Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment.

This is a book about faith in the historical city. Although towns are inanimate, they assume the characteristics of their creators. Cities, like men, are embodiments of the past and mirages of unfulfilled dreams - but inevitably renew themselves unit by unit in a slow, time-bound metabolic process. City personality does not rest on material progress but on historical options faced by a specific town and no other. The current "urban crisis," and its pessimistic, self-destructive diagnosis, differs from previous environmental revolutions in its contextual misdirection. While the "hard-headed realists" are the planners and architects who know that man's reaction to his environment is largely arational, determined by purely emotional identifications with religion, wealth, education, art, amusement, charity, and family life. A history of urban origins is a history of design imagination. It is not mentioned in better scientific planning circles that man-made environment, whether good or mediocre, is the product of architecture, envisioning form-producing order.