Which town?

And in this inexorable way India was pillaged, degraded and disfigured, its streams and rivers poisoned, its soils vitiated, its air polluted, its mounts bared and forests felled, its ocean contaminated and asphyxiated.

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In Her town, the camps and groupings of interests and activities, affirming and further defining more rigorously their respective objectives and responsibilities, were sharing up the economic and physical ground. Between the farmers, the foresters and the urbanists, boundaries were being marked out and a sort of protocol was being set, each group listing its regulations, needs and conditions. Newcomers were now confronted with a more determining and rigid physical situation – on one side, the doctrinal insistence on a certain type of urbanization and on another the will almost fierce to defend the life of the forests and to expand it as far as possible and on the third side the constant and growing need for volunteers and funds to work the land, support the farms and feed the community. One could only try to live in the forested or farming areas if one was ready and willing to work there as well, while if one wished to reside in the “urban” zone, one could opt for a number of activities – joining a service or a productive or research unit, or one of the many branches of regional social action, or the administration, or one of the construction centers or one of the schools -, but one also had to find lodgings. The community had no capital at its disposal to build residential quarters in advance; the study and planning teams that tried, with relative success, to function in a coherent manner around R.’s model, now discouraged any individual development on the territory reserved to the city as well as all initiative which did not fit their parameters.

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