Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
discovering what he has done. It is not that all these people do not
belong to a community, but that they belong to a larger community of a
new type which your administrators have failed to discover, and which
your working theory of local government ignores. This is a question I
have already written about with some completeness in a book published
a year or so ago, and called “Anticipations,” and in that book you
will find a more lengthy exposition than I can give here and now of
the nature of this expansion. But the gist of the argument is that the
distribution of population, the method of aggregation in a community,
is determined almost entirely by the available means of locomotion. The
maximum size of any community of regular daily intercourse is determined
by the length of something that I may best suggest to your mind by the
phrase--the average possible suburban journey in an hour. A town,
for example, in which the only method of progression is on foot along
crowded ways, will be denser in population and smaller in area than one
with wide streets and a wheeled traffic, and that again will be denser
and compacter than one with numerous tubes, trams, and light railways.
Every improvement in locomotion forces the suburban ring of houses
outward, and relieves the pressure of the centre. Now, this principle of
expanding communities holds not only in regard to towns, but also on the
agricultural country side. There, also, facilities for the more rapid
collection of produce mean finally the expansion and coalescence of what
were previously economic unities.
Now if, while this expansion of the real communities goes on, you keep
to the old boundary lines, you will find an increasing proportion of
your population straddling those lines. You will find that many people
who once slept and worked and reared their children and worshipped and
bought all in one area, are now, as it were, delocalized; they have
overflowed their containing locality, and they live in one area, they
work in another, and they go to shop in a third. And the only way in
which you can localize them again is to expand your areas to their new
scale.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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