The agricultural metaphor of my title is deliberate. It suggests the need for cultivating the urban environment, including the aesthetic dimension that is part of every place, so that it offers the conditions under which people will develop and flourish. Humane environments require time to grow and should emerge out of local needs, conditions, and traditions. What was once spontaneous urban growth of a proportion and scale to match the human body and activities that completed it must now be deliberately chosen and quickly accomplished. But the same
organic principles apply. Planning under these conditions demands a gardener who is talented and sensitive, one who understands that the balance of differences among the components
of an environment must be nurtured by being responsive to the distinctive qualities of each, to the interrelations among them, and to the unpredictabilities inherent in a complex and temporal
process. This is the essential reciprocity of people and place, and the aesthetics of environment rests on a perceptual engagement between them. The capacity to cultivate the functional and the aesthetic as inseparable aspects of the same urban growth is what makes planning an art and the planner an artist. Can there be any act more profound or scope more
significant? It must now be deliberately chosen and quickly addressed.