"I guess," he answered, "it'll be a nice place when it is finished." This was a trans-Atlantic way of restating the old saying that Rome wasn't built in a day. May I take my last difficulty first? A traveller, he was an American, was asked what he thought of Rome. Unwin, a specialist-and, what is more-an expert. I am also keeping away from the subject of suburb plotting around existing towns, a fascinating theme on which you will hear Mr. (This has been done, of course, by Romulus and other Romans, by Alexander and by American pioneers). You will have gathered from my title, and from what I have already said, that I am abstaining almost entirely from the study of town-planning in its idealist aspect, the delightful and unusual pastime of pegging out a whole bran new city on a houseless thousand acre field. The third, and I don't mean to suggest that these three are all the disturbing factors I might catalogue, is that towns however perfect are always changing the units of their formation.Įach of these considerations in itself is so complex that I purposely refrain from attempting to give them names. Another is that for obvious reasons a town of size and importance cannot be planned as such from its birth. One is that towns, whether they receive regulated control or not, take and continue their disposition in accordance with certain influences which cannot be wholly checked by any laws or for that matter by any by-laws. There are three considerations which I wish to present, considerations which have an irresistible influence upon the subject we have met to consider. Please believe me, I speak in no mockery of town-planning, and if I am about to suggest to you that it is impossible to lay down a general code or science which under that name can be said to have universal application, it is not because I ignore the need of such a science but because I have some facts to put before you which show how impossible it is to secure that uniformity of circumstance upon which alone a science can be built. The aim is indubitable, but does the method, does the craft exist? In short, to go back to our bit of Aristotle, if there is an art and method to which the name town-planning can be applied there is no doubt as to the existence of its aim. So the social economic philosopher brings forth town-planning and makes it as clear as daylight that the newborn craft is to be the mother of millennium. "The man" she says "who builds a house, even if he only spends three hundred pounds upon it, takes the precaution of spending three hundred shillings on an architect and a plan but the town which is worth a hundred thousand times as much, perhaps a million times as much, is built by random accretion, by accident, by whim, by error. And why? Pure reason leaps to the answer. In fact he might even say that the more important are the towns the greater are the failures. Let us think of it thus:-the social and economic philosopher observes that houses on the whole are successful creations and that towns on the whole are-from his social and economic points of view-failures. Nothing could be neater as a definition, nothing more reasonable as a proposition. I had well nigh begun my essay with the statement that town-planning is as easily defended by logic as it is defeated by history.įrom the point of view of clearheaded lecture room reasoning it is the application to a town of that process of ordered forethought which we habitually apply to individual buildings. In other words while we admit that the expression townplanning at least implies that there are certain human activities which have an object-the creation of perfect towns-can we go the length of stating that those activities and those desires may be formulated into anything resembling a science or a method? What is its meaning? Can we define it? Still more, I ask, can we go beyond a mere academic definition and give it practical illustration? Can we in fact proceed from our definition to the exposition of universal working formulæ capable of concrete and uniform issues. "Town-planning" is now an accepted expression. Has every object an art or a method which leads up to it? That is the question which we find before us in our present subject. It was Aristotle who said this, and knowing the authorship we claim the dictum to be beyond controversy true. Every art and every method has some object or end.
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