If we are to humanize our urban environment, we must turn the planning process upside down and start thinking about the conditions that are important to human growth—to man’s heart, soul, and nervous system, as well as his mind; to build places that will strengthen the family and provide the most fruitful relationship between the family and their schools, churches, libraries, health, cultural, recreation, business, and government centers. …

Planning out from the needs of people produces a community in which people, young or old, will be able to go to school, to the library, to a concert, to shop, to picnic, or to look at the stars at their own time on foot, by bike, or by bus, freed from the regimentation of the automobile and the highway….

The road to humanizing the urban environment may be neither long nor difficult if we will set out upon it—but it begins with people and proceeds from their needs and their yearnings. Once started on it, the signposts may be clearer than we know.

Sprawl is dreadfully inefficient. It stretches out the distances people must travel to work, to shop, to worship, to play. It fails to relate these activities in ways that strengthen each, and thus, it suppresses values that orderly relationships and concentrations of uses would stimulate.

Sprawl is ugly, oppressive, massively dull. It squanders the resources of nature—forests, streams, hillsides—and produces vast, monotonous armies of housing and graceless, tasteless clutter. But worst of all, sprawl is inhuman. It is antihuman. The vast, formless spread of housing pierced by the unrelated spotting of schools, churches, stores, creates areas so huge and irrational that they are out of scale with people—beyond their grasp and comprehension—too big for people to feel a part of, responsible for, important in.

The richness of a real community—in both its support and its demands—is largely voided. Variety and choice are reduced to a sort of prepackaged, brand name selection of recreation, culture, and education. The individual is immersed in the mass. …

Urban growth is our opportunity, not our enemy. It invites us to correct the past, to build places that are productive for business and for the people who live there, places that are infused with nature and stimulating to man’s creative sense of beauty—places that are in scale with people and so formed as to encourage and give strength to the real community which will enrich life; build character and personality; promote concern, friendship, brotherhood.