The Philadelphia art jury created in 1912 was given this additional power by the legislature of 1913.
No construction or erection in a city of the first class of any building, bridge or its approaches, arch, gate, fence, or other structure or fixture which is to be paid for wholly or in part by appropriation from the city treasury or other public funds, or for which the city or any other public authority is to furnish a site, shall be begun until the approval of the jury shall have been given to the design and proposed location thereof. The approval of the jury shall also be required in respect to all structures or fixtures belonging to any person or corporation which shall be erected upon or extend over any highway, stream, lake, square, park or public place within the city.... In deeds for land made by any city of the first class restrictions may be imposed requiring that the design and location of structures to be altered or erected thereon shall be first approved by the art jury of each city. Nothing requiring the approval of the jury shall be erected or changed in design or location without its approval. If the jury fails to act upon any matter submitted to it within 60 days after such submission, its approval of the matter submitted shall be presumed.[160]
In spite of the complete control which a municipality has over the location and design of public structures and the creation and extension of its park system, the obstacles to the formulation of and adherence to a consistent plan are as persistent and often as effective as those which prevent the control of street development.
Expert suggestions have too frequently been disregarded by a purely political city council whose power of appropriation is a most effective check on the execution of city plans. One of the chief objections to the usual form of city government with a mayor and a large elected council of one or two chambers, aside from incompetence and wastefulness and, at the worst, dishonesty, arises from this power of obstruction. Neither the people’s representatives in council nor the engineers and architects in the employ of the city departments have been educated to the idea of a unified city. The department system emphasizes a city’s subdivisions; the political system emphasizes still different subdivisions; and neither group of subdivisions logically fits into a city plan. There may be interesting historical reasons for the combination of certain areas into this or that group; politicians may have had shrewd reasons for establishing certain political boundaries; but the topographical conditions of the site often prove the strangeness of the compound. Several sections contained in a political subdivision may be separated by considerable waterways or difficult grades so that transit between parts of the same political district is almost prohibitively expensive; and yet that district must be treated as a unit when appropriations for public improvements are considered. The ward or district method of electing city councilmen does not produce a body interested in the best development of the city as a unit, the best transit system for the whole city, the best park system for the whole people, the most complete playground system for all the children. Instead, forty units, more or less, with selfish ideas fostered by local business men and property owners, are represented each by a councilman whose best equipment is his ability to get things for his own ward, and the city plan develops like a crazy quilt.
The last few years have seen considerable development of the unit idea. One interesting step is the correlation of all the departments of a city administration. This is done, first, by the creation of a new administrative board in which are united for purposes of efficiency and economy the various departments. Thus under a board of public works or of public improvement are united the maintenance work of the city, and the construction of streets, water mains, sewers, and so forth, each of which municipal services was formerly in charge of a separate department.
The mayor’s cabinet in Kansas City, Missouri, is an interesting experiment in correlation. A weekly conference of the heads of all city departments is held at which questions from each department which affect the development of the entire city are discussed, and the policy of each department is influenced by its effect on other departments. For nine months the experiment was tried only in connection with the city administration. It succeeded so well that to the members of the city administration were added representatives from several organizations and industrial bodies. These conferences are said to have resulted in an improvement in the city’s management by the securing of a most desirable measure of co-operation between the administration and the tax payers. Kansas City was a most advantageous field for an experiment of this kind. The creation of the park and boulevard system of the city had already produced the finest kind of co-operation between property owners and the park commission, and an eager willingness on the part of the citizenship to contribute to the carrying out of the unit idea as expressed in plans of the commission.
The elimination of ward representation in city government is a recent advance toward the unit idea. It is sometimes expressed in the commission form of government, sometimes in a single city council elected at large. From the viewpoint of city planning the most notable advantage of this simplified form of government is that the administration represents the entire city and is not a collection of representatives from the several parts of the city. Other advantages due to a saving in time and money caused by a smaller body with a businesslike procedure, are no doubt real. It is more satisfactory in urging the need of planning measures to deal with a few men, whether bad or good, efficient or stupid. It is also wholesome to fix the responsibility of a policy on an administration consisting of a few men rather than to trace the responsibility through a maze of committees and motions to an irresponsible clerk. City planning legislation may chance to succeed in two chambers of a city council in spite of numbers, because of the domination of one or two individuals; but when responsibility for success or failure must be fixed, it will not be placed on those individuals but ingeniously distributed over various committees. If the single council of limited number is likely to produce better councilors, just so far city planning measures may be benefited; but there is no guaranty of this result. However constituted, the smaller body does represent the entire city; and though each individual member will have by natural and political inheritance a desire for the advancement of his own locality, he may be controlled by the greater fact that he is chosen by all the citizens of the city.
Boston is the largest city with sufficient experience to test this theory. Certain critics of the charter of 1909 tried to strike a locally popular note by alleging that wards without representation in the council did not get their share of the annual appropriations for local improvements. This statement is not borne out by the facts. The figures for the years 1910 and 1911 show a total appropriation of $2,132,881 for local improvements excluding appropriations for highways, sewers, bridges, and other improvements in which the city as a whole is interested. Of this sum, $795,163 was used in four districts which had no representative, as the term was formerly used in the council. The entire membership in the council came from six districts of the city, or seventeen wards. Distributing the amount spent on these districts among the seventeen wards would result in an average of $78,689 each, with which an average of $90,395 for each of the eight wards in unrepresented districts compares very favorably. Five members of the council of nine live in three wards whose appropriations for the last two years for local improvements make a total of $133,000. This is only one-sixteenth of the total appropriated, and the remaining fifteen-sixteenths is for districts which all together had only a minority in the council. Such evidence is an interesting corroboration of the sound conclusion that the elimination of sectional representation is an important step toward the carrying out of the unit idea in comprehensive city planning.