Habitat Forum, United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, Vancouver, Canada, 2 June 1976.

381

382 Lester R. Brown

current year, North America will export an estimated 94 million tons of grain. In con- sumption terms, the farmers of North America are exporting enough grain to feed, at their respective consumption levels, 560 million Indians or 115 million Russians.

The world food trade pattern has been altered profoundly in recent decades. A genera- tion ago, Western Europe, which was the most urbanized region, was also the only im- porting region. Each of the other continents was exporting grail, in at least some quantity. By 1976, that situation has been changed beyond recognition. Virtually the entire world has come to depend on North American food exports. Asia, Africa, Latin America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, are net grain importers (see Table 1). A great amount of the food imported into these regions is used to feed the cities.

Table I. The changing paitern of world grain trade’

Region 1934-38 1948-52 1960 1970 1976’

(Million metric tons)

North America + 5 +23 i39 + 56 +94 Latin America + 9 + 1 0 +4 -3 Western Europe -24 -22 -25 -30 - 17 E. Europe & USSR + 5 _ 0 0 -27

0 -2 -5 - 10 Asia + 2 -6 - 17 -37 -41 Australia & New Zealand + 3 + 3 + 6 +12 i-8

I Plus sign indicates net exports; minus sign, net imports.

*Preliminary estimates of fiscal year data.

Source: Derived from FAO and USDA data and author’s estimates.

Further analysis on a country by country basis shows that the world today consists almost entirely of food deficit countries. Those remaining as important exporters at the global level can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. While scores of new food im- porters have emerged over the past two decades, not a single new exporter has emerged! Growing deficits in some countries are due to the inability to expand food production apace with rapidly multiplying populations. In other countries, these deficits are a matter of mismanagement and of agricultural neglect, treating agriculture as a stepchild while giving the cities priority for new investments. All too often, deficits are the product of both factors.

Not only are nearly all countries today food importers, but a growing number now import over half of their grain supplies. Among these are Japan, Belgium, Senegal, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Lebanon, Switzerland and Algeria. Others rapidly approaching a similar degree of dependence on imported foodstuffs include Portugal, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Egypt.

As rising import needs throughout the world have begun to exceed the exportable surpluses produced in the North American countryside, both the USA and Canadian governments have found it necessary to restrict access for some countries at least temporarily in order to avoid politically unacceptable rises in domestic food prices. Most recently Russian and Polish grain buyers were excluded from U.S. grain markets during the fall of

The Urban Prospect: Re-examining the Basic Assumpiions 383

1975. The Canadian Wheat Board banned any new wheat sales from mid-July of last year until the harvest was completed in the fall.

Anticipating future difficulty in gaining access to USA food supplies, some countries have negotiated long-term agreements which are intended to ensure adequate North American grain supplies. Among these are Japan, the Soviet Union, and Poland. After a quarter century of burdensome food surpluses and keen competition among exporters for markets abroad, the emerging competition among importers for assured access to supplies represents an ominous reversal.

Zf the trends of the past several years continue, the collective import needs of the 100 plus importing countries will eventually greatly exceed the exportable supplies from North America, particularly when the harvest is poor. This is creating a politics of food, a type of food diplomacy. The hostages in this game are the cities of the world that are sustained with imported food. They are living quite literally “from ship to mouth”. The trend of cities becoming more and more dependent on imported food is everywhere evident, from Leningrad to Lagos, Cairo to Santiago, Tokyo to Bombay.

It is not likely that this rapid growth in dependence on imported foodstuffs from North America can continue for much longer. Yet the trend toward urbanization undoubtedly will lead toward ever greater dependence on North American food. Inevitably, harsh decisionswill have to be made by the USA and Canadian governments on who gets food and who does not.

Forward-looking Canadians foresee the day when the domestic demands of a growing, increasingly affluent population may reduce the exportable surpluses of food, much as they already have for energy. Overwhelming dependence by the world’s cities on imported food supplies from a single geographic region in a world of food scarcity brings with it a vulnerability to external political forces and climatic trends that is risky indeed. This being the case, countries would do well to re-examine urbanization policies and consider whether continued rapid urbanization and the associated growing dependence on distant food supplies is in their national interest.

THE ENERGY ASSUMPTION

Urbanization and the availability of energy are closely related. The emergence of the first cities appears to have been closely associated with agricultural breakthroughs such as the harnessing of draught animals, the domestication of new agricultural plants, and the development of irrigation systems. In effect, these enabled humans to harness more energy for their own purposes-to capture more solar energy in plants or, in the case of draught animals, to convert otherwise unusable roughage into a form of energy that could be used to increase the food supply. Important though these new energy sources were, the agricultural surpluses they made possible were never enough to support more than a small proportion of the population living away from the land. Indeed, as recently as 1800 only 2.2% of the population of Europe resided in cities of 100,000 or more.

The energy breakthrough which permitted much larger populations, even majorities, to be sustained in cities was the discovery of fossil fuels, initially coal and later oil. The harnessing of fossil fuels, to generate steam for industrial power, gave birth to the industrial

384 Lester R. Brown

revolution, permitted the concentration of economic activity, and ushered in a new era of

urbanization.

The large-scale migration of people from countryside to city requires an abundance of

energy. In an urban environment, additional energy is required to satisfy food, fuel, housing, and transport needs. Assuming no change in consumption levels, each person who moves from the countryside to the city raises world energy requirements.

With food, urbanization raises energy requirements on two fronts. As the urban popula- tion increases relative to the rural food producing population, additional energy is required in agriculture to generate this requisite food surplus. At the same time, more energy is needed to process the food and transport it to urban areas.

As more and more people move into the cities, each person remaining in agriculture must produce an ever larger surplus. This, in turn, requires the broad substitution of mechanical energy for labour in food production’ (see Fig. 1). In a world where energy is becoming scarce and unemployment is rising, it makes little sense to continue this whole- sale substitution in countries with large, unemployed rural populations.

It is customary to point with pride to the small percentage of the population living on the land in industrial nations such as the USA, where 5% of the society living on the land provides food for the remainder. This level of labour productivity in agriculture requires vast amounts of energy. Professor David Pimentel, writing in Science, illustrates the magnitude of the requirement. If the current four billion world population were to

be fed at USA consumption levels, using USA energy intensive agriculture production techniques, and “Ifpetroleum were the only source of energy, and if we used all petroleum reserves solely to feed the world population, the 415 billion barrel reserve would last a mere 29 years.“2

f

2 \ IO- .I960

G D

4 \

I I I O 05 1.0 I.5 2

Energy Input, 10’5k,localories

Fig. i. Substitution of energy for labour on USA farms.

‘John S. Steinhart and Carol E. Steinhart, Energy use in the U.S. food system. Science, 2 November, 1973 *David Pimentel et al., Food production and the energy crisis. Science, November 2, 1973.

The Urban Prospect: Re-examining the Basic Assumptions 385

Although the amounts required for production are large, they are dwarfed by compari- son with the amount of energy used to transport, process, and distribute food in a highly urbanized society. Within the United States, one-fourth of the energy used in the food system is used to produce food. Three-fourths of the total is used to transport, process, and distribute that same food once it leaves the farm.3

The difficulties in meeting the food needs of city dwellers are in many ways paralleled by the difficulties in meeting their fuel needs. In both cases, supplies must come either from the countryside (in the form of charcoal, firewood, etc.) or be imported (as kerosene, fuel oil, etc.). Except for those few nations that have adequate domestic sources of hydro- electric or petroleum power, the grim alternatives are an ever-widening barren area around the cities, as they outgrow indigenous forest reserves, or growing dependence on unreliable and expensive fuel imports.

Urbanization also increases energy requirements for waste disposal. At the village level, waste disposal is not a major problem. Organic wastes are returned to the soil to enrich it, an important and integral part of nature’s nutrient cycles of phosphorus, sulphur, and nitrogen. In this way they contribute to the food supply. But once large numbers of people congregate in cities, waste may no longer be an asset. Indeed, efforts to safely dispose of it often represent an additional drain on scarce energy resources.

The rapid urbanization characterizing so much of the world during the third quarter of this century occurred during an era of cheap energy, an era which may be historically unique. Oil production has already peaked in some major producing countries, including the U.S.A. and quite possibly Romania (see Fig. 2). Production declines in other countries will follow. With the end of the petroleum age now clearly in sight, the world must turn to other forms of energy, forms which may by their very nature affect the pattern of human settlement.

Until recently, it was assumed that the world would move from the fossil fuel era into the nuclear age. After a quarter century of experience with nuclear power, the world is beginning to have second thoughts about continuing down the nuclear path. Failure to devise any satisfactory techniques of waste disposal, the inevitable spread of nuclear weapons along with nuclear power, and the prospect of terrorist groups acquiring nuclear

t- Source:U.S.Bureou of Mines

Fig. 2. Petroleum production, USA, 1950-74.

3Eric Hint, Energy useforfood. ORNL-NSF-EF-57, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, October 1973.

386 Lester R. Brown

materials and weapons are all beginning to raise doubts in even the most sanguine of minds. My colleague Denis Hayes discusses the mounting international resistance to going nuclear in a recent paper.4

Beyond the seemingly insoluble waste disposal and security problems, the economics associated with nuclear power are becoming questionable. In 1975 there were 25 times as many nuclear reactors cancelled or deferred in the United States as there were new orders placed. A principal executive within a company producing nuclear reactors described the industry as sick. It is undoubtedly sick; the real question is whether or not it may be terminally ill.

Given this very real possibility, urban planners need to consider the possibility of a world which will move not from the fossil fuel era to the nuclear era but toward growing reliance on solar energy. If the world moves toward a solar age, it means, among other things, that the population will need to be broadly distributed, for the simple reason that solar energy itself is broadly dispersed.

The mechanisms for capturing solar energy vary widely. They include solar collectors which are used both for heating and cooling; they include photovoltaics, which convert solar energy into electrical energy (the form that powers COMSAT’s international com- munications satellites); and indirect forms of solar energy such as wind, water, and fire- wood. All forms of bioconversion including firewood are, of course, solar based. The great attraction of solar energy is that the source is safe, secure, virtually endless and rather widely available.

If the world goes solar, the optimum size of human settlements is likely to be far smaller than it would otherwise be. Planners should be considering the prospect of numerous relatively small communities, widely distributed for energy efficiency, rather than the continuing massing of people in large megalopolises.

THE EMPLOYMENT ASSUMPTION

A third assumption implied by the projections of urbanization trends is that jobs will be available in the cities. But this assumption is at least as questionable as those on food and energy. One of the most intractable problems facing governments in the years ahead is that of providing employment for the rapidly-swelling numbers of young people coming into the job market. Projections by the International Labour Organization indicate that the industrial countries will need to create 161 million additional jobs during the 1970- 2000 period, or an increase of 33%. The developing countries meanwhile must attempt to create 922 million new jobs, nearly double the number of jobs that exist today (see Table 2).

The labour force of India alone is expected to increase by 63 million during the current decade. Already plagued with widespread unemployment and underemployment, India is now beleaguered by 100,000 new entrants into the labour force each week. Mexico, with

*Worldwatch Paper 6, Nuclearpower; [hefifth horsernun, Denis Hayes, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC. May 1976.

The Urban Prospect: Re-examining fhe Basic Assumptions

Table2. Projectedgrowth in the world labourforce, 1970-2000

387

Year 1970 2000 Additional Change

(millions) jobs required 1970-2000

More developed nations 488 649 161 +33% Less developed nations 1,011 1,933 922 +91%

Source: International Labour Office.

its comparatively small economic base, will shortly have nearly as many young people entering the job market each year as the USA.

The creation of jobs requires capital. Even the industrial countries with a relative abundance of capital have had difficulty in recent years in expanding employment rapidly; hence they have had the highest levels of unemployment since the Depression of the Thirties. What has been a problem for the industrial societies is becoming a crisis for the developing countries.

This explosion in the number of job seekers is coming at a time when it is becoming more difficult to raise capital for investment purposes. A growing body of economic literature is documenting the difficulty in maintaining satisfactory levels of capital formation.5 The USA, traditionally a source of capital for the rest of the world, is having difficulty meeting its own requirements. Japan’s foreign investment rate has been cut severely. The centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are now borrowing heavily from Western capital markets.

With capital projected to be in short supply, as many jobs as possible must be created with that which is available. Creating jobs in the urban industrial sector requires far more capital than the creation of jobs in the rural agricultural sector. Thus, employment considerations also argue against rapid urbanization.

THE URBANIZATION PROSPECT

There are three reasons why urbanization trends cannot continue as projected until the end of the century. These are: the inability of the countryside to produce sufficiently large food surpluses, the disappearance of the cheap energy needed to underwrite the urbaniza- tion process, and the impossibility of creating enough jobs in urban settings.

If the flow from the countryside to the city should continue unabated, some harsh correctives will likely begin to operate in the not too distant future. Among these will be food shortages in the cities, energy shortages that will hamstring the economy, and rising levels of unemployment. The secondary aims of stress will be uncontrollable inflation, increasing nutritional stress, growing dependence on external food and energy imports, and an associated rise in external indebtedness. Finally, rising urban unemployment will possibly lead to social unrest and political instability.

SSee Capitcrl Needs in the Seventies by Barry Bosworth, James S. Duesenberry and Andrew S. Carron, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1975, and The CapitalNeeds andsavings Potential of the U.S. Economy, Projections Through 1985, New York Stock Exchange, New York, 1974.

388 Lester R. Brown

Given this possible scenario, would it not be wise for governments to devise policies to slow urban growth before the constraints of natural and social systems limit their options? Before attempting to answer this, it would be well to examine the forces leading to the wholesale movement of people into cities. The forces at work will fall into two broad categories, those originating in the countryside-the push forces -and those serving as attractants in the cities-the pull forces. The delineation is not always clear, with forces often being simply opposite sides of the same coin.

The principal official policies which influence urbanization, both directly and indirectly, almost always reflect a bias toward the city, thus creating a natural magnet to draw people from the countryside.6 Professor Michael Lipton, in his book,7 rather graphically describes the nature of this rural-urban conflict:

The most important class conflict in the poor countries of the world today is not between labour and capital, nor is it between foreign and national interests. It is between the rural classes and the urban classes. The rural sector contains most of the poverty and most of the low-cost sources of potential advance, but the urban sector contains most of the articulateness, organization, and power. So the urban classes have been able to ‘win’ most of the rounds of the struggle with the countryside; but in so doing they have made the development process needlessly slow and unfair.

Food price policies designed to provide unrealistically cheap food for city dwellers through ceiling prices discourage domestic food production. More broadly, urban-oriented food policies discourage private investment in food production, and hence employment in the countryside. This distortion in the development process helps explain the increasing dependence on food imported from abroad, a situation which now exists in so many countries.

Apart from the distortions caused by shortsighted food price policies, public investment in most developing countries is heavily biased toward urban communities. It is not at all uncommon for a country with 70% of its population in rural areas to allocate only 20% of its public sector investment to those same areas. In such a situation, investment per person can easily be several times as high for the urban dweller as for those living in the country- side.

The strong urban bias in public investment in social services, particularly education and health, further enhances the attractiveness of the cities. For example, an accident of birth can strongly influence access to a university education. Professor Lipton points out that a child from an Indian town or city is 8.5 times more likely to go to a university than a village child. In addition to being a gross inequity, such a system is inefficient. University places are used to train less able urban children rather than more capable rural children.

A similar case exists with medical care. With investment in medical facilities concentrated in urban hospitals rather than rural clinics, the less urgent medical needs of the city take priority over the more urgent medical needs of the village. Again, quite apart from inequity, this is also inefficient. It leads to a wasteful allocation of scarce resources, which must inevitably take its toll in the form of reduced economic growth.

“For an excellent analysis of the urban bias of governments, see Professor Michael Lipton’s (Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) book, IVh.v Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias and World Development. Temple-Smith, London. 1976.

‘Lipton op. cir

The Urban Prospecf: Re-examining the Basic Assumptions 389

The social cost of this urban bias in the policies and priorities of governments is high. It

seems certain to rise, particularly as the food, energy, and employment constraints on urbanization begin to operate. This unfolding situation calls for a pronounced shift in rural-urban priorities. The convergence of swelling food deficits, rising unemployment, and a widespread physical deterioration of agricultural systems in all too many developing countries, suggest the outlines of a broad new public initiative, a way of meeting several needs simultaneously.

FOOD, JOBS AND RURAL RESTORATION

Apart from the great financial cost of providing jobs in an urban-industrial setting,

there is a pressing need to sharply expand the effort to arrest and reverse the ecological deterioration of the countryside now underway in many heavily populated developing countries. This deterioration takes the form of deforestation, overgrazing, desert expan- sion, soil erosion, and the silting of streams, hydroelectric and irrigation reservoirs and canals.

During the past several years the global environment crisis has been defined almost exclusively in industrial or rich country terms, in terms of pollution. The two have become virtually synonymous, but there is another, perhaps even more serious facet of the environmental crisis. Erik Eckholm describes it vividly:

In the world war to save the habitable environment, even the battles to purify the noxious clouds over Tokyo and Sao Paulo, and to restore life to Lake Erie, are but skirmishes compared to the uncon- tested routs being suffered in the hills of Nepal and Java, and on the rangelands of Chad and north- west India. A far deadlier annual toll, and perhaps an even greater threat to future human welfare than that of the pollution of our air and water, is that exacted by the undermining of the productivity of the land itself through accelerated soil erosion, creeping deserts, increased flooding, and declining soil fertility. Humans are-out of desperation, ignorance, shortsightedness, or greed -destroying the basis of their own livelihood as they violate the limits of natural systems.8

Perhaps the single most helpful effort in arresting this deterioration and restoring the countryside would be the mobilization of the population for massive reforestation projects. Reforestation serves several important ends. It reduces runoff, reduces soil erosion, lessens the frequency and severity of flooding, slows the siltation of irrigation reservoirs and canals and, over the longer term, it provides an important source of fuel and building materials. There is so much to be gained from a large-scale reforestation project in virtually every developing country that it is difficult to understand why more governments have not initiated programmes for this purpose.

In a number of countries, particularly in Africa and to a lesser degree in Asia and Latin America, desert expansion poses a serious threat to agriculture. If the complex social and political problems can be overcome, this too is an area where the investment of human labour in restoring destroyed vegetation, seeding grass, fencing, and planting tree belts can be very effective and can contribute to the capital stock and productive capacity of the country.

8For a current, detailed discussion of these ominous trends, see a recent book by my Worldwatch colleague, Erik Eckholm, Losing Ground: EnvironmenfalSfress and World Food Prospecfs. W. W. Norton, 1976.

390 Lester R. Brown

With water rather than land likely to be the principal constraint on efforts to expand food production during the final quarter of this century, local water conservancy projects in the form of small catchments and earthen dams made from local materials can make an important contribution to rural water supplies. What is lacking in most countries is the political leadership and the means of mobilizing and organizing unemployed people.

Throughout history, societies have mobilized for very specific objectives. From time to time the achievements have been singularly impressive: the construction of the pyramids in ancient Egypt, the rather massive restoration of the countryside in China (particularly reforestation, water conservation works, and terracing) over the past twenty-five years, and the landing of astronauts on the moon by the USA. The objectives, social structure and geographic location of these societies have varied widely, but each represents in its own way a rather spectacular accomplishment. The techniques of social organization differ markedly in these three particular situations, suggesting that each society needs to evolve its own techniques of social organization to achieve its goals.

There is an opportunity for the mobilization of literally hundreds of millions of chroni- cally or seasonally unemployed people to improve the food production capacity of many countries, particularly developing ones. The need exists, it is a real one, and it is expanding day by day.

NATIONAL URBANIZATION AND POPULATION POLICIES

Many of the problems confronting urban planners are a result of continuing, often uncontrolled, population growth and a strong urban bias in the allocation of resources. Part of the growth in urban populations is due to natural increase in the cities and part to migration from rural areas. In the most rapidly growing cities, the migration is the domi- nant component. The forces responsible for the human flood of several hundred million people from the countryside to city between 1950 and 1975 are a combination of urban pull and rural push.

As we wrestle with the problems of human settlements, of the human habitat, it becomes increasingly clear that we are grappling in some measure with the problems of population, both current numbers and, in many countries, continued rapid natural increase. There are now four billion of us in the world, a figure we reached, according to the Population Reference Bureau, on 28 March 1976. This landmark occasion was not the cause for celebration, rather it was a matter which troubled people everywhere. The stresses and strains associated with continuing population growth in a world already inhabited by four billion people confront the urban planner on every front.”

In our day-to-day wrestling with problems and events we tend to forget the fateful arithmetic of population growth. Occasionally we need to remind outselves that a 3%

annual rate of population growth led to a nineteenfold increase in a century. Algeria, with a 3.4% rate of population growth and with 15 million people today, would find itself with 285 million people, more than the total population of North America, just four

9See Worldwatch Paper 5, Twenty-two dimensions of the population problem, Lester R. Brown, Patricia I. McGrath and Bruce Stokes, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC, March 1976.

The Urban Prospect: Re-e.xaminin,q the Basic Assumptions 391

generations hence. Similarly, if recent trends continue, Mexico, with 60 million people today, will have more than 1. I billion in a century. This would exceed the current population of Russia, India, and Bangladesh combined. I cite these numbers not because

they are expected to materialize, but merely to emphasize the urgency of reducing birth rates where they remain high.

I put population policies at the forefront of efforts to cope with urbanization because if we do not succeed in putting the brakes on population growth, then our efforts on other fronts will be for naught. Along with this attention to population must come a major shift in government priorities away from the urban bias which has contributed to so many of the problems we face.

Many planners and analysts believe that the tide from the countryside to the city cannot be slowed to stemmed, that it is inevitable. 1 am not among those. What is needed is far- sighted national policies which give the countryside its due. It is at the national level where most important policies are formulated and programmes are designed to shape the process of urbanization. And most of them have an overwhelming bias toward the urban centres at the expense of rural areas.

Correcting this imbalance is not an impossibility. Some countries have made a concerted effort to improve both productive capacity and living conditions in the countryside, and have derived broad social benefits from it. Among these nations-China, Taiwan, the USA, Tanzania, Cuba and New Zealand- there is no common bond of geography, political system or culture. The only common element is a desire to improve the lives of those living in the countryside as well as in the city.

In suggestion that the time has come for governments to abandon their urban bias, I am in no way suggesting that the city be abandoned. The evolution of cities represents an important facet of the social evolution of our species. As Barbara Ward has pointed out so effectively in The Home of Man, cities are an integral part of contemporary civilization,

both repositories and custodians of culture. to No one argues against cities; nor does anyone argue for a world which is entirely urbanized. There should be a balance between the rural-urban distribution of people and economic activity. The question is what that balance should be in each country, and how it will be affected by the emerging food and energy situation and by changing economic and environmental conditions.

The massive movement from the countryside to the cities has been based over the past quarter century on conditions which do not appear to be sustainable. It is incumbent on political leaders to recognize this and to eliminate the overwhelming urban bias in resource allocation, adopting a much more balanced approach, one consistent with the new food, energy, and employment realities. The most effective efforts to ameliorate the problems facing cities may well be those to improve living conditions and productivity in the countryside

‘“Barbara Ward. The Home of Man. W. W. Norton, New York, 1976.