Text 13. The Practice of Town Planning

Before attempting to describe the processes of modern Planning in practice it is necessary to inquire with some precision what are its main objects and in what direction it is leading.

The main objects of modern Planning are: Beauty, Health and Convenience. There can be little doubt that beauty should stand first as it is the quality which must run through the whole in order to lift sanitation and engineering to the level of civic design and the dignity of city life. It is of course quite understandable that for strategic reasons the word beauty was hidden under the forbidding chill of «amenity» and placed second in order. If town planning is to be complete and to avoid lopsidedness a just equipoise must be attained between these three.

Nor will beauty without health do. In many of the old towns and villages which we most heartily admire picturesque beauty is to be found, but at the expense of health. There is a gloomy grandeur about the grime of Manchester or the pall of smoke over lower Sheffield, which is comparable to the eruption of a volcano or the burst of a thunderclap, and is thoroughly typical of the strength of these cities. But though smoke may produce wonderful sunsets, we can safely say that beauty which is the cause of a higher death-rate is wrong and must be blown away by the planner at the cost of artistic obloquy or commercial grumbling.

Some of the nineteenth-century Continental Town planning was too much concerned with boulevards and public places and too little with the living conditions behind the fine facades. Conditions as to air space and light were below the English level; and yet the dreariness of our externals has produced more drab urban conditions, and even tended to affect the interior of the houses. One of the chief advantages of the lower density in modern suburban planning has been the possibility of introducing beauty, which here stands for the preservation of trees and greenery, an improved type of domestic architecture, the avoiding of monotony and the planning of the whole site to group houses together, so that besides being individually pleasing they may make attractive compositions. This aspect of beauty is so modest and so comparatively easy to be got that it should not terrify the most hardened philistine.

Beauty and health stand condemned if they prevent commercial Convenience; and it will be realized that convenience is the most clearly demonstrable of town planning advantages.

Town planning, in a word, intends to make the city in every way a more convenient place to work in, aiming at designing and remodelling its business quarters, manufacturing districts, railway facilities and water front.

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Text 12. Plan of the Modern British Town	\|	Supplement II

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