Much remains to be learned if the application of these principles is to be ideal. For example, urban hydrology—precisely what happens to the water cycle during various kinds of development, and how it might be adjusted—is a relatively new branch of study and still needs much research. But even with present knowledge, great improvement over present patterns is possible. In the hands of a few emerging experts, planning which pays attention to soils and topography and climate and special landscape features and values can be a subtle art, prescribing villages and farms and factories in the right places, making the most of native vegetation and views and places where George Washington slept and the breezes of July. Its form on a map tends toward curved lines rather than the orderly straight ones abhorred by nature.
Yet in one simple form, this kind of land use planning has been practiced for many years in rural America by millions of farmers, who have cooperated with one another to their own mutual benefit in soil conservation programs to reduce erosion and to slow down the wasteful and destructive runoff of precipitation. We noted earlier a pilot urban adaptation of such programs on Pohick Creek on the metropolitan fringe in Virginia, where an effort is being made to develop a whole stream basin in accord with soil conservation principles, not only to avoid future flood damages and sedimentation and pollution but to retain natural areas, living streams, and many of the other features the land had before the city engulfed it. Even with the gaps in present knowledge and the probability that developers and builders are not going to cooperate as fully and eagerly as farmers, it offers much hope. For it may well betide a time when urban planners in general will have the vision and authority, together with the reinforced knowledge, to subject all new development to its basic guiding precept—a respect for the way the landscape works. It is getting to be far more possible now than it was in the past to say, in relation to a given place: "This is how development ought to proceed."
In the ring of counties nearest Washington, all of them much lacerated by sprawl that has been gobbling up some 24,000 acres of peripheral countryside each year, respect for the way the vanishing landscape works has been growing by leaps and bounds. The authority to translate it into good practices, however, is much hampered by the complexities of metropolitan reality. Officially endorsed plans exist for these counties, or for parts of them, which show quite a lot of regard for soils and topography and their appropriate use. But frequently these plans are of necessity a mass of compromises. They have had to be adjusted drastically to fit in with existing development, road networks, sewage lines, and such things, which seldom are located in accordance with an ecological ideal. They are encrusted with concepts from older plans not based in landscape principles. Differing views or interests on opposite sides of municipal or county boundary lines may gut them. Money to buy needed open space—the only way to ensure its protection—is usually short. And legal institutions that ought to be on the side of good planning sometimes get in its way.
Zoning, for example, is an indispensable tool for implementing planning, but too weak for some metropolitan situations and often too inflexible to meet certain needs. If essential open space has been protected only by zoning, astronomical increases in its speculative value may generate enough pressure on zoning boards to change the category, as happened last year on upper Rock Creek. This is particularly true in view of metropolitan plans' inevitably hodgepodge nature, which makes them somewhat arbitrary and vulnerable to attack. Bribery and personal-interest scandals often are rooted in zoning matters. Furthermore, residential zoning of the standard minimum-lot-size sort, not adapted to cluster housing and such sophistications, may actually encourage sprawl and rectilinear violation of the landscape by restricting the density of people in a place where the density of buildings and pavements is what really matters.
THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE
Tax systems can be troublesome in various ways—discouraging public purchase of needed parks or conservation areas because officials don't want the land to go off the tax rolls, preventing renewal of blighted areas by penalizing improvements, running farms out of business by taxing their fields as subdivision land, promoting leapfrogging and sprawl (in the case of Federal capital gains taxation) by rewarding speculative retention of tracts. And other government programs and policies at various levels work against good planning or have done so in the past, either by failing to encourage good types of land use or by actively promoting bad types. Traditional Federal mortgage insurance and home loan practices oriented toward standard suburban development are an example, and so are many highways and roads subsidized and routed by experts in higher realms of government.
With so much economic and legal muscle arrayed on the side of chaos and a whole army of enterprising folk dedicated to its perpetuation—some holding seats on planning and zoning bodies—the wonder is that the metropolitan counties have been making any headway at all with improving their planning process. And they have been, especially since they have begun to work together in such organizations as the Metropolitan Washington Council of Government. But, as elsewhere throughout America, the progress is somewhat dwarfed by the population pressures and untrammeled expansionism planning must deal with. Radical measures may be needed; there has been sober talk of counties' issuing bonds, condemning all vacant land within a wide radius of the city, and buying it up for gradual resale and development in an orderly and sensible way, thus eliminating at one stroke the speculative pressures and torsions that are the root cause of much of the trouble.
For under metropolitan conditions fee ownership, either of land or of its development rights, seems to give the only certainty of control over land's use. Obviously its potential employment by government is limited in a free economy, and such things as zoning and subdivision controls—strengthened and made rational—are going to have to continue as main tools, together with devices like scenic easements, which usually, however, again involve a form of purchase.
Fee ownership is the kind of control that is being exercised—by private interests rather than by government—in the promising "new towns," where certain individuals and groups are attempting to use industrial-type, long-term financing in the purchase and development of large tracts on which strong and careful planning, involving everything from industry to fish ponds, can be enforced from scratch. Perhaps the most famous single example of this kind of thing is Reston, Virginia, which is being built on over 7000 acres of pleasant Piedmont countryside in northwestern Fairfax County. It has aroused hope across the nation in people concerned with such things, for if private capital can go to work in this enlightened fashion and still come out with a profit, the implications for the future are enormous. Like any pioneering venture, it has run into some troubles, and it lately suffered a shift in management. But it is still being steered toward the same goal of environmental grace and decency and seems likely to arrive there.