STRENGTHENING THE UNITED NATIONS

X.

What UN's Metropolitan Structure Might Do

A new age of cities has come into being. In poor and in rich countries alike, the rural folk are pouring in upon the cities. By force or by incentives, some countries pressure the ruralites to remain in their villages, to little avail. Rural happiness and independence have usually been only a myth of the sophisticated urban intellectual. The cities offer electricity, anonymity, and a feeling that their mass of people is too close to the government to be ignored. Yet the original older city populations have not solved their own basic problems-of crime, metro-neuroses, class conflict, corruption, pollution, and bad housing.

The remedy is two-fold. The world has to organize its cities into metropolitan communities into which all of the rural population would fall for this purpose as well. There are about 100 natural metropolitan areas of the world, containing about 40% of the Earth's inhabitants in their central cores.

Transportation systems, communications systems, mental and physical health, population control, housing, education, recreation and crime control are the major subjects that lend themselves to the jurisdiction of Metropolitan Councils.

The Metropolitan Councils should proceed immediately to the construction of new cities. At least one thousand new cities of a million persons each are needed in the world today The technology and sociology of their construction are available. The new cities should be organized by experienced cadres of the old, the necessary scientists and managers, and the rural folk who are participating anyway in the great urban migration.

Consortia of companies under metropolitan direction will invest in each new city, construct it, and retire from it as its plans resolve into operations and the city population begins to take hold of its life and governance.

These cities will differ drastically from the old ones. Their designs will not only bring a rarely experienced decency to the lives, work, and pleasures of their residents, but also bring immense savings in construction, in costs of occupancy, indeed in every facet of productive activity, law and order, and the costs of living. During this critical age, the heavy relative costs of new small towns gives them a lower priority; when the new large cities are built and the old ones regenerated, the privilege of building the towns will descend to our heirs.