Our civilization is properly called an urban civilization, for the forces which shape it gather in the cities and spread out from them. The cities integrate, and in many ways dominate, the entire society. An inquiry into the nature of the city, then, is also an inquiry into much that is important to the nature of civilization itself. The defects of cities are defects of the whole system of living.

There are different types of large cities, but the type which is most significant in this inquiry is the industrial-commercial metropolis. Resort cities, capital cities, shrine cities, and the like may be conspicuous, but they do not have the same kind of influence. It is the metropolis which expresses the essence of our system. All references to cities in this paper are to this type.

The most thorough studies of cities have been made in the United States, but in so far as other observations have been made they indicate that with caution the results may be extended to other large cities of the world. It has been shown that the large expanding city has a natural form which is repeated in all cities, and which is not only unplanned, but for the most part not responsive to efforts at control. There is a basic pattern which no city escapes; a spatial order of population groups and institutions and of functional parts of the economy, and a number of states of social organization and disorganization which are related to this order. This paper is principally concerned with the typical forms of disorganization, and the conditions under which they arise and some of the results of efforts to deal with them.