TRANSIT

Our large modern urban nodes are, in their very nature, massive communication systems. In these intricately complex switchboards, men are actively involved in the buisness of producing and distributing the information that is the essential stuff of civilization - the accumulated wisdom, discriptive accounts, ideas and theories, reports of human events, laws, contracts, records or transactions, gossip, and the ideational products of the arts and the sciences.
The means by which these varieties of information are transmitted are becoming more defined, as the sheer volume that must be handled rapidly increases. Face-to-face conversation remains one of the most effective for some purposes, and for this reason certain business establishments seem willing to suffer high costs of congestion in the dense business districts. Telephones, other electronic transmission devices, and the postal services offer very effective substitutes for a great deal of the person-to-person contact that would otherwise need to be conducted face to face. These are further supplemented for mass communication by radio, television, concerts, lectures, and store displays, and by newapapers, magazines, books, journals, and other printed materials. Libaries, files, and museums store important information for later use. For all these, the urban settlement, and especially the large urban settlement, offers the most effective channels, and it is therefore the major locus of communication flow. It is there that interdependent specialists of verious kinds are best able to exchange information, services, and goods; and this exchange is the medium through which economic and cultural wealth are produced. (...)
The urban settlement is seen as aplace in which physical artifacts are spatially distributed and in which activity locations are geometrically arranged. Although a great deal of attention has been paid to the spatial patterns of personal trips, the dominant conception is nonetheless that of a static spatial arrangement. neither traditional city plans nor their underlying studies have successfully depicted the city as a social process operating in space. And yet, city planners have traditionally sought to influence social processes, and particularly the process of human interaction, by manipulating the spatial arrangements.

Melvin M. Webber , 1964 , Urban Place and Nonplace Urban Realm, University of Pennsylvania Press, Seite 86