The present of traffic in the environment gives it a sense of purpose and a contact with the outside world; it is the visible link which is so obviously lacking in the housing estate where the roads simply exist to serve the houses. If the inner vitality of the neighborhood, social and visually, is incapable of supporting itself emotionally (as it is in, say, Well Hall and Park Village West) then the loss of traffic is fatal, and loneliness and desolation rule.
The original battle to segregate pedestrian and traffic, to create precincts in the which the pedestrian could enjoy freedom of movement, has been won. The shopping and residential precinct is well established. Are we than, cynically performing a volteface by extolling the virtues of traffic and so undermining the precinctual system? Not at all. But the point must be raised that a lot of planning is to some extent an abuse of the truth. We have seen the by-low town, built according to legal lights and the sterility and boredom of it. There is the danger of a more stable from the acceptance of okay planing terms and the use of abstract diagrams, or the habit of thinking in abstract terms, whereby the real process is reversed and the made negative and sterile. One could, for instance, simplify the traffic circulation of Trowbrige in the form of diagram and whilst this would be true as far as the traffic is concerned, it would not be true of the town in any other sense. Yet the danger is that diagrams and abstraction are taken for the truth and acted upon, so that in the end we shall be living in a diagram which is precisely what the world is beginning to look like. The answer may be difficult. I fell that all the values are upside down: that instead of a creative, organic movement adding fresh meaning to the formula e and abstraction int he hope that they will set fire to the environment.
