CITY PLANNING AS A CIVIC ASSET

GRAHAM ROMEYN TAYLOR

That the city planning idea has gotten beyond the experts and has “arrived” in the mind of the average citizen became evident at the Fifth National Conference on City Planning, held in Chicago May 5-7. The delegates, representing seventy or eighty cities and towns and a score of different states, included not only students and experts but real estate operators and business men. City planning as a civic asset was shown to have gained recognition when twelve important cities made earnest appeals for the conference next May.

It is significant that this new grip of the idea on the country accompanied an important shift of emphasis—from spectacular and elaborate schemes for reconstructing the heart of the city to practical details of city building. As Dr. Werner Hegemann of Berlin, whose stimulating contribution from European city planning proved a distinct feature of the conference, put it: “City planning should not be primarily for attracting the traveler, but for the people who live in the city. The spectacular captured our imaginations; we must turn the resultant impulse into the work of planning the every day living conditions of city dwellers.” “Psychologically it is quite justifiable,” said George B. Ford, “that American city planning began with the ‘City Beautiful.’ The ‘City Scientific’ would never have aroused such enthusiasm. However, after floundering around for a number of years we have now got our perspective and a sense of the proportion of things, and we know that considerations of health, convenience and efficiency are of fundamental importance.”

The emphasis on guiding the normal growth of cities was shown particularly in the report of the committee which has been at work a year on plans for the development of a typical tract on the outskirts of a growing city, and also in the discussion of transportation problems. The committee started with certain “given conditions.” The tract was assumed to be four miles from the center of a city having a population of 500,000; land cost was put at $2,500 an acre; costs of sewers and other fundamental improvements were fixed on the basis of business experience; and the topography, country roads, railroads and rapid transit lines were mapped. The development was assumed to be for a factory population. The committee presented nine plans prepared by nine groups of participants and these were accompanied by detailed figures covering all costs, interest on capital, profits and selling prices. In this careful attention to costs and financing of the development, the work of the committee has an especial value beyond the city planning competition of the Chicago City Club which also concerned the development of a residential tract in an outlying portion of the city. The prize plans in this competition were shown to the conference when it visited the Chicago City Club.

“No city can afford to build subways”—this was the bomb thrown into the discussion of transportation. And there was a surprising consensus of opinion that American cities have gone subway-mad. This point of view came out at a discussion at which the leading paper, written by Milo R. Maltbie of the New York Public Service Commission, was read and commented on by E. P. Goodrich, consulting engineer of the Borough of Manhattan.

Henry C. Wright of New York showed graphically that subways are predicated upon extreme congestion. The high cost of construction as compared with other methods of rapid transit does not warrant investment unless heavy traffic is assured by crowded tenements of three to four stories or more in height throughout the region served by the subway. He strongly recommended elevated structures or rapid transit lines running in open cuts, except in the most crowded down town sections of large cities. This point of view was reinforced by Dr. Hegemann who cited the experience with subways in English and continental as well as American cities.

Cheap land values and the consequent possibility of low rents were shown to depend upon cheap, though rapid and good and ramifying transportation. Without this factor it is impossible to secure a wholesome spread of city population.

How to pay the costs of the local improvements which city planning suggests received special attention in a paper by George E. Kessler, upon the development of parks in Kansas City. The system of local assessments was shown to secure practically all the results which could be obtained through the use of “excess condemnation,” with less trouble and with better co-operation on the part of all citizens, including real estate men who so often object to excess condemnation. The success of the Kansas City method was attested by a leading real estate man of that city, J. C. Nichols, who said that despite the fact that park boulevards and similar local improvements are almost entirely paid by local assessments, the property owners who have to foot the bills are now the first to demand these improvements.

Whether through modification of systems of local assessment or through the direct application of excess condemnation, the principle of financing improvements through the increase in value of the areas benefiting was felt by all to be an essential in accomplishing the realization of city plans. Two points in this connection were much discussed—first, the distance to which local assessment should go back from the improvements and the proportion in which it should diminish; and second, the question of paying locally for improvements in outlying unimproved land. The conference seemed to feel in regard to the first point that it is impossible to make any hard and fast rule and that each case could be decided on its own merits. With regard to the second point, opinion seemed to be that the local assessment should be paid in small installments over a long period and that a much larger portion should be assessed on the city as a whole than in the case of improvements in the built-up sections.

An important paper by Edward M. Bassett of New York discussed the legal powers which a city should have to enable it to carry out city planning successfully. He particularly sought to show the necessity for removing the legal wrappings which retard a city from applying the principle of “excess condemnation.” Some of his illustrations of the way a real estate speculator can secure the values which ought to accrue to the whole city were most striking. In the Bronx, he said, a speculator obtained an award for a house lying in the way of a newly opened street, whereupon he moved it to the center of another street soon to be opened. He obtained another award, and so far as the law is concerned he may continue the process with each new street opened. The exercise of the police power was also shown by Mr. Bassett to be of the utmost importance in establishing regulations for public health and safety, and in dealing with such matters as the limitation of the height of buildings.

The National City Planning Conference, as its name implies, is not so much a convention for propaganda as a gathering of students. Each session was devoted to but one or two papers, of which advance copies were in the hands of delegates. There was thus opportunity for careful discussion.

The papers were characterized not so much by inspirational flights as by a hard-headed, common-sense attention to every-day facts and conditions, and the “humdrum human mechanism,” to quote Chairman Frederick Law Olmsted, “by which city plan visions are to be realized.” Mr. Olmsted’s address on A City Planning Program dealt with such prosaic things as the system of records whereby a city should know all the essential facts about its sewers, conduits and sub-surface pipes, its poles and wires, gutters, pavement, car lines, and character of buildings. He emphasized the importance of topographical, social, economic and legal surveys, and showed how a municipality’s future city planning “office” should have an equipment of such information and a co-operative relation with all the agencies, public and private, whose activities affect the problems and efforts of city planning.

A similar point of view was displayed in the paper by George B. Ford on The City Scientific. He discussed the various types of surveys which should be undertaken and showed how a body of data can be secured, so as to reduce such matters as street widening and extension and transportation almost to an exact science. He advocated a program survey which would lay out in order of urgency the matters which the local commission should undertake. Especially he urged that it is futile to attempt to get planning results from one expert but that at least three—representing the engineering and economic side, the aesthetic side and the social side—should work together harmoniously, calling in specialists along particular lines.

The organization and functions of a city planning commission was a subject on which there was much discussion, following a paper by Mayor William A. Magee of Pittsburgh.

The Chicago plan appropriately came in for consideration, and at the banquet a toast was drunk to the memory of Daniel H. Burnham, a fine portrait of whom appeared back of the speakers’ table. Charles H. Wacker, chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission, told of the efforts, methods and experience in rallying the whole citizenship of Chicago, even to the education of the school children through a manual on the plan. He referred to the wonderful civic spirit which reached a high tide when the western metropolis gave to the nation the glorious beauty of the World’s Fair “White City”; and he expressed the firm faith that around the vision of the Chicago plan the people would again rise to a practical idealism expressed in a nobler conception of what their city might become. At a previous session Edward H. Bennett, who was associated with Mr. Burnham in the designing of the Chicago plan, discussed various aspects of a newer interest in the scientific study of such elements as transportation and housing.

Faith in the civic idealism of the average man and woman, as expressed by Mr. Wacker, was a note which well followed a noteworthy address by Lawson Purdy. Rarely does the economic and the spiritual blend as it did when he showed that so material a thing as land value becomes, when we try to distribute it equitably and for the community welfare, the vehicle for a larger brotherhood of neighbors and citizens. And in discussing the relation of the public rights to the liberty of the individual, he brought it all to the test of the law of love, so well expressed—and the reference went straight to the hearts of those who treasure the memories of personal friendship with one of the most lovable “people’s men” of our generation—by Sam Jones, the “Golden Rule” mayor of Toledo.