Urban renewal

“ 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 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. ”

“ The urban tendency of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities. There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked the evil. Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of domestic happiness. Between the two, night and morning, by electric road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class population. And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement evil. In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist. ”

“ Is not the improvement of our towns and cities, as such, a field which capital might well enter? Recent investigations by Captain Francis V. Greene, of New York, and other experts, demonstrate that, were the city's pavements as good as they should be, horses could draw threefold greater loads over them, with an immense abatement of both noise and filth. While the improvement of the metropolis due to individual enterprise and taste has been marvelous of late years, its mansions and business structures vying with the finest in the world, the city as a city is little changed. ”

“ Before leaving the statistics of the growth of cities, it is worth our while to note that certain great urban centers are developing in this country which promise to show, even in the near future, the most extensive urbanization of population known to the world ”

“ As soon as the urban population, as a result of the development of the means of transportation, methods of production, etc., is enabled to transfer to the country all its accustomed requirements of culture, its institutions [433] of learning, museums, theaters, concert-halls, libraries, social centers, etc., the migration will begin. Life will offer all the advantages of the former large city without its disadvantages. ”

“ How many people own their own homes? What proportion of the population consists of nomads, hobos, gypsies? On the other hand, certain urban neighborhoods suffer from isolation. Efforts have been made at different times to reconstruct and quicken the life of city neighborhoods and to bring it in touch with the larger interests of the community. Such is in part the purpose of the social settlements. These organizations and others which are attempting to reconstruct city life have developed certain methods and a technique for stimulating and controlling local communities. ”

“ Studies of urban growth reveal that the city grows outward from its central business district (1) in a series of expanding zones. [73] There is a “zone of transition” (2) encircling the downtown area. This is the area of deterioration, the so-called “slum”, created in large part by the invasion of business and light manufacture. A third area (3) is inhabited by workers in industry who have escaped from the area of deterioration (2) and who desire to live within easy access of their work. ”

“ The nature of the city itself has been modified. It is larger, more crowded, more dependent upon arteries, of trade and transportation, and upon the supplies furnished from the outside. The race must adapt itself to urban conditions as they exist to-day; we must learn to live and to thrive in densely populated centers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who have been dangerously brought together by the conditions of urban production. The constant struggle that has had to be waged against anything that might lead to such coming together has found urbanism to be its most effective field of operation. ”

“ Down-town—"'way down-town," in the vernacular—in latitude far south of homes and peace and contemplation, where everything is business and dollars and hardness, and the streets might well be economically straight, and rigorously business-like, they are incongruously crooked, running hither and thither in a dreamy, unpractical manner, beginning where they please and ending where it suits them best, in a narrow, Old-World way, despite their astonishing, New-World architecture. ”

“ He attaches especial importance to urban selection, as he calls it, in weeding out the best stocks. He writes—“There is no more agonising question than that of the exhaustion of our intellectual reserves by the influence of city-life. ”

“ Our Utopia will have, of course, faultless roads and beautifully arranged inter-urban communications, swift trains or motor services or what not, to diffuse its population, and without some anticipatory provisions, the prospect of the residential areas becoming a vast area of defensively walled villa Edens is all too possible. ”

“ As cities ceased to be regarded simply as centres of trade and money-getting, and became habitual homes for the richer and more cultured; as men woke to the pleasure and freedom of the new life which developed itself in the street and the mall, of its quicker movement, its greater ease, its abundance of social intercourse, its keener taste, its subtler and more delicate courtesy, its flow of conversation, the stately and somewhat tedious prose-writer of days gone by passed into the briefer and nimbler essayist. ”

“ These were the moving streets, the beautiful residential apartments, following the modern neo-functional patterns and participational design which had completely altered the pattern of city living. The Old City still remained, of course—the slums, the tenements, the skid-rows of the metropolis—but this was the teeming heart of the city, a new home for men to live in. ”

“ A progressive and dynamic civilization implies the good and bad alike. The cities, as the foci of progress, inevitably contain both." The development of suburban life, stimulated by the railroad and the trolley, and the transference of manufacturing industries to the suburbs, are regarded as factors of great promise for the amelioration of the recognized evils of city life and for the solution of some of the difficulties it offers and the promotion of its best results. ”

“ They are tearing down the ugly buildings and building upon their sites the beautiful, weaving in the almost gentle creations of the modern architects, a new city which after a little time will cease to be modeled upon Europe but which will serve, in itself, as a model capital for the entire world to follow. ”

“ Still there is a great deal to be done in the way of improvement to our streets. The move in the direction of permanent streets is an excellent one and if carried out as designed will be an improvement and saving to the city. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A large proportion of the old buildings and all the unsightly, lofty, and inartistic ones were cleared away and replaced with structures of the low, broad, roomy style adapted to the new ways of living. Parks, gardens, and roomy spaces were multiplied on every hand and the system of transit so modified as to get rid of the noise and dust, and finally, in a word, the city of your day was changed into the modern city. Having thus been made as pleasant places to live in as was the country itself, the outflow of population from the cities ceased and an equilibrium became established. ”

“ There are new cities enough about the world, goodness knows, and there are new parts enough of old cities—for examples of which we need go no farther than London, Paris and Rome, all of late so mercilessly renovated. ”

“ Let the earth shake, and fires burn, we will have here our city, better and more beautiful than ever—and more valuable—an imperial city of steel it shall be, and thus will we get even with the misfortunes of this day.
Reform in the rebuilding was needed, whatever should be the scale of beauty or utility decided upon. Fifty years ago the elevating influences of tasteful environment were not so highly appreciated as now, and all large cities are fifty years old or more. All large cities, as a rule, had their beginning with narrow, crooked streets and mean houses. ”

“ If then, there are twenty such avenues to the metropolis, it appears that the total of the regular ingress and egress will be 16,000 persons, of whom perhaps 8,000 walk, 2,000 arrive in public conveyances, and 6,000 ride on horseback, or in open or close carriages. Such a phenomenon is presented no-where else in the world; and it never can exist except in a city which unites the same combined features of population, wealth, commerce, and the varied employments which belong to our own vast metropolis. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The houses in the other parts of the city are scattered, but without ever losing sight of the regularity of the original plan; and to a person who has been travelling much through the country, and marked the immense quantity of new manufactories, new canals, new railroads, new towns, and new cities, which are springing, as it were, from the earth in every part of it, the appearance of the metropolis rising gradually into life and splendour, is a spectacle of high historic interest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ New York is improved, as the word goes, wonderfully. You will return to a strange city; you will not recognize many of your acquaintances among the old buildings; brand-new buildings, stores, and houses are taking the place of the good, staid, modest houses of the early settlers. Improvement is all the rage, and houses and churchyards must be overthrown and upturned whenever the Corporation plough is set to work for the widening of a narrow, or the making of a new, street. ”

“ It is thus, and thus only, that we can hope to have a city development truly evolutionary, that is, one utilising the local features, advantages, and possibilities of place, occupation, and people. Of course, it is needful to supplement these by the example of other cities; but it is no less needful to avoid weighting down the local life with replicas of institutions, however excellent elsewhere, if really irregional here. ”

“ There is no difficulty in finding work—profitable work—work that is really urgently, imperatively needed—the building of a home-city, and, as men hasten to build up this and the other towns which must inevitably follow its construction, the migration to the towns—the old, crowded, chaotic slum-towns of the past—will be effectually checked, and the current of population set in precisely the opposite direction—to the new towns, bright and fair, wholesome and beautiful. ”

“ As the city grows, it must of necessity climb the steep bluffs by which it is encompassed; and on these it is not too much to imagine, at no far period, the squares, terraces, and crescents of a wealthy and public-spirited community ”