Urban 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. ”

“ These policies have usually evolved incrementally in response to the pressures of the day and, almost invariably, they contradict each other and the stated settlement goals of the government. A national urban strategy could provide an explicit set of goals and priorities for the development of a nation's urban system and the large, intermediate, and small centres within it. Such a strategy must go beyond physical or spatial planning. It requires that governments take a much broader view of urban policy than has been traditional. ”

“ City planners have not all begun with a lamppost. Some of them began with billboards and thought of billboards exclusively for a long time; then they moved on to municipal art, education, censorship of movies, recreation, housing and labor. Some began with parks and advanced to health and transportation.
There is no one thing in city planning that stands out conspicuously today as the crowning achievement of its purpose. City planning is thus not a finished ideal, but one capable of, and exhibiting, indefinite expansion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By systematically neglecting the simplest elements of city planning, we have provided a large and profitable field for all the palliative devices of engineering: where we eliminate sunlight we introduce electric light; where we congest business, we build skyscrapers; where we overcrowd the thoroughfares with traffic we burrow subways; where we permit the city to become congested with a population whose density would not be tolerated in a well-designed community, we conduct water hundreds of miles by aqueducts to bathe them and slake their thirst ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Community planning includes not only provision for the proper location and construction of public buildings and streets, for water supply, lights, parks, etc., but also for the convenient, as well as wholesome and pleasant location of homes. Large cities, like London, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, have spent enormous sums of money in city planning after they have already grown up without plan. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is possible to have a degree of flexibility even in an area closely built up with expensive buildings, such as downtown districts of any large city, if the planning board is given the right to modify the provisions of the building code in return for concessions from property owners, and a very necessary widening of streets is made possible which otherwise would be prohibitively expensive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All streets being or which at any time become highways repairable by the inhabitants at large within any urban district, and the pavement stones and other materials thereof and all building implements and other things provided for the purposes thereof, shall vest in and be under the control of the urban authority. ”

“ Public buildings are often badly placed because political influences rather than public convenience determines their location. The congestion of traffic on the down-town streets, the lack of parks and open spaces in certain sections of the city, the unsightliness 207due to the myriad of poles, wires, signs, and billboards in many of the city’s thoroughfares—these things are all due in large measure to the absence of planning. ”

“ Town-planning—the art of laying out towns with due care for the health and comfort of inhabitants, for industrial and commercial efficiency, and for reasonable beauty of buildings—is an art of intermittent activity. It belongs to special ages and circumstances. For its full unfolding two conditions are needed. The age must be one in which, whether through growth, or through movements of population, towns are being freely founded or freely enlarged, and almost as a matter of course attention is drawn to methods of arranging and laying out such towns. ”

“ Programming and implementing a housing policy that is incorporated into general town and country planning instruments and supported by urbanisation plans that guarantee the existence of an adequate network of transport and social facilities ”

“ In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, high-ways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. ”

“ In this way the city acquires an organization which is neither designed nor controlled.
Physical geography, natural advantages, and the means of transportation determine in advance the general outlines of the urban plan. As the city increases in population, the subtler influences of sympathy, rivalry, and economic necessity tend to control the distribution of population. Business and manufacturing seek advantageous locations and draw around them a certain portion of the population. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”