The public program
It would be a great gain if many persons could look forward to the ownership of a bit of the earth, to share in the partition, to partake in the brotherhood. Some day we shall make it easy rather than difficult for this to be brought about.
Society, in its collective interest, also has necessities in the land. There is necessity of land to be owned by cities and other assemblages for water reservoirs, and all the rights thereto; for school grounds, playgrounds, reformatory institutions, hospitals, drill grounds, sewage-disposal areas, irrigation developments, drainage reclamations; for the public control of banks and borders of streams and ponds, for the shores of all vast bodies of water, for pleasure parks, recreation, breathing spaces in the great congestions, highways and other lines of communication; for the sites of public buildings, colleges and experiment stations, bird and beast refuges, fish and game reservations, cemeteries. There are also the rights of many semi-public agencies that need land,—of churches, of fraternal organizations, of incorporated seminaries and schools, of water-power and oil and coal developments, of manufacturing establishments, of extensive quarries, and of commercial enterprises of very many kinds. There is also the obligation of the general government that it shall have reserves against future needs, and that it shall protect the latent resources from exploitation and from waste. Great areas must be reserved for forests, as well as for other crops, and, in the nature of the case, these forest spaces in the future must be mostly in public ownership.
Great remainders should be held by the people to be sold in small parcels to those who desire to get out to the backgrounds but who do not want to be farmers, where they may spend a vacation or renew themselves in the soil or under the trees, or by the green pastures or along the everlasting streams. It is a false assumption which supposes that if land cannot be turned into products of sale it is therefore valueless. The present active back-to-the-land movement has meaning to us here. It expresses the yearning of the people for contact with the earth and for escape from complexity and unessentials. As there is no regular way for attaining these satisfactions, it has largely taken the form of farming, which occupation has also been re-established in popular estimation in the same epoch. It should not be primarily a back-to-the-farm movement, however, and it is not to be derided. We are to recognize its meaning and to find some way of enabling more of the people to stand on the ground.
Aside from all this, land is needed for human habitation, where persons may have space and may have the privilege of gathering about them the goods that add value to life. Much land will be needed in future for this habitation, not only because there will be more people, but also because every person will be given an outlet. We know it is not right that any family should be doomed to the occupancy of a very few dreary rooms and deathly closets in the depths of great cities, seeing that all children are born to the natural sky and to the wind and to the earth. We do not yet see the way to allow them to have what is naturally theirs, but we shall learn how. In that day we shall take down the wonderful towers and cliffs in the cities, in which people work and live, shelf on shelf, but in which they have no home. The great city expansion in the end will be horizontal rather than perpendicular. We shall have many knots, clustered about factories and other enterprises, and we shall learn how to distribute the satisfactions in life rather than merely to assemble them. Before this time comes, we shall have passed the present insistence on so-called commercial efficiency, as if it were the sole measure of a civilization, and higher ends shall come to have control. All this will rest largely on the dividing of the land.
It is the common assumption that the solution of these problems lies in facilities of transportation, and, to an extent, this is true; but this assumption usually rests on the other assumption, that the method of the present city vortex is the method of all time, with its violent rush into the vortex and out of it, consuming vastly of time and energy, preventing home leisure and destroying locality feeling, herding the people like cattle. The question of transportation is indeed a major problem, but it must be met in part by a different philosophy of human effort, settling the people in many small or moderate assemblages rather than in a few mighty congestions. It will be better to move the materials than to move the people.
The great cities will grow larger; that is, they will cover more land. The smaller cities, the villages, the country towns will take on greatly increased importance. We shall learn how to secure the best satisfactions when we live in villages as well as when we live in cities. We begin to plan our cities and to a small extent our villages. We now begin to plan the layout of the farms, that they may accomplish the best results. But the cities and the towns depend on the country that lies beyond; and the country beyond depends on the city and the town. The problem is broadly one problem,—the problem of so dividing and subdividing the surface of the earth that there shall be the least conflict between all these interests, that public reservations shall not be placed where it is better to have farms, that farming developments may not interfere with public utilities, that institutions may be so placed and with such area as to develop their highest usefulness, that the people desiring outlet and contact with the earth in their own right may be accorded that essential privilege. We have not yet begun to approach the subject in a fundamental way, and yet it is the primary problem of the occupancy of the planet.
To the growing movement for city planning should be added an equal movement for country planning; and these should not proceed separately, but both together. No other public program is now more needed.