Book Description

Excerpt from Our Cities to-Day and to-Morrow: A Survey of Planning and Zoning Progress in the United States The planning of cities and regions has become a recognized community activity and responsibility within less than two decades. To plan intelligently and comprehensively we need to know many things which are now only half understood, and we need to compare, analyze, and appraise experience before we can be sure of basic principles. The natural unorganized power of our cities for the adaptation of means to ends has proved entirely inadequate to cope with the present accelerated rate of change. City planning, however, cannot wait for research. Many communities are on the point of being, as it were, overwhelmed on the field of battle. Those charged with administering municipal government must plan their tactics and even their major strategy under fire. This situation has forced cities and city planners to make decisions on insufficient data, - to use weapons fashioned from opportunistic facts rather than from facts scientifically chosen and wrought out. Only in the last three or four years have arisen the beginnings of a more penetrating comparative scrutiny of methods now employed and an appraisal of elements of success or failure in their application. Before we can choose the most promising subjects of research, - the subjects most likely to furnish ammunition immediately usable in the fight against congestion, against unbalanced distribution of urban population and unwholesome urban environment, - it is essential to know what experiments are being made in the cities of the United States and what results have come from specific lines of action in dealing with specific situations. We should guard ourselves, however, against producing voluminous compilations of ignorant opinions, or tabulations and listings of undigested or insignificant information. Harvard University made a grant from the Milton Fund for Research to the authors of the present book for "a survey and analysis of city planning and zoning progress in the United States." 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.