Wuttke, R. Die deutschen Städte (2 vols.; Leipzig, 1904).
A collection of articles on various technical phases of city life. Article 4, “Die Baupolizei,” by Oberbaukommissar Gruner, is a discussion of the public regulation of buildings and the function of zoning and building codes in the modern city. (VI; VII, 3; VII, 1, 2.)
In addition there are available reports of zoning commissions of the various cities and numerous articles in magazines dealing with the administrative aspects of city life, such as The American City, in which digests, criticisms, and discussions of these zoning devices may be found.
5. The needs of communal life impose upon the city a certain degree of order which sometimes expresses itself in a city plan which is an attempt to predict and to guide the physical structure of the city. The older European cities appear more like haphazard, unplanned products of individualistic enterprise than the American cities with their checkerboard form. And yet, most European cities were built according to some preconceived plan which attempted to take account of the needs of the community and the limitations of the environment. There is a tendency, however, for the city to run counter to the plan which was laid out for it, as is seen, for instance, in the problems of city-planning of the city of Washington. The fact is that the city is a dynamic mechanism which cannot be controlled in advance unless the conditions entering into its genesis and its growth are fully known. City-planning, which has grown into a highly technical profession, is coming to be more concerned with studying the problems of a changing institution, with city growth, and the forces operating in city life than with the creation of artistic schemes of city structure. On the one hand the importance of devising a scheme of wholesome, orderly existence in the city is being recognized, on the other hand, the limitations of any attempt to make the city conform to an artificial plan impresses itself upon the experience of the technicians engaged in this work.
Agache, Auburtin and Redont. Comment reconstruire nos cités destruites, reviewed in Scott. Geog. Mag., XXXIII, 348–52, and Annales de Geog., January, 1917, by F. Schrader.
A criticism of suggested plans for the reconstruction of cities in the French devastated area. (III, 6.)
American Institute of Architects. City-Planning Progress in the United States (New York, 1917).
Bartlett, Dana W. The Better City: A Sociological Study of a Modern City (Los Angeles, 1907). (III, 6.)
English Catalogue, “International Cities and Town-Planning Exhibition, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1923.”
A comprehensive summary of the town-planning movement. A work to be consulted by all students of the subject. (II, 3; V, 4.)