Man's language-based technology has altered his immediate environment, while man the biological organism has remained essentially unchanged. It is true that man lives better, has loftier goals, grander schemes, and plans that project further and further into the future, but modern man's environmentally-biochemically controlled behavior is little changed from that of his remotest ancestors. He feels elation and despair, happiness and sorrow, and knows truth, beauty, and ugliness. Conditioning may modify his responses but not his basic reactions.

So we begin with the city as a creation of man, a biological organism who, through language, discovered the means of controlling and enhancing his environment. One of the ways that he controls and enhances his environment is by modifying it to suit his purposes and needs, and one of these is the city. The fact that knowledge plus resources equals wealth is a recent discovery, but one that man has probably always known intuitively. If we look at the city in its simplest aspect, we must acknowledge that its primary function is the creation of wealth. The sum of the people, the interaction of their diverse interests, and the ferment created by the trading and commercial activity adds up to a melting pot of human intellect that has made the city the fountainhead of technology, the arts, commerce, learning, and government. The city as a human community developed in response to man's activities, but it has never lost its primary function as the mechanism which, through communication, freed man from the trap of the limitations imposed by his preoccupation with survival. The city has come to be man's outstanding achievement and has generated unprecedented wealth and inspired the great technological advances of which we are so proud. But not lasers, skyscrapers, SST's, machineguns, nuclear bombs, split-levels, TV dinners, computers, color television, electric guitars, toothbrushes, and carving knives, nor any of the other 1001 wonders of the 20th century have changed the biology of man in any essential way. By every criteria the city is a biological community and it responds to the same factors that influence the growth, development, and demise of any biological community. Its appearance may deceive one into thinking that the buildings and streets have a life of their own, but the city's activity, its functions, its very life is guided by living, growing, developing organisms who invented the city for the production of wealth and who are aided by the speech-tool behavioral response mechanism of communication—courtesy of IBM and AT&T. And it is the human element of the city that will ultimately determine its health, viability, vigor, stability, and longevity. If the city loses its capacity to reproduce itself or fails to provide for the commonwealth of its members, it will wither and ultimately perish. But if it is endowed with vigor born of diversity, with interlocking functions, and primary elements providing suitable environments for secondary elements, the city must thrive, It can do nothing else.

Above all, the city must be a place where human beings can demonstrate their humanity. This requires the opportunity for peaceful association and a built-in response network and environmental conditions that discourage violence and anti-social behavior and encourage individual creativity and progress. If man creates an environment that is basically destructive of protoplasm, the biological organism we call man will deteriorate via the very mechanisms that perpetuate him. But if the environment expands the horizons of his genetic potential, there is no reason to predict any end to the development of wealth and resources and the good life for everybody in the city. There are those who believe that life in New York City is already intolerable; that the pollution, congestion, traffic, and crime make it impossible for New York to remain a viable human community. And they may be right, for as long as the production of wealth alone is the overriding priority the deterioration of New York will continue. But the existing conditions have set in motion autoregulatory mechanisms that are driving people away, and as large organizations leave New York the wealth-producing base shrinks—but so does the pollution and congestion. As more and more people leave New York we may witness a spontaneous autoregulation of the dynamics of the city.

Art galleries, museums, universities, and the tallest buildings in the world will be entirely irrelevant if the city is not a viable community. We must understand the growth and development potential of our cities and harness them for the common good in order to make our cities safe and prosperous.

By using predictable behavior of biological communities, the basis for creating the city as a well-balanced ecosystem is possible at the present level of technology and knowledge. The biological process is an evolutionary heritage and the technical skill exists as one of man's great achievements. What is needed is an understanding of their relationship to each other, and that is urban ecology.

—Theodore W. Sudia