The Urban Line Looking at The Human Cloud, by Maurice
A. Ash (Town and Country Planning Association, 3s. 6d.), and taking in its terrifying calculations as to the likely spread of the London conurbation over the next twenty years—Mr. Ash thinks that we may be short of land for about a million of the people who will have to be housed in or beyond the Green Belt—I thought of a conversation I had some time ago with a scientist friend of mine. He maintained that the city of the future would find its most natural form in a hundred-mile-long and two-mile-wide rectangle. With a fast underground railway down the middle communications would be assured, and nobody would have more than one mile to go in order to reach open country. The city would be built of tower blocks, whose external walls might be faced with copper or aluminium, so that the whole would have the air of a great ship riding on the land. I commend this idea to those faced with the dilemmas Mr. Ash discusses in his pam- phlet, and, if they display no interest—for plan- ners are a notoriously conservative body of men —then I should like to see it incorporated into a work of science fiction—preferably by one of those writers whose books I can read even on railway journeys.
Previous page
