Man think and feel differently, relates differently to other men and his environment, work and moves about distinctly in his environment, and reacts differently as well as proportionally to knowledge and technology. Thus, to understand how man relates to the city is to understand all of life. The best anyone of us can do, is to adopt a point a view that helps to evaluate alternative plans for urban development.

The most basic needs that a proposed solution must satisfy is to be considered first. At the most elementary level, a city should be so structured and organized that it meets:

Man’s Physical Needs

1. Food
2. Water
3. Air
4. Shelter
5. Sanitation
6. Waste Disposal
7. Electricity
8. Gas
9. Transportation
10. Places for work, entertainment, exercise
11. Privacy

Man’s Love of Nature

1. Fresh Air
2. Sunshine
3. Trees
4. Parks
5. Beaches
6. If Possible, a city should be located so that it is surrounded by hills or mountains or located on the side of a mountain overlooking an ocean, or a lake, or rolling forests.

Man’s Need for Social Life and Social Care

1. Civic wealth should be adequately distributed so that poverty does not exist
2. City Facilities will need to include educational, health and work institutions
3. City will need to accommodate the old, the crippled
4. City will need to rehabilitate the displaced worker
5. City will need to have family care services such as day care for children of working mothers
6. City will need to control juvenile delinquency and crime
7. City will need to maintain adequate health and safety standards.
8. City will need to provide a man a home and a job he can take pride in.

Man’s Need for Growth

1. City must be flexible so that replacement of obsolete facilities, complexes and institutions won’t pose much of a problem.

Moshe Safdie, who is an architect of Montreal’s Habitat goes beyond these basic needs and asks the important question. What makes a city tick?
In a quote, Safdie says:

“I prefer San Francisco to Los Angeles. I prefer New York to Philadelphia. Why? The kind of concentration that is achieved in them creates certain choices, an openness of society that is not possible in the lower-density environments. I want my children to be able to meet and play and communicate with many other children on their own, not only when they are driven somewhere. I want them to grow up in an environment that is not just a place where people sleep but where people work…and where people enjoy themselves, or as the Goodmans say in Communitas: ‘The City must be the integration of work, love and knowledge.’…We want two extremes. We want the intensive meeting place, the urban environment, the place where everybody is together, and we want the secluded open space where we are alone in the country with nature. We need and we want both…this is the contradictory desire in our utopia…. We want to live in a small community with which we can identify and yet we want all the facilities of the city of millions of people. We want to have very intense urban experiences and yet we want the open space right next to us.”