Town planning

“ Why the Town Planning Act may prove to be the handsomest gift this country has made to its land-owners for a very long time! I do not suppose, however, that the economic effect of limiting the number of houses to the acre will be to benefit the owners of land to this extent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The idea of town or suburb planning has not yet found its way into the minds which dominate local Public Authorities, but a few examples will doubtless awaken them to the benefits of the Act, if not from the æsthetic, yet from the economic point of view, and then borough or ward boundaries will become as unnoticeable for town-planning purposes as ecclesiastical parish ones now are for educational administration. ”

“ It considers such matters as the laying out of new roads and streets and the improvement of old ones, the location of parks, playgrounds, and public buildings, the construction of sewers, water works, and lighting systems, the style of architecture for public buildings, the enactment of housing laws. While town planning boards usually deal primarily with matters pertaining to the physical development of the town, they may also plan with reference to the improvement of the educational system, the promotion of public health, and of social needs generally. ”

“ The provisions of the Act relating to town-planning are commended by The Times as marking "a new departure in legislation in this country. Hitherto new centres of population have been allowed to grow up, and existing urban areas have been allowed to expand, without control or prevision. The result has too often been that the haphazard development of land in the vicinity of urban centres has produced slums, prevented the orderly growth of towns, and involved enormous expenditure in clearing sites, widening streets, and providing necessary open spaces. ”

“ Are we then to conclude that town-planning is merely a useless aspiration, and that its systems, if it has any, are so uncertain of general application as to be nugatory? Not so. For, to take an analogy from another craft, the system of man patching, which we call medicine, is justified by the dire necessity which says man must be healed or he dies. Similarly the study of ideal perfection in towns so far from being merely visionary, or positively mischievous is actually needful. For crises occur in the life of towns when action must be taken, decisive and costly action. ”

“ Town Planning, then, calls for a great co-operative effort to recreate in our cities worthy dwelling places for our social life. The individual must find his reward for sometimes sacrificing his immediate interests and predilections in the far wider opportunities which a co-ordinated development would afford, and above all, might I say here, he must learn to consume his own smoke literally and metaphorically. ”

“ It looked on town-planning as one of those new methods of social reform, which stand in somewhat sharp contrast with the usual aims of political parties and parliaments. The latter concern mainly the outward and public life of men as fellow-citizens in a state; they involve such problems as Home Rule, Disestablishment, Protection. The newer ideals centre round the daily life of human beings in their domestic environment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I do not mean that our customs, our land tenure, or the particular form in which we raise our revenue, for example, are not important factors; but, that town-planning must as far as possible be based on the essential facts; for economic laws have a wonderful way of asserting themselves in spite of accidental customs. If it were not so, building and town development must have been brought to a standstill long ago by our custom of raising nearly the whole of the revenue for local administration by means of rates, which are virtually a tax on the rent of buildings. ”

“ Whether from the point of view of appearance, of health, or of mere business, town-planning is the only national method of providing for the future.
It is futile to write letters to The Times about lost opportunities: common-sense would have saved the situation in nearly every case, for town-planning is idealised common-sense. People who have bought a house in a half-developed suburb wake up one morning to find a shop rising on the opposite side of their road. They pack up their furniture and flit to another half-built district a mile further out ”

“ Among these newer efforts town-planning is one of the better known. Most of us now admit that if some scores of dwellings have to be run up for working-men or city-clerks—or even for University teachers in North Oxford—they can and should be planned with regard to the health and convenience and occupations of their probable tenants. Town-planning has taken rank as an art; it is sometimes styled a science and University professorships are named after it; in the London Conference of 1910 it got its deductio in forum or at least its first dance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This distribution of population and institutions we may call the ecological organization of the community.
Town-planning is an attempt to direct and control the ecological organization. Town-planning is probably not so simple as it seems. 116Cities, even those like the city of Washington, D.C., that have been most elaborately planned, are always getting out of hand. The actual plan of a city is never a mere artifact, it is always quite as much a product of nature as of design. But a plan is one factor in communal efficiency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is for you as citizens loyally to support the action of your representatives, and to give them hearty and enlightened encouragement to carry forward town-planning schemes for the area around Manchester, to a degree which will secure for you the utmost benefits which it is possible to obtain under the present Town Planning Act ”

“ All the enterprises just described have one feature in common, namely, the laying out of sites on a plan which takes cognizance of the future, secures a due proportion of open space, variety in the arrangement of streets and the most advantageous disposition of the houses and other buildings. They go beyond sanitary requirements and take account of higher needs. They have lent force to the advocacy of municipal “town-planning,” as practised by several towns in Germany; and provision was made for this procedure in the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909. ”

“ This is one of the ways in which town-planning can serve the nation.
The development of a modern town is inevitably centrifugal; it spreads and sprawls outwards along the main roads into the country unless that tendency be checked. Every mile that it grows outwards means a few minutes’ extra time for travelling to and from work, congestion increases at the centre, and the country—as a place for recreation—is driven further and further away. ”

“ Architects have devised beautiful buildings in such towns. But they have not touched the chaos or treated the whole inhabited area as one unit. Town-planning has been here unknown. [2]
In other periods towns have been founded in large numbers and full-grown or nearly full-grown, to furnish homes for multitudes of common men, and their founders have built them on some plan or system. One such period is, of course, our own. Within the last half-century towns have arisen all over Europe and America. They are many in number. They are large in area. Most of them have been born almost full-grown ”

“ In fact there come times when it is obvious that something must be done and it is quite clear that however imperfect may be the science of town-planning and however liable it may be to fallibility in its methods of forecasting the future, that science must be called in to guide the measures for which necessity is clamorous. ”

“ The Church might help much in town-planning if it would change its policy, and, instead of dropping unconsidered and trifling buildings at frequent intervals over a new suburb, build one grand and dominant building on some carefully chosen site to which the roads would lead. ”

“ Regina is laid out on the best lines with wise prevision of the needs of the future. In the town planning quarters are reserved for manufacturing industries, business centres, residential streets and suburbs, schools and churches. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It was, perhaps, Greek influence which brought in a stricter use of the rectangle and a greater care for regular planning.
It may be asked how all this applies to the planning of towns. We possess certainly no such clear evidence with respect to towns as with respect to divisions agrarian or military. But the town-plans which we shall meet in the following chapters show very much the same outlines as those of the camp or of the farm plots. They are based on the same essential element of two straight lines crossing at right angles in the centre of a (usually) square or oblong plot. ”

“ In a very large town it is of course important to secure a certain possibility of progressing diagonally, otherwise the journey from place to place may unduly resemble a knight's move on the chess-board, but if I were planning anew a town of fair size, I would certainly retain a strict parallelogram formation for its central area and start the radiation at a quarter of a mile or half a mile from the focus. ”

“ This sort of thing has been going on in nearly all our growing towns for want of the Town Extension Plan; and most of this confusion and loss to the community can be avoided by such a plan.
It is true that you cannot foresee exactly what the development of a town will be; that you may possibly provide for a wider street than will be required; that you may reserve an open space for a park on a site where as it turns out only a sparse population will settle ”

“ Yet experience shows first that towns tend, whatever their originator or their guardians may prescribe, to take matters into their own hands, secondly that with the utmost forethought no man can plan a large town ab initio, nor can even a large section of a town be replanned with the certainty of acceptance by posterity; and thirdly that large towns are always changing the units of their formation, old houses give way to new, and one district gives way socially to another. ”

“ We now come to deal with an element of economy which will be simply incalculable. This is to be found in the fact that the town is definitely planned, so that the whole question of municipal administration may be dealt with by one far-reaching scheme. It is not by any means necessary, and it is not, humanly speaking, possible, that the final scheme should be the work of one mind. It will no doubt be the work of many minds—the minds of engineers, of architects and surveyors, of landscape gardeners and electricians. ”

“ Our towns in the past have tended too much to resemble this latter unorganised condition, and it is largely to this fact that we owe the squalor, ugliness and haphazard character of their development; for there is no doubt that the town must represent the character of the social life of the people composing it, and that it will express by its form the social organisation upon which it is based. ”

“ These give way to residences without shops, less mean but more dreary. Then follows a tract of desecrated country waiting to be eaten up in building lots, then a derelict farm, then a hideous market garden, next villas, beyond them a village, once rural, now aping town manners, beyond it, more villas and horrible new-laid roads, and last of all, very shyly and very slowly, with a gradual diminution of the apologetic sale-boards, unrural fences, mutilated hedges, and general sense of town oppression, you are welcomed by that fair and desirable thing, the country. ”

“ Work, too, would be practically completed in one ward before commencing on another, and the operations in the various wards would be taken up in due and proper sequence, so that those portions of the town site on which building operations were not in progress would also be a source of revenue, either as allotments, cow-pastures, or, perhaps, as brickfields. ”