The distinguished speakers in the preceding sessions of this seminar stressed rather convincingly the inadequacy of government to cope with the immense problems that confront our urban areas today. Perhaps we may find the answer to this quandary - the inability of government to meet rising expectations of its citizenry despite increasing taxation -from an oft-repeated experience of a brain surgeon working in the decade after the second millennium. A patient came to have his brain checked. Brain surgery having advanced adequately at that age, the patient left half of his brain for an extensive laboratory analysis and repair with specific instructions to return in a week. However, a month elapsed but the patient did not return. One day the doctor met his patient at a party and asked, in a rather harsh tone why he had not come back for the other half of his brain. The patient sidled over to his doctor and whispered, "I found a very good job, doctor, where I don't need half of my brain. I'm working for the federal government."
It is not fair for us to discuss further the shortcomings of the government. Rather, we must examine the other side of the coin before coming to conclusions. A look at the other side may reveal a more shocking circumstance that has been previously deliberated upon. Our people have a tendency to identify only one sector of the society. They have even acquired a national pastime of expressing their urge to lay the blame upon just one sector. This cannot be the case with us because planning has taught us that attempts at development occur as fortuitous occasions only when both private and public sectors are involved in harmonious collaboration. There can really be no effective development programs when either of the sectors deny their participation. The questions then are: Is government solely to blame for the crisis in our urban areas? If we subscribe to the concept of collaborative effort, how much can we assess the private sector for the crisis? How can you, all of us, be evaluated in the degree to which we have contributed to this crisis?
The answers to these questions will be the subject of today's discussion entitled "Design in an Urban Environment." It is a rather difficult subject to discuss with the members of the design profession even in an air-conditioned theater. Many of the decisions affecting the quality of our environment were not made in air-condtioned spaces. The significant ones are being arrived at not in the artificiality of the built-environment but under the biological stresses of the natural one.