As the Brissago council came to realise that what it had supposed to be
temporary camps of refugees were rapidly developing into great towns of
a new type, and that it was remoulding the world in spite of itself, it
decided to place this work of redistributing the non-agricultural
population in the hands of a compactor and better qualified special
committee. That committee is now, far more than the council of any
other of its delegated committees, the active government of the world.
Developed from an almost invisible germ of ‘town-planning’ that came
obscurely into existence in Europe or America (the question is still in
dispute) somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century,
its work, the continual active planning and replanning of the world as
a place of human habitation, is now so to speak the collective material
activity of the race. The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and
recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling
of spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years,
giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and
everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only
picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the
race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. Their
cities are no longer tethered to running water and the proximity of
cultivation, their plans are no longer affected by strategic
considerations or thoughts of social insecurity. The aeroplane and the
nearly costless mobile car have abolished trade routes; a common
language and a universal law have abolished a thousand restraining
inconveniences, and so an astonishing dispersal of habitations has
begun. One may live anywhere. And so it is that our cities now are true
social gatherings, each with a character of its own and distinctive
interests of its own, and most of them with a common occupation. They
lie out in the former deserts, these long wasted sun-baths of the race,
they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands, and bask
on broad lagoons. For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to
desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for half a
million years, but now that the War against Flies has been waged so
successfully that this pestilential branch of life is nearly extinct,
they are returning thither with a renewed appetite for gardens laced by
watercourses, for pleasant living amidst islands and houseboats and
bridges, and for nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea.
Man who is ceasing to be an agricultural animal becomes more and more a
builder, a traveller, and a maker. How much he ceases to be a
cultivator of the soil the returns of the Redistribution Committee
showed. Every year the work of our scientific laboratories increases
the productivity and simplifies the labour of those who work upon the
soil, and the food now of the whole world is produced by less than one
per cent. of its population, a percentage which still tends to
decrease. Far fewer people are needed upon the land than training and
proclivity dispose towards it, and as a consequence of this excess of
human attention, the garden side of life, the creation of groves and
lawns and vast regions of beautiful flowers, has expanded enormously
and continues to expand. For, as agricultural method intensifies and
the quota is raised, one farm association after another, availing
itself of the 1975 regulations, elects to produce a public garden and
pleasaunce in the place of its former fields, and the area of freedom
and beauty is increased. And the chemists’ triumphs of synthesis, which
could now give us an entirely artificial food, remain largely in
abeyance because it is so much more pleasant and interesting to eat
natural produce and to grow such things upon the soil. Each year adds
to the variety of our fruits and the delightfulness of our flowers.