In our immediate environment, the average man is overwhelmed by the vagueness of terms like "comprehensive planning", "process-oriented programmes", "Five-to-Ten Years Plan", and other intellectually-laden phrases. The ordinary Manileno always hears and reads about leading behavioral scientists, educators, architects, developers, builders, economists, and city and regional planners meeting in comfortable air-conditioned quarters to determine how to build homes and communities that will be safer, healthier, and better places in which to live and watch his family grow. Within an election year he may take such news as another wave of promises or may have difficulty in separating private enterprises from government-sponsored agencies. Human needs in housing from his experiential viewpoint means a comfortable home safe from burglars, close to work and school, within reach of shopping premises, in a friendly neighborhood, something within his income level, supplied with potable water, light, and--who can tell--a telephone line, perhaps. And it also probable means some extra space for visiting relatives from the provinces or close kin studying in Manila. He would find it difficult to grasp terms like housing technology and design, market and population trends, community planning and development, expandable-contractable houses, the "suburban tundra", and indicated infrastructures. But like Henry David Thoreau's Reflections at Walden, the average Manileno would understand and feel the need to have noble villages of men: "If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go around a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us."