During the past few weeks readers of the press in our city and region may have noticed a number of items which bear a curious relationship. At City College, students dug themselves into a hole in the ground at a place on the campus where the authorities were planning to put up a new building, in protest against the destruction of trees and open space. The students were severely disciplined for their preservation efforts, which needless to say proved fruitless.

In Scarsdale and surrounding communities, citizens woke up too late to find that their beloved Bronx River Parkway was being attacked by bulldozers, its famous Butler Woods hacked down, its lawns and pathways eliminated, and the very heart of this fine parkway reservation, dedicated to quiet recreation, sacrificed to the demands of speeding motorists

In Bedford, further up in Westchester County, home owners stages a sit-down one day in the path of highway equipment in what proved to be a vain attempt to stop the paving with asphalt of the town's old dirt roads, which its citizens (who, after all, are the ones who use it) preferred to keep that way, in order to preserve
Bedford's rural appearance.

While in White Plains, at a conference on highway beautification (God help us, what a phrase), lovers of trees and meadows spoke up for conservation of our natural and man made landscape against the pressures to submerge them under miles of concrete for speeding cars. Other conference speakers favored more widespread adoption of so-called "cluster zoning," a planning device for land subdivision, which preserves the maximum open space, as opposed to the usual practice of covering every available acre with house lots. While planners and laymen alike urged their fellow citizens to work for tighter architectural controls by enacting long overdue regulations to enhance the appearance of the areas in which and around which all new construction is planned, whether of highways, public buildings, or private developments.

The relation of all these news items should be obvious. They all reveal the growing understanding on the part of the public of what should be the relative values in our suburban life today of landscape amenities versus uncontrolled construction, and it is a good sign. Even though the students at CCNY were, incidentally, protesting faculty authority, as such, the fact that they used trees and the open space as a means for publicizing their protest shows an awareness of an issue on their part which public sympathy could be expected. Even if, as I mentioned the other day, the civic groups in West Harlem are ostensibly concerned with more recreation opportunities; in Morningside Park, the fact that they are getting public support is also due to a general public revulsion against the sacrifice of open space in our public parks to massive building operations.

These various individual actions may seem to be unconnected, but I'd like to think they represent a slow, steady growing concern on the part of the public about the needless violation of our remaining green areas. There will be, I hope, more and more protests against thoughtless planning and especially against the type of mentality that puts the automobile and its convenience above human amenity in all its pleasant forms.

This is Robert C. Weinberg, critic-at-Iarge in architecture and planning.