The man most likely to head President Kennedy's proposed Department of urban Affairs emphasized Friday night that initiative, responsibility, and no all amount of federal and local courage can successfully contribute to the renascence of major American cities now on the decline.

"Communities, like individuals, should have the intelligence to plan for their lectures," Robert C. Weaver '35, administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, told an audience of 250 at Lowell Lecture Hall. "The best way to formulate plans," he went on, "is through government...at all levels."

Citing the "vast urban revolution" facing the United States, Weaver quoted sector Gruen's aphorism--"If we keep planning in our present direction, our cities will resemble doughnuts: all the dough in the suburbs and nothing in the middle at the hole. Will we accept without question patterns of life foisted upon us the accidents of growth?" Weaver asked.

Describing important convictions in the administration's urban policy, he said, "The small town atmosphere has appeared from our major cities and cannot be reclaimed. Yet somehow the persists that city planners can recapture the virtues of the past with green and high rise apartments in the of untrodden grass."

It is the primary task of urban problems to revitalize the central city, weaver said. Asserting that Americans the city for "the challenge of its concentration," he stated that "to abandon central cities would be to forsake the merstones of our culture."

One of the most important problems re-invigorating urban areas, he pointed is to unite the suburbs in an attempt control metropolitan growth. "Every political subdivision within a metropolitan area is the prisoner of it," he said.

Calls Boston a Disaster

Boston perhaps more than any city in America is an example of the disastrous acts of the failure of localities to join the common effort," Weaver declared. Emphasizing the need for courage "to did the best of today beside the best yesterday," Weaver added that the now on the planning boards must be social as well as architectural . There should be "no ghettoes of kind," he said, but added that this should not include eliminating differences between Americans.