8
ALBERT MEISTER
than the town itself and therefore more likely to enjoy less impersonal relationships since the population shares a common area of habitation. It seems more possible under such conditions to hope to re-create feelings of belonging (more or less similar to those of the village) and to evoke social participation and popular initiative.
But, much more rapidly than in rural settings, community development in urban areas must overcome the geographical restrictions of district or neighborhood: the creation of new services supposes the intervention of centralized local governements. Housing betterment and slum clearance may be contrary to housing and zoning codes, or, more frequently, may require special legislation and call for formulation of a general policy of urban renewal, etc.... All such activities when confined within narrow locality boundaries raise the opposition of groups, associations, powers and interests located outside the area. Thus, when begun as geographically limited activities they very quickly force consideration of problems of elaborating a general planning of construction of services, of classifying neighborhoods or zones for development or re-development, of coordinating groups with opposed interests in support of a common goal, of decentralising local authority in certain fields, of establishing a general policy of planned social change instead of uncoordinated and partial adaptations to the consequences of this social change, etc.... All these problems appear much more quickly in urban than in rural community development.
These distinctions between urban and rural community development should not be allowed to obscure the profound differences between the phenomenon of urbanization as it took form in Western Europe and America and the phenomenon called by the same name which has been making its appearance in newly developing countries. If the slums of the big Asian or African towns are comparable to the slums of European or American cities at the time of the Industrial Revolution — and which they could not entirely eliminate until now, — the present problems of these two types of urban agglomerations are very different. In the West, our job is to re- organize, re-develop, re-harmonize a milieu in relation to new needs and new work, to new transportation and new leisure habits, as wrell as to fight against the consequences (such as juvenile delinquency, mental ill-health, etc.) of a too quick growth of the production sector of our economies: work and transportation having grown at too accelerated a rate compared to the relatively slow development of the consumption services (such as housing, leisure and education activities, etc.).