European cities are better planned.
Many cities take little or no thought for the morrow. They expect to grow bigger and busier, but they give small thought to the impending problems which growth is bound to bring. European cities have been far ahead in this respect. If Paris is outwardly the most attractive city in the world, it is because the authorities, more than seventy years ago, set out to make it so. The best-built city in the United States is Washington, the streets and parks of which were all planned before a single building was erected.[[80]]
The broad scope of city planning.
What City Planning Includes.—City planning is the science of designing cities, or parts of cities, so that they may be better places for people to live in. It includes the arranging of streets, the locating of public buildings, the providing of parks and playgrounds, the devising of a proper transportation system, and the regulating of private property in such way as to promote the best interests of the whole community. It is, therefore, or ought to be, the center or focus of all the city’s activities, each one of which should be carried on in harmony with the general plan. It is only in this way that a great waste of the city’s money and serious inconvenience to all classes of citizens can be prevented.
Although city planning is not a new art it is only within recent years that American cities have given much attention to it. For many decades the cities and their suburbs were allowed to grow haphazard. What was once a country highway became a village road, then the main street of a town, and finally the chief business thoroughfare of a large city. To have widened it in early days would have been cheap and easy; but when a city has grown up on both sides of it the project becomes too expensive. Lack of planning is responsible for much of the traffic congestion with which the cities are wrestling nowadays.
The great importance of streets.
The Streets.—The streets are very important factors in the daily life of every community, far more so than we commonly realize. They are the city’s arteries. On their surface they carry vehicles of every sort. Their surface also affords locations for lamp posts, telephone poles, hydrants, and many other instrumentalities of public service. Underneath the street surface are sewers, water mains, gas pipes, and conduits; overhead are wires and signs and balconies. The streets give access to the shops and houses; they are likewise the principal channels for light and air, both of which are essential to life in the buildings alongside. Nearly every form of public service depends upon the streets; without them private property would have little or no value. About one-third of all the land in the city is occupied by the streets, so that proper street planning becomes a matter of great importance to the community.[[81]]
The layout of streets.
In most American cities the streets are laid out in rectangular form, with long, broad avenues running one way and narrower cross-streets the other. This means that each intersects the other at right angles and the city blocks become squares like those of a checker-board. This plan has been widely used in America because it takes less land for streets than any other plan would require and it makes all building lots of convenient rectangular shape.[[82]] The chief objection to this gridiron plan is that it makes traffic more congested at the junction of important thoroughfares. It also gives a sameness to the appearance of all the streets and hampers the development of architectural variety. European visitors often comment on this. Street after street in the shopping or residential districts all look alike to the stranger; all have been laid out with a pencil and ruler, the same widths (or nearly the same); every lot of land is of the same size; and the long rows of houses seem to be all of the same type. In the cities of Europe, on the other hand, the streets are more often curved or winding; some are very broad and some very narrow, so that each street has its own individuality. To some extent American cities are now laying out diagonal and winding streets in their newer suburbs on the principle that picturesqueness ought to be combined with utility.
The old and the newer methods of determining widths.