Metropolitan existence is a construct of private and public life so articulated as to provide each resident with a plentiful physical and economic access to both. The photosynthetic veneer, the vegetal world, must not be overlaid by a man-caused opaque veneer. The liveliness of a man's world is hindered by the physical extension of his shelter and the spatial dilution of his institutions. In a society where production is a successful and physically gigantic fact, the coordination and congruence of information, communication, transportation distribution, and transference are the mechanics by which that society operates. Swiftness and efficiency are inversely proportional to dispersion.
Scattered life is by definition deprived or parasitic.
The saddest aspect of waste on the energetic side is that no matter how much we produce and install in horsepower, kilowatt hours, gas mains, fuel tanks, coaxial cables, the linkage is inevitably far too tenuous for a truly complex and vivifying society. True life cannot be spread that thin. The fullness of man's life may lie in the balance between instinctive longing that reaches down through the flesh of ancestry and an intellectual unrest that seeks an etherealized universe. The practical as a frozen likeness of the real is obsolescence. As the universe is structure, the purpose of life is to take hold of it and help it to find its meaning, its form.