Book Description

Excerpt from Preliminary Reports of the City Planning Commission of the City of Milwaukee: November, 1911 City planning on a broad, comprehensive and scientific basis is a comparatively new art in America. Up to recent years this great country had been too busy developing its wonderful resources and accumulating vast wealth to give heed to the very important subject of beautifying its cities and making them better places in which to live. The idea that mere beauty might have more than an aesthetic value did not occur to the busy American until within the last decade. To him a city was simply a city, beautiful or ill-conditioned as chance had made it, and to be taken as it was without question. It never occurred to him that by a better arrangement of its streets and boulevards could business be expedited, or that by providing ample breathing space the health and energy of its citizens could be enhanced. It is true he appreciated the beautiful when he saw it and was quick to take advantage of that which was convenient when it was at hand, but he was, apparently, blind to the fact that it would pay in dollars and cents as well as in added usefulness to create beauty and convenience where it did not exist. All this was better understood in Europe. There the long centuries of the past had completed the commercial development of the natural resources to a far greater extent and the question was no longer how to get the most out of new countries but how to still further develop old countries. The problems of congestion, with their attendant evils, pressed the European cities as they had pressed but few American cities, and long ago the residents of many of their leading cities seriously grappled with the problems and in large measure solved them. It may be said that all of the European cities have been planned on a far more scientific basis than American cities, and in several notable instances the advance is so great that no American city, with the single exception of possibly Washington, begins to compare with them. Paris, for instance, in large measure solved the problem nearly a century ago, and Berlin and other large cities have made wonderful strides in the last half century. Paris and some of the others have found that it pays, not only for the added pleasure and efficiency of its citizens, but actually in dollars and cents. The revenue derived from pleasure seekers by Paris, and some of the Italian cities in particular, is enormous, and pays a splendid dividend upon vast sums invested in municipal improvements. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.