City planning

“ City-planning, which has grown into a highly technical profession, is coming to be more concerned with studying the problems of a changing institution, with city growth, and the forces operating in city life than with the creation of artistic schemes of city structure. On the one hand the importance of devising a scheme of wholesome, orderly existence in the city is being recognized, on the other hand, the limitations of any attempt to make the city conform to an artificial plan impresses itself upon the experience of the technicians engaged in this work. ”

“ What City Planning Includes.—City planning is the science of designing cities, or parts of cities, so that they may be better places for people to live in. It includes the arranging of streets, the locating of public buildings, the providing of parks and playgrounds, the devising of a proper transportation system, and the regulating of private property in such way as to promote the best interests of the whole community. ”

“ In fact, city planning is in its infancy in this country, but its promoters are enthusiasts with a developing sense of values and they are meeting an increasing response among the people for whose interest they are working. ”

“ Although city planning is not a new art it is only within recent years that American cities have given much attention to it. For many decades the cities and their suburbs were allowed to grow haphazard. What was 208once a country highway became a village road, then the main street of a town, and finally the chief business thoroughfare of a large city. To have widened it in early days would have been cheap and easy; but when a city has grown up on both sides of it the project becomes too expensive. ”

“ It strives to arouse communities, large and small, to the necessity of such work and assists them in it, whether it be merely an awakening to the desirability of maintaining clean back yards, or undertaking a comprehensive development along plans laid down by landscape architects, involving large bond issues and the rebuilding of cities according to the latest and most approved methods of city planning. ”

“ The effectiveness of any city planning commission is bound to be dependent on the attitude of other existing administrative agencies which have as a part of their function the planning and execution of public improvements. ”

“ The improvements effected in cities through city planning commissions, both with regard to street location for the better routing of traffic, and the laying out of parks and the location of public buildings, have been so apparent, that the idea has been taken up by rural communities and a few states have passed legislation for the creation of special agencies for rural community planning. ”

“ Urban Renewal is a federally financed program of city planning which requires city governments to seize homes and other private property from some citizens and re-sell them, at below cost, to real estate promoters and other private citizens for developments that the city planners consider desirable. ”

“ Finally, the commission should at all times be a propagandist body educating the citizens to see the economy of planning in general and to decide every specific question of the city’s physical growth from the standpoint of city planning. ”

“ As a means of stimulating consideration of the subject and of promoting farsighted planning for the future, the committee has adopted as its slogan the statement, "Every American city needs a city plan now." ”

“ Property owners are in many communities no longer left free to determine height of buildings, appearance, or even the uses for which houses may be erected in any district. American cities have still much to learn in this regard from the example of many European cities which have developed the art of city planning with wonderful results in beauty of landscape and of architecture, in practical economy for business, and in the health and welfare of the mass of the people. ”

“ The next point of vital interest is that we shall secure proper homes for the people. Until town planning has done this, until the people of a city have homes fit to inhabit, in surroundings which will provide health, comfort and beauty, it is too soon to consider ambitious schemes for remodelling the central area of the town. ”

“ Joseph F. Folsom and appended to Urquhart's History of Newark, Vol. II., pp. 949-1020.
City Home: See Delinquent Children.
City Plan Commission: "City planning means development of our city according to carefully prepared plans; stopping all further random development, all haphazard extensions, and all improvements for certain favored sections or limited localities. It means considering every suggested change or improvement as to its effect on the entire city and all suburbs and nearby towns.
"City planning is for all, and especially for the man of modest income. ”

“ The development of the water front, the location of railroad terminals, the transit problem, have all been distinctly recognized as requiring the permanent attention of a special planning board representing the public interest. But in those fields where the public interest is apt to conflict with the advantage of private or corporate owners, the value of expert suggestion and study can never be as fully realized as where the execution of a plan is entirely in the control of the municipality. ”

“ Nearly every form of public service depends upon the streets; without them private property would have little or no value. About one-third of all the land in the city is occupied by the streets, so that proper street planning becomes a matter of great importance to the community. ”

“ A device included in the legislation creating some of these street planning bureaus, which aims to place the location and design of streets absolutely in the control of the municipality, is contained in the provision that owners who erect buildings within the limits of a proposed street as laid down on the [Pg 174] official plan will receive no compensation for damage to their buildings when the street is constructed. ”

“ Every planning board established hereunder shall make a report annually to the city council or governing body in cities and to the annual town meeting in towns, giving information regarding the condition of the city or town and any plans or proposals for the development of the city or town and estimates of the cost thereof ”

“ The word town-planning at least implies a certain aim, can it be said also to imply a definite and scientific method? History and facts seem to answer No. For though one may argue that as the building of a house requires the forethought of an architect, so, but in a much greater degree, does a city demand a designer. ”

“ Borrowing freely from the dramas of Shakespeare, of Hauptman, of Gorki, Toller has re-created the bitter tragedy of the abortive English revolution killed so effectively by the Reform Bill of 1830.
The Law of City Planning and Zoning, by Frank Backus Williams (8vo, 738 pages; Macmillan: $5) is an exhaustive examination of the legal basis for city planning in the United States, or rather, of the legal hindrances to a more complete development of civic utilities. ”

“ Llewellyn Jones
− + Freeman 2:260 N 24 ’20 600w + N Y Evening Post p18 O 23 ’20 110w NOLEN, JOHN. New ideals in the planning of cities, towns and villages. il $1 (3c) Am. city bureau, Tribune bldg., N.Y. 710
20–211 “The cities of the United States have not yet made many of those public improvements that are so essential to modern life, especially for the new era.... They have not yet applied in a businesslike and economical manner the methods characteristic of the modern city planning movement. ”

“ The city plan, for example, establishes metes and bounds, fixes in a general way the location and character of the city's constructions, and imposes an orderly arrangement, within the city area, upon the buildings which are erected by private initiative as well as by public authority. ”

“ While more of a general survey than a special study of the influence of the city plan upon the actual growth of the city, it does show some disharmonies arising out of the attempt to control a planned urban project in the face of growth and unexpected complications. ”

“ Down near the railroad station, where the "red-light [ 60] district" used to be, there has long stood a tract of several blocks of little buildings, dismal and dilapidated. They are coming down. Some of them have come down. And there, in that place which was the home of ugliness and vice, there now shows the beginning of the city's Municipal Group Plan. This plan is one of the finest things which any city in the land has contemplated for its own beautification. ”

“ But in a town-planned district an area is set apart for dwelling-houses, another for shops, another for factories. The position of each area is determined by local conditions, by the “lie of the land,” by the prevailing wind, and by the situation of railways and roads. There is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. This branch of town-planning is called “zoning.” Sites are reserved for municipal buildings, for schools, churches, cinemas and all the other requirements of our complex life. Roads are planned wide where heavy traffic is anticipated, narrow elsewhere. ”

“ It is evident that the predominating object in designing a plan for the city, was first to secure the most eligible situations for the different public buildings, and to arrange the squares and areas so that the most extended views might be obtained from every direction. ”

“ The Town Planning Act gives cities and towns the power to purchase land and allot it, to tear down undesirable buildings, to co-operate with any workingman's association for improving and erecting dwellings, and to buy the necessary land for making improvements of all kinds. ”

“ Much of what we ordinarily regard as the city—its charters, formal organization, buildings, street railways, and so forth—is, or seems to be, mere artifact. However, it is only when and in so far as these things, through use and wont, connect themselves, like a tool in the hand of a man, with the vital forces resident in individuals and in the community that they assume the institutional form. As the whole the city is a growth. It is the undesigned product of the labors of successive generations of men. ”

“ The most obvious and perhaps the most important step in the wise guidance of a city’s growth is the endeavor to make the streets thus brought into existence through private initiative serve not merely the immediate selfish purpose of the dealer in real estate but the permanent interests of the whole community. The attempt to control private development is made through the supervision of all plans offered for record, supplemented in a few cities by the establishment of an official street plan to which all private plattings are expected to conform. ”

“ The right to levy a special assessment for such street improvements as do not involve the taking of land, such as grading, paving, curbing, and sidewalk construction, is almost universally granted to municipalities by legislation in the United States. ”

“ The administration was then renovating it from top to bottom, opening streets and squares in the middle of the old quarters, constructing spacious promenades and gardens, and sumptuous public edifices, in a word, giving air and light and splendour and beauty to a city which was already beautiful in addition to being placed in a unique situation. I think there must be very few cities which in a few years have managed to destroy and rebuild, according to new plans, so large a part of themselves. ”

“ At the present moment the national government, in conjunction with the city of London, is spending immense sums of money in laying out parks, in building public baths, model tenements and lodging houses in some of the poorer quarters of the city. Better than all else, they are building out in the suburbs, on some of the vacant land outside the city, beautiful garden cities, rows and rows of model houses, each with its little garden in front of it, and each provided with every convenience that modern invention and science can suggest to make it healthful, convenient, and comfortable. ”

“ In the more progressive countries of Europe matters are not left thus to the caprice of individuals; in some German towns, and the so-called garden cities of England, we have excellent examples of scientific town planning, conducing to homogeneity, convenience, and beauty. The awakening social sense in this country will surely lead soon to a general conviction of the duty of an oversight of street planning and building in the interests of the community as a whole. ”

“ Part 3 Turning to the main central growth of cities, a successful business at or near the city centre which requires more space can secure it either by acquiring adjoining ground, by building higher in the air, or by moving away from the centre. To build higher in the air solves the problem in a banking and office district, but not in a retail shopping district, where ground floor frontage on traffic streets is required. ”

“ Later the social activities in educational, charitable and recreational lines, become organized and evidence themselves in schools, hospitals, theatres and clubs, increasing diversity of function resulting in increased diversity of structure. Analyzing city land according to its utilization, it may be divided into three main classes, that used for business, that for residences and that for public or semi-public buildings. ”

“ The GROWTH OF THE CITY
52Besides extension and succession, the general process of expansion in urban growth involves the antagonistic and yet complementary processes of concentration and decentralization. In all cities there is the natural tendency for local and outside transportation to converge in the central business district. In the downtown section of every large city we expect to find the department stores, the skyscraper office buildings, the railroad stations, the great hotels, the theaters, the art museum, and the city hall. ”