Urban district

“ It had grown from a minute hamlet into what we used to call an 'urban district.' In that old world in which there was neither freedom nor direction, the land was divided up into patches of all sorts and sizes and owned by people who did what they liked with it, subject to a few vexatious and unhelpful restrictions. ”

“ The Urban District.—Of areas within which are administered the local affairs of the urban portions of the kingdom there are several of distinct importance, although in reality the institutions of urban government are less complex than they appear on the surface to be. In the main, the legal basis of urban organization is the Municipal Corporations Consolidation Act of 1882, which comprises a codification of the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 and a mass of subsequent and amending legislation. ”

“ All streets being highways repairable by the inhabitants at large within an urban district, are vested in and under the control of the urban council. After much litigation it has now been established that this provision does not give the council an absolute property in the soil of the street, but merely such a qualified property in the surfaces as enables them to exercise control. ”

“ In every town, town electoral areas for the election of town commissioners: Provided that any urban district or town or so much of any union as is situated in an urban district may be constituted a single urban, town, or poor law electoral area, as the case may be. ”

“ The character of the meshes in that wider network of roads that will be the country, as distinguished from the urban district, will vary with the soil, the climate and the tenure of the land—will vary, too, with the racial and national differences. But throughout all that follows, this mere relativity of the new sort of town to the new sort of country over which the new sorts of people we are immediately to consider will be scattered, must be borne in mind. ”

“ The control exercised by an urban district council over streets and buildings is to a very large extent exercised through by-laws which they are empowered to make for various purposes relating to the laying out and formation of new streets, the erection and construction of new buildings, the provision of sufficient air-space about buildings to secure a free circulation of air, and the provision of suitable and sufficient sanitary conveniences. ”

“ But while rural as well as urban district councils have the powers and duties of surveyors of highways, the provisions of the Public Health Acts relating to streets apply only in urban districts, except in so far as the Local Government Streets. ”

“ Under this clause half the rural districts of England have acquired urban powers which, being exercised by persons having for the most part an interest in urbanizing the district—jobbers in residential land ripe for development, tradesmen, contractors and local builders—have been used as an instrument to prevent the erection of dwellings suitable for agricultural laborers and to tie the hands of landowners willing to provide such dwellings. ”

“ Moreover, every urban authority and rural authority invested by the Local Government Board with the requisite powers may, and when required by order of the said Board shall, themselves undertake or contract for the proper watering of streets for the whole or any part of their district. ”

“ As regards urban districts the initiative may safely be left in the hands of the intelligent members of council, who will sooner or later move in the direction of placing their districts in line with all the other large towns in the country. ”

“ An urban council may acquire and maintain lands for the purpose of being used as public walks or pleasure-grounds, and may support or contribute to the support of such walks or grounds if provided by any other person. They may also contribute to the cost of laying out, planting or improvement of Public parks. lands provided for this purpose by any person, in their own district or outside that district, if it appears that the walks or grounds could eventually be used by the inhabitants of that district. ”

“ Teesdale In the administrative county of Durham— the urban district of Barnard Castle; the rural district of Barnard Castle; the lands common to the parishes of Lynesack and Softley, Hamsterley and South Bedburn in the rural district of Barnard Castle. In the administrative county of Yorkshire, North Riding, the rural district of Startforth. ”

“ In this district buildings may have four stories and a height of 661⁄2 feet, and may occupy 75 per cent of an inner lot and 80 per cent of a corner lot. The second district is made up of the more closely built suburbs of urban character, and here buildings may have not more than three stories, a height of not more than 521⁄2 feet, and may occupy 75 per cent of the lot if the building does not exceed 26 feet in height, but only 65 per cent otherwise. ”

“ If the difficulty should be met simply by extending the boundaries of the city, it is important that the new boundaries should include not merely those areas which are now seen to have close physical relations with the city, but a great extent of territory within which the beginnings of urban or suburban growth have started, or are likely to start, during the next generation. ”

“ Under the Local Government Act of 1894 counties are divided for the purposes of the act into urban and rural districts. In British India the word is used to represent the zillah, an administrative subdivision of a province or presidency. In the United States of America the word has many administrative, judicial and other applications. ”

“ Widths for outlying thoroughfares in a district like Pittsburgh, therefore, cannot be determined by any general rule. Each must be laid out as a problem by itself, the principal objects in each problem being to select a tolerably direct line on reasonable gradient, and so to fix the side lines of the location that it shall be possible to meet the immediate needs by constructing an economical suburban road, where it does not already exist, and ulti [Pg 37] mately to convert it into an ample urban thoroughfare with the minimum of cost and inconvenience. ”

“ Prevention is cheaper than cure, and a moderate expenditure of effort and money will accomplish far greater results in the long run if applied to the wise control of the growing suburban districts, where new streets are constantly coming into existence, than if applied to costly remodeling of the older parts of the city; but the latter is sometimes of the utmost importance, and is of direct interest to a much larger number of citizens than the prosaic work of controlling scattered suburban development. ”

“ When [Pg 301] any city, borough, or township is partly within and partly without the twenty-five mile limit, the whole of such city, borough, or township shall be regarded as within the Suburban Metropolitan District.
Section 2. There shall be an executive department created for every Suburban Metropolitan District, to be known as the Department of Suburban Metropolitan Planning, which shall be in charge of a Suburban Metropolitan Planning Commission. ”

“ Burns, supra, pages 93-95 (149 N. E. 788) , in sustaining a comprehensive building zone ordinance dividing the city into eight districts, including exclusive residential districts for one and two family dwellings, churches, educational institutions, and schools, said:
'The constantly increasing density of our urban populations, the multiplying forms of industry and the growing complexity of our civilization make it necessary for the state, either directly or through some public agency by its sanction, to limit individual activities to a greater extent than formerly. ”

“ For the obtaining of a borough charter no fixed requirement of population is laid down. Each application is considered upon its merits, and while the size and importance of an urban community weigh heavily in the decision other factors not infrequently are influential, with the consequence that some boroughs are very small while some urban centers of size are not yet boroughs. Of the present number of boroughs, seventy-four, or about one-fifth, are county boroughs. ”

“ The district I have in mind is a very common type of district: a healthy, open suburb on the fringe of London, tainted by one of those older villages in which the poorest workers are apt to congregate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We choose the heart of a thickly-populated district, and emerge from comparative quiet into a Babel of sound. A sharp turn brings us from a side-street into one long thoroughfare ablaze with light, and as busy as a fair. It is a fair, in fact; the pavement and the roadway are crowded with a seething mass of human beings side by side with the meat-stalls, the fish-stalls, the fruit and vegetable stalls, and the cheap-finery stalls ”

“ This applies no less to county or baronial boundaries than to those of parishes or other divisions. The principle which has governed the formation of the English unions, whenever the commissioners have not been driven from it by local circumstances, has been to fix upon some market-town conveniently situated as a centre, and to attach to it the whole surrounding district, of which it may be considered the capital, and in which the general business of the district, both public and private, for the most part centres. The roads of a district always converge upon the market-town. ”

“ Just where and by what criteria the new lines are to be laid is no easy question to decide; our metropolitan centers are of such various origins and in such differing degrees of development. The committee on City-County Consolidation of the National Municipal League in a preliminary report rendered in 1916 seeks to classify the urban communities in this fashion:
“The simplest type of urban county is that in which the geographical limits of the two local units are identical and the population has grown up out of a single well-defined historical nucleus. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Aristocrats in London, of course, know nothing of a northern district of New York City called Harlem, with so many streets that a learned arithmetician would be needed to number them: a district which, at the first call of spring, becomes vocal with children on door-steps and venders of every vegetable in every language. ”

“ The city should be divided into districts of such size that one man would be able to sweep the streets of his district and keep them clean at all times. Nothing being swept or thrown into the street, one man would be able to keep in good order a considerable territory. ”

“ The ward or district method of electing city councilmen does not produce a body interested in the best development of the city as a unit, the best transit system for the whole city, the best park system for the whole people, the most complete playground system for all the children. Instead, forty units, more or less, with selfish ideas fostered by local business men and property owners, are represented each by a councilman whose best equipment is his ability to get things for his own ward, and the city plan develops like a crazy quilt. ”

“ The most advanced type of the city-county problem involves the adjustment of the political to the physical and social unity of a great urban area, regardless of established boundaries of either cities or counties. ”

“ The narrow alleys in the interior of 200 or more of the large downtown city blocks of the District, although unfitted for habitation, have been notoriously congested with a large population for which adequate housing never has existed. ”

“ The residences of the rich, the municipal and provincial buildings, the church and the principal European and Chinese business houses are in the central district; while the farmers, artisans, shoemakers and other classes of people inhabit the other districts. ”

“ The state Legislative Council, after a favorable decision by public consultation of the affected population, shall define the boundaries of the metropolitan district and shall organize the same in accordance with the provisions of the national organic law, determining which metropolitan powers are to be assumed by the governmental organs of the pertinent metropolitan district.
When the Municipalities wishing to form a metropolitan district belong to different federal entities, the creation and organization of the same shall be the responsibility of the National Assembly. ”

“ The district comprises the most ignorant and most vicious portion of the city. It is full of low grog-shops, houses of ill-fame, low gambling-houses, and sailor boarding-houses, whose keepers enjoy protection and immunity, for which they pay by the most efficient electioneering services. ”