Page:Old Towns and New Needs.djvu/67

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THE TOWN EXTENSION PLAN
45

tunately in the past, they have allowed the building blocks to be so covered with building that there is not enough space for air or light to reach to the rooms, much less for any garden space in which the children could play. They have now set themselves the task of providing a play ground of some sort within half a mile of every child's home in the city. Perhaps the most interesting point about these play-grounds is that they are becoming local civic centres; they are beginning to provide for Chicago that grouping and organisation of its mass of humanity which hitherto it has wanted. In connection with these play grounds a large building called "a field house" is usually built, containing Gymnasia, Refreshment Rooms, Reading Rooms, Baths and Swimming Baths, a Concert and Dance Hall and different rooms for the use of Trade Unions, Friendly Societies, and other similar bodies requiring a meeting place. The "field house" with the numerous activities centred there, is becoming the focus of the neighbourhood in which it exists; and the amorphous mass of humanity around it is beginning to take on a definite relation to the centre, is beginning to group itself, as particles of a chemical solution group themselves into a beautiful crystalline form about some central point of attraction.

This brings us to consider what is the sociological reason which impels men to come together in villages, towns, or great cities. Is it not largely the fact, well expressed recently by an American, that 10 people working together can do more than 15 people working separately, that 100 working together can do more than 1,000 working separately.