Chapter II: The theoretical basis

Relationship between environmental areas and networks

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Some implications of the concept may now be considered. As applied to a whole town, it would produce a series of areas within each of which considerations of environment would predominate. These areas would be tied together by the interlacing network of distributory roads onto which all longer movements would be canalised without choice. As explained previously, in principle it would not be unlike a gigantic building with corridors serving a multitude of rooms. The relationship between the network and the environmental areas would therefore be essentially a service relationship: the function of the network would be to serve the environmental areas and not vice versa. This may seem elementary but in fact it is one of the things which this approach puts into the right perspective, it brings it home that traffic and roads are not ends in themselves, they are services only, the end is the environment for living and working.

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It follows from this that there must be a capacity relationship between the network and the environmental areas. As a rule, in most cases, the network would be designed to suit the capacity of the areas just as a water pipe is designed to suit the cistern it serves. It would be unwise, for instance, to feed in wide roads stimulating much vehicular movement from suburban areas, if the central areas were not capable of accommodating the traffic. Conversely it would not be satisfactory to redevelop a town centre with large office blocks with huge car parks if the network could not deal adequately with the resulting traffic. This second example is one where technical consequences arising from the network, in spite of its service function, exercise a controlling influence over the capacity for traffic of the whole town. The main point, however, is that the concept of a network and areas puts highway capacity, and the capacity of buildings to generate traffic, into an understandable relationship on a calculable basis.