symbol, the house has, of late, supplanted the car. If so, this shift from the mobile open road to the manicured roots of suburbia may signify a real change in American orientation. There is a growing uneasiness about the degree to which cars have become the real population of our cities, with a resulting loss of human scale, both in power and in distance. The town planners are plotting ways and means to buy back our cities for the pedestrian from the big transportation interests. Lynn White tells the story of the stirrup and the heavy-armored knight in his Medieval Technology and Social Change. So expensive yet so mandatory was the armored rider for shock combat, that the cooperative feudal system came into existence to pay for his equipment. Renaissance gunpowder and ordnance ended the military role of the knight and returned the city to the pedestrian burgess. If the motorist is technologically and economically far superior to the armored knight, it may be that electric changes in technology are about to dismount him and return us to the pedestrian scale. "Going to work" may be only a transitory phase, like "going shopping." The grocery interests have long foreseen the possibility of shopping by two-way TV, or video-telephone. William M Freeman, writing for The New York Times Service (Tuesday, October 15, 1963), reports that there will certainly be "a decided transition from today's distribution vehicles. . . . Mrs. Customer will be able to tune in on various stores. Her credit identification will be picked up automatically via television. Items in full and faithful coloring will be viewed. Distance will hold no problem, since by the end of the century the consumer will be able to make direct television connections regardless of how many miles are involved." What is wrong with all such prophecies is that they assume a stable ٛ framework of fact --in this case, the house and the store which is usually the first to disappear. The changing relation