Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

380 Jean Bourgeois-Pichat
79. Migratorymovements towards thetowns have geneticresults, the importance
of which has not yet been fully appreciated. The most gifted are attracted to the
towns and so the country districts slowly lose their best elements. This factor
is even beginning to produce an effect at the international level. The brain-drain
being carried out by the most economically developed countries is a subject
which should enlist the attention of demographers.
80. At the same time, it is an open question whether the tendency to create
bigger and bigger urban centres - megapolises, as they are called - will con-
tinue at the rate with which we are familiar.
The technical progress about to take place in high-speed mass transport could
call into question the existence of such ‘megapolises’. As long as man was
obliged to move about on foot, the size of towns was limited by his physical
walking powers, as it was then impossible to live too far from the place of
work. Water, the horse, the railway, and fmally the motor-car changed this
situation and extended considerably the range of urban centres.=3 Magazines
of the beginning of the century have pictures of those later known as subur-
banites arriving in the morning at the railway stations to work in the cities. A
whole new sociology developed around this new means of transport which
contributed enormously to the creation of ‘megapolises’. The motor-car, owing
to its being an individual means of transport, arrived to upset everything. In
multiplying by five the surface transport congestion per person, it has brought
cities to the very verge of total paralysis.
me new means of rapid mass transport
81. The new means of rapid mass transport which we are told are about to be
realized will perhaps involve a complete overhaul of the situation. We are
promised trains on air cushions able to go at three or four hundred km. an hour.
One can imagine that it will only need a few years to approach the speed of
sound, so it is thinking in terms of mass transport movements at, say, 1,000 km.
(6-7 hundred miles) an hour that we have to envisage the situation of our pres-
ent-day cities. There can be little doubt that no method of individual transport
will ever attain such speeds as those. Consequently, mass transport is bound to
recover an overwhelming superiority. When it will take only twelve minutes to
get to work 125 miles from one’s place of residence, the geographical distribu-
tion of populations will be based on very different criteria from those of the
present day.
At the same time, cities ought to be able to rid themselves of hundreds of
thousands of cars which block the streets every morning and evening. This
means that the transport services within cities will themselves have to be reor-
ganized. It does not seem too early to try to imagine what urban life could be
like based on such technological innovations - for these innovations will be
here tomorrow. It is on these bases that the megapolis of the year 2,000 wil func-
tion. These new means of transport could also affect the use of country homes,
since it will be possible to live in them all the year around.