CITIES IN EVOLUTION
ES IN EVOLUTION
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE TOWN PLANNING MOVEMENT
AND TO THE
STUDY OF CIVICS
BY
PATRICK GEDDES
MEMBER AND HON. LIBRARIAN OF THE TOWN PLANNING INSTITUTE DIRECTOR OF THE CITIES AND TOWN PLANNING EXHIBITION
WITH 59 ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON WILLIAMS & NORGATE
14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN 1915
PREFACE
FROM opening chapter to concluding summary it will be plain that this book is neither a technical treatise for the town-planner or city councillor, nor a manual of civics for the sociologist or teacher, but is of frankly introductory character. Yet it is not solely an attempt at the popularisation of the reviving art of town planning, of the renewing science of civics, to the general reader. What it seeks is to express in various ways the essential harmony of all these interests and aims ; and to emphasise the possibilities of readier touch and fuller co-operation among them. All this is no mere general ethical or economic appeal, but an attempt to show, with concrete arguments and local instances, that these too long separated aspects of our conduct of life and of affairs may be reunited in constructive citizenship. Despite our contemporary difficulties — industrial, social, and political, — there are available around us the elements of a civic uplift, and with this, of general advance to a higher plane of industrial civilisation.
The civic awakening and the constructive effort are fully beginning, in healthy upgrowth, capable not
vi CITIES IN EVOLUTION
only of survival but of fuller cultivation also, towards varied flower and fruit — flower in regional and civic literature and history, art, and science ; fruit in social renewal of towns and cities, small and great. Such renewal involves ever-increasing domestic and indi- vidual well-being, and these a productive efficiency, in which art may again vitalise and orchestrate the industries, as of old.
Nor is this " merely Utopian," though frankly Eutopian. In matters civic, as in simpler fields of science, it is from facts surveyed and interpreted that we gain our general ideas of the direction of Evolution, and even see how to further this ; since from the best growths selected we may rear yet better ones.
Furthermore, the book makes an appeal even to the professed town-planner, though he already knows the facts it contains. For its definite principle is that we must not too simply begin, as do too many, with fundamentals as of communications, and thereafter give these such aesthetic qualities of perspective and the rest, as may be, but above all things, seek to enter into the spirit of our city, its historic essence and continuous life. Our design will thus express, stimu- late, and develop its highest possibility, and so deal all the more effectively with its material and funda- mental needs.
We cannot too fully survey and interpret the city for which we are to plan — survey it at its highest in past, in present, and above all, since planning is
PREFACE vii
the problem, foresee its opening future. Its civic character, its collective soul, thus in some measure discerned and entered into, its active daily life may be more fully touched, and its economic efficiency more vitally stimulated. With civic energies and life thus renewing from within, and the bettered con- dition of the people kept clearly in view, the interior circulation and the larger communications from with- out will become all the clearer, and be surer than before of constructive efficiency and artistic effect. For civic considerations have to illuminate and control geographic ones, as well as conversely. Idealism and matter of fact are thus not sundered, but inseparable, as our daily steps are guided by ideals of direction, themselves unreachably beyond the stars, yet indispensable to getting anywhere, save indeed downwards.
Eutopia, then, lies in the city around us ; and it must be planned and realised, here or nowhere, by us as its citizens — each a citizen of both the actual and the ideal city seen increasingly as one.
Acknowledgments must be made to many friends, especially to those of the growing guild of town- planners, to whom this book might have been dedi- cated ; and if among these an individual name had to be selected, it should be Raymond Un win's. Again it should have been offered to other fellow-workers, in matters of civic betterment, in Edinburgh, in London, and in Dublin ; and since these have largely been
viii CITIES IN EVOLUTION
women, I should have wished to offer the book to that most effective and organising of civic workers, Lady Aberdeen. Or again to those few pioneering states- men who have most advanced the Town Planning Movement — headed, of course, by the Rt. Hon. John Burns, but notably followed up by Lord Pentland when Secretary for Scotland, and now for Ireland by Lord Aberdeen, as in his generous intervention towards town planning and housing for Dublin.
More detailed acknowledgments must not be forgotten, as notably to Messrs Bartholomew & Son for permission to reproduce the population-maps in Chapter II. from their Atlas of England', further to The Welsh Outlook for figs. 16 to 19, and to the Western Mail for the perspective of the Civic Centre at Cardiff. Several blocks and photographs have been communicated by Mr Ewart Culpin, Mr W. H. Godfrey, and Mr Raymond Unwin. The frontispiece and three other Edinburgh views are in the copyright of Mr Frank Inglis of Edinburgh, and the views of Dundee and Hampstead in that of Messrs Valentine & Sons, Ltd., Dundee.
Last, but not least, I am indebted for not a few illustrations to my friend and colleague Mr F. C. Mears ; and for help with proofs, index, and illustra- tions to my wife and daughter.
The reader will notice that the book has been in type before the war, but not a line or word has been altered, and only the closing sentence added ; since
PREFACE ix
the main theses of the book and its appreciations and criticisms of German cities are not affected by this turn of events. The Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, of which so much has been said in the following pages, has fully shared in the civic history it illustrated, by total destruction by the vigilant and enterprising Em den, but is none the less in
process of renewal.
PATRICK GEDDES.
CONTENTS
C IAP. PAGES
1. THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES. . . . 1-24
2. THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEAN-
ING . . . ' . .. . - . . 25-45
3. WORLD - CITIES AND THEIR OPENING
COMPETITION .... . . 46-59
t. PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC . . 60-83
.». WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY . . 84-108
(>. THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE . . . 109-143
7. THE HOUSING MOVEMENT . . . . 144-1 60
8. TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZEN-
SHIP . 161-175
9. A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY . 176-191
10. GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 192-221
11. HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING IN RE-
CENT PROGRESS. . . . . . 222-245
12 TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 246-294
13 EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING, AND
THE NEED OF CIVICS 295-312
14. THE STUDY OF CITIES . . . . . 313-328
15. THE SURVEY OF CITIES 329-338
xii CITIES IN EVOLUTION
16. CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PUR-
POSES, OF MUNICIPALITIES AND GOV- ERNMENT . 339-358
17. THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 359-375
18. ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT . . 376-392 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION . . . 393-402 SUGGESTIONS AS TO BOOKS .... 403-406 INDEX 407-409
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Edinburgh, looking from Princes Street towards Castle and Old Town. Frontispiece
F IG. PAGE
1. Salisbury: Plan in eighteenth century .... 5
2. „ Diagram of original lay-out .... 6 ,'J. „ Modern haphazard building .... 7 •k Edinburgh : Reconstruction of old High Street house . 9 f>. „ Court in Canongate . . . . .10 (i. „ Grassmarket . . . . . .11
7. St Nicolas, Belgium, showing large central space for
markets, etc. . . . . . . . . 12
8. Oxford: Plan of, 1578 14
9. Edinburgh: Upper High Street 17
10 and 11. Population-map of United Kingdom, with inset
of coalfields . . . . . .23
12. Greater London 27
13, Lancashire towns agglomerating as " Lancaston " . . 31 14 Midland towns agglomerating as " Midlandton " . . 36
15. Clyde and Forth towns agglomerating as " Clyde-Fort h " 40
16. Miners' cottages — Cardiff: fronts . . 70
17. „ „ „ backs . 71
18. „ „ Woodlands, Yorkshire : fronts . . 72
xiii
xiv CITIES IN EVOLUTION
PAGE
19. Workers' cottages — Earswick, Yorkshire: back gardens . 73
20. Diagram, Town— ^-Country : Country— ^-Town 96
21. Newcastle : Preservation of old mill in Jesmond Dene
Park 98
22. Primitive dwellings : suggestion for boys' corner of public
park 100
23. A children's garden in Old Edinburgh . . . .103
24. Edinburgh : Confusion of small workshops behind working-
class dwellings . . . . . . .104
25. Edinburgh : West Princes Street Gardens . . .106
26. „ Milne's Court 115
27. „ Charlotte Square 121
28. „ Back of Moray Place, with drying-greens and
mews 123
29. „ An improved tenement house (1892) in
Upper High Street . . . .133
30. Expansion of a Scottish industrial town . . . .135
31. Edinburgh: Old tenements in Co wgate . . . .136
32. „ New tenement village, Duddingston . .140
33. Plan of Edinburgh, Old and New, before Railway Age . 146
34. Edinburgh : Workers' cottages, Cox's gelatine works (1893) 153
35. Port Sunlight : Cottages. . . . . . . 154
36. Bournville : Girls' recreation ground . . . •>. . 155
37. New Earswick : Cottages . . . . . . 1 56
38. Harborne Village : (a) Estate as planned under bye-laws ;
(6) as executed by Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd. . 157
39. Edinburgh railways : type of planless growth of Railway
Age, as arresting town planning and impeding its recovery . . . . . . . . .159
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv
F G. PACK
40. Frankfort new docks, showing dockers' village, with
garden, boulevards, park and lake . * . .197
41. View in Hampstead Garden Suburb .... 224
42. Parks and parkway girdle for a small American city :
Roanoke . 233
43. Plan of Cities and Town Planning Exhibition in Ghent,
1913 . . / . . . . . .271
41. Cardiff: Model of Civic Centre . . ... . 276
45. Plan of a Netherlands town (Goch) seventeenth century . 282
46. Plan of Mons : Showing beginning of fortifications . . 283
47. „ Fully fortified, eighteenth century . . 284
43. Plan of Netherlands town as example of scientific
fortification of seventeenth century . . .285
49. Outlook Tower, Edinburgh . . . . . .322
50. „ „ showing different storeys 324
51. Ramsay Garden, University Hall, Edinburgh . . . 327
52. Birmingham in 1832, with its Parliamentary boundary . 351 5.'}. Crosby Hall, Chelsea, as rebuilt in 1909-10 . . .374 54. Garden Village, Roseburn, Edinburgh . . . .381
5.5. Co-operative Tenants, Ltd.: Example of progressive
development in planning :^_. .... 383
5(>. Harton Estate, South Shields : Example of changes from conventional plan and lay-out of former years ; type easily adaptable to bye-law streets anywhere . . 385
57. New Leven : Design for garden suburb of a small
Fifeshire town . . . . . . . 390
58. Design for seal of Civics Institute of Ireland . . .391
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES
The (volution of cities is here treated, not as an exposition of origins, but as a study in contemporary social evolution, an inquiry into tendencies in progress. Difficulties of approach to civic studies, and civic betterment. Examples to arouse interest e.g. of antiquary and artist, of builder, of housewife and artisan, etc. Needed cor- rection of popular ideas, e.g. of medieval towns. The traveller and his need of "synoptic vision." Aristotle to Adam Smith. Defects of current education in delaying needed progress from abstract politics to concrete civics. Criticisms of the former : need of concrete knowledge, e.g. of Dublin and Belfast, etc. The political and the civic attitude in London affairs, as concentrating upon election returns and upon town plan respectively.
ALIKE in Europe and in America the problems of the city have come to the front, and are in- creasingly calling for interpretation and for treat- ment. Politicians of all parties have to confess their traditional party methods inadequate to cope with them. Their teachers hitherto — the national and general historians, the economists of this school or that — have long been working on very different lines ; and though new students of civics are appear- ing in many cities, no distinct consensus has yet been reached among them, even as to methods of
2 'CITIES IN EVOLUTION
inquiry, still less as to results. Yet that in our cities — here, there, perhaps everywhere — a new stirring of action, a new arousal of thought, have begun, none will deny ; nor that these are alike fraught with new policies and ambitions, fresh out- looks and influences ; with which the politician and the thinker have anew to reckon. A new social science is forming, a new social art developing — that much is surely becoming plain to every observer of contemporary social evolution ; and what press and parliaments are beginning to see to-day, even the most backward of town councils, the most submissive of their voters, the most indifferent of their tax- payers, will be sharply awakened to to-morrow. Berlin and Boston, London and New York, Man- chester and Chicago, Dublin, smaller cities as well- all till lately, and still no doubt mainly, concentrated upon empire or national politics, upon finance, commerce, or manufactures — is not each awakening towards a new and more intimate self-conscious- ness ? This civic self is still too inarticulate: we cannot give it clear expression: it is as yet mostly in the stage of a strife of feelings, in which pain and pleasure, pride and shame, misgivings and hopes are variously mingling, and from which definite ideas and ideals are only beginning here and there to emerge. Of this general fermentation of thought the present volume is a product — one no doubt only too fully retaining its incompleteness. The materials towards this nascent science are thus
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 3
not merely being collected by librarians, published in all forms from learned monographs to passionate appealings, and from statistical tables to popular picture-books: they are germinating in our minds, and this even as we walk the streets, as we read our newspapers.
Shall we make our approach, then, to the study of cities, the inquiry into their evolution, beginning with them, as American city students commonly prefer to do, upon their modern lines, taking them as we find them? Or shall we follow the historic and developmental method, to which so many European cities naturally invite us ? Or if some- thing of both, in what proportion, what order ? And, beyond past and present, must we not seek into our cities' future ?
The study of human evolution is not merely a retrospect of origins in the past. That is but a palaeontology of man — his Archaeology and History. It is not even the analysis of actual social processes in the present — that physiology of social man is, or should be, Economics. Beyond the first question of Whence ? — Whence have things come ? and the second, of How? — How do they live and work?— the evolutionist must ask a third. Not, as of old at best, What next? — as if anything might come; but rather Whither? — Whither away? For it is surely of the essence of the evolution concept — hard though it be to realise it, more difficult still to apply it — that it should not only inquire how this of to-day
4 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
may have come out of that of yesterday, but be foreseeing and preparing for what the morrow is even now in its turn bringing towards birth. This of course is difficult — so difficult as ever to be throwing us back to inquire into present conditions, and beyond these into earlier ones; yet with the result that in these inquiries, necessary as they are, fascinating as they become, a whole generation of specialists, since the doctrine of evolution came clearly into view, have lost sight or courage to return to its main problem — that of the discernment of present tendency, amid the apparent phantasmagoria of change.
In short, then, to decipher the origins of cities in the past, and to unravel their life-processes in the present, are not only legitimate and attractive in- quiries, but indispensable ones for every student of civics — whether he would visit and interpret world- cities, or sit quietly by his window at home. But as the agriculturist, besides his interest in the past pedigrees and present condition of his stock and crops, must not, on pain of ruin, lose sight of his active preparation for next season, but value these studies as he can apply them towards this, so it is with the citizen. For him surely, of all men, evolution is most plainly, swiftly in progress, most manifest, yet most mysterious. Not a building of his city but is sound- ing as with innumerable looms, each with its manifold warp of circumstance, its changeful weft of life. The patterns here seem simple, there intricate, often mazy beyond our unravelling, and all well-nigh are chang-
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 5
ing, even day by day, as we watch. Nay, these very webs are themselves anew caught up to serve as threads again, within new and vaster combinations. Yet within this labyrinthine civicomplex there are no mere spectators. Blind or seeing, inventive or un- thinking, joyous or unwilling — each has still to weave
FIG. i. — Salisbury : Plan in eighteenth century showing survival of original (thirteenth-century) planning.
in, ill or well, and for worse if not for better, the whole thread of his life.
Our task is rendered difficult by the immensity of its materials. What is to be said of cities in general, where your guide-book to Rome, or Paris, or London, is a crowded and small-typed volume? when book- sellers' windows are bright with beautifully illustrated volumes, each for a single city? and when each of these is but an introduction to a mass of literature for every city, vast beyond anticipation? Thus,
6 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
taking for example one of the smallest of historic cities — one now known to few in Britain, fewer still in America, save in association with the world-famous generosities of one of its children, steeped early in its traditions of patriotism and of literature — Mr Erskine Beveridge's valuable Bibliography of Dunfermline fills a bulky crown octavo of closely printed two- columned pages !
FlG. 2. — Diagram of original lay-out of city blocks.
Again, each specialist, each general reader also, is apt to have his interest limited to the field of his own experience. If we are to interest the antiquary or the tourist, it must be first of all from their own point of view ; but we reach this if we can show them, for instance, exactly howr one of their favourite cathedral cities — notably Salisbury, for choice — was planned. At the exodus of its Bishop from Old Sarum in 1220, he brought its citizens after him into what he had laid out as a veritable garden city ; so that Salisbury at its beginnings six centuries ago was
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 7
curiously like Letchworth or Hampstead Suburb to-day, so far as its homes were concerned. Indeed, their architects will be the first to recognise that Salisbury had advantages of greater garden space, of streams carried through the streets ; not to speak of the great cathedral arising in its spacious close beyond. Thus interested, the antiquary is now the very man to lead us in tracing out how the present crowded
FIG. 3. — Illustration of modern haphazard building over gardens.
courts and gardenless slums of Salisbury have un- mistakably (and comparatively lately) arisen from the deterioration of one old garden-home after another. He rediscovers for himself in detail how curiously and closely medieval town planning and housing, thus recovered, anticipates that of our Garden Cities ; and whether he care to renew such things or not, he can next help us with more difficult cases, even with what is probably the most difficult of all — Old Edin- burgh, so long the most overcrowded and deteriorated of all the world's cities— yet with its past never
8 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
wholly submerged, and thus one of the most richly instructive, most suggestive to the fresh-eyed observer, to the historic student. Hence here the impulse of Scott's reopening of the world-romance of history, and next of Carlyle's tragi-comic rendering of its significance ; here is the canvas of Robert Louis Stevenson's subtly embroidered page ; and now in turn, in more scientific days, the natural centre for the earliest of British endeavours towards the initiation of a school of sociology with its theories and a school of civics with its surveys and in- terpretations.
The painter may be at first harder to deal with, for he has as yet too seldom begun to dream how many new subjects for his art the future is here preparing, when our Garden-Suburb avenues have grown and their cottage roofs have mellowed. Yet we shall reach him too — even next spring, for then our young orchard will have its first blossoms, and the children will be at play in it. The builder, again, eager to proceed with more cottages, is impatient of our civic dreams, and will not look at our old-world plans of temples or cathedrals. As yet he is somewhat apt to miss, in church, and still more in the business week, what a certain old-world aphorism concerning the frequency of failures among those who build without an ideal may mean if restated in modern terms. Again, the utilitarian housewife, busy in her compact and convenient, but generally rather small and sun- less scullery, may well be incredulous when we tell
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 9
her that in what have now become the slums of Old Edinburgh, for instance, this scullery was situated in the porch, or on a covered but open first-floor balcony, until she can be shown the historic evidence, and
FIG. 4. — Edinburgh : Reconstruction of old High Street houses, with open-air galleries.
even the survivals of this. Even then, so strong is habit, she will probably prefer her familiar arrange- ment ; at any rate until she realises how, for lack of this medieval and returning open-air treatment, she or her little maid may be on the verge of consumption.
10 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
Her husband, the skilled artisan in steady employ- ment, with bigger wages and shorter hours than his Continental rival, may well stare to be told how much more there is that makes life best worth living in many a German working-town as compared with ours ; or how, were he a mechanic in Marseilles or Nimes, or many another French city, he would be
FIG. 5. — Surviving court in Canongate, with outside stairs, etc.
week-ending all summer with his family at their little country property — now looking after his vineyard, or resting under his own fig-tree. "Gibove all, let us end this preliminary unsettling of popular beliefs as we began. Rich man and poor, Conservative and Liberal, Radical and Socialist have all alike to be upset — in most of what they have been all their lives accustomed to hear and to repeat of the poverty and the misery and the degradation of the towns of the Middle Ages,
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES
11
12 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
and from which they have been so often told we have in every way progressed so far — by having put before them a few of their old plans and pictures, say from the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. For there — or indeed in any public library — it is easy to search
FIG. 7. — St Nicolas, old town of Pays de Waes in (Belgian) Netherlands : Large central space for markets, archery butts, maypole, etc.
out the old documents, as in well-nigh every town the actual survivals, which prove how grand and spacious were the market and public places, how ample the gardens, even how broad and magnificent might be the thoroughfares, of many a medieval town. What is to blame in them — and nowadays rightly enough- has mainly been introduced in the centuries since the Middle Ages died — the very worst of it within the
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 13
industrial period, and much within our own times. If a concrete instance of this be wanted, the world has none to offer more dramatic and complete than that of the Historic Mile of Old Edinburgh, and especially its old High Street, in which this is being written. For, as we have above indicated, this mass of medieval and renaissance survivals has been, and too nearly is still, the most squalid conglomeration, ' the most over-crowded area in the old world : even in the new, at most the emigrant quarter of New York or Chicago has rivalled its evil pre-eminence. Yet our " Civic Survey of Edinburgh " shows these evils as mainly modern, and that the town planning of the thirteenth century was conceived — not only relatively, but positively — on lines in their way ' more spacious than those which have made our " New Town " and its modern boulevard of Princes Street famous.
Aristotle — the founder of civic studies, as of so many others — wisely insisted upon the importance, not only of comparing city constitutions (as he did, a hundred and sixty-three of them), but of seeing our city with our own eyes. He urged that our view be truly synoptic, a word which had not then become abstract, but was vividly concrete, as its make-up shows : a seeing of the city, and this as a whole ; like Athens from its Acropolis, like city and Acropolis together — the real Athens — from Lycabettos and from Piraeus, from hill- top and from sea. Large views in the abstract, Aristotle knew
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 15
and thus compressedly said, depend upon large views in the concrete. Forgetting thus to base them is the weakness which has so constantly ruined the philosopher, and has left him, despite his marvellous abstract powers, in one age a sophist in spite of Aristotle, in another a schoolman in spite of Albertus Magnus, or again a pedant in spite of Bacon. So also in later times ; and with deadly results to civics, and thence to cities. Hence the constitution-makers of the French Revolution ; or of most modern politics, still so abstract in spite of Diderot's Encyclopaedia, of Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, each abounding in wide observation. Hence, too, the long lapse of political economy into a dismal science ; although it arose concretely enough, first by generalising the substantial agricultural experience of De Quesnay in France, and then qualifying this by the synoptic urban impressions of Adam Smith. For, as the field -excursions of our Edinburgh School of Sociology are wont to verify, his main life and apparently his abstract work were primarily but the amplification and sound digestion of his own observations — not only in maturity at Glasgow, but in boyhood and youth in his earlier homes. Nowhere more clearly can one realise that superiority to agriculture as a means of wealth, of the manufactures, the shipping and the foreign trade, on which Smith insisted so strongly, than in a ramble through the old-world merchant towns — Kirkcaldy, Dysart, and the rest— which line the coast of Fife. For in Smith's day,
16 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
though not in ours, Fife was a "beggar's mantle with a fringe of gold," as King James the Sixth and First so shrewdly and picturesquely described it five or six generations earlier ; and with exactly the same economic insight.
So bookish has been our past education, so strict our school drill of the " three R's," and so well-nigh complete our lifelong continuance among them, that nine people out of ten, sometimes even more, under- stand print better than pictures, and pictures better than reality. Thus, even for the few surviving beautiful cities of the British Isles, their few mar- vellous streets — for choice the High Street of Oxford and the High Street of Edinburgh — a few well- chosen picture postcards will produce more effect upon most people's minds than does the actual vision of their monumental beauty — there colleges and churches, here palace, castle, and city's crown. Since for the beauty of such streets, and to their best elements of life and heritage, we have become half- blind, so also for their deteriorated ones; especially when, as in such old culture-cities, these may largely be the fossilisation of learning or of religion, and not merely the phenomena of active decay. Yet even these we realise more readily from the newspaper's brief chronicle, than from the weltering misery too often before our eyes.
Happily the more regional outlook of science is beginning to counteract this artificial blindness. The field-naturalist has of course always been working in
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18 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
this direction. So also the photographer, the painter, the architect ; their public also are following, and may soon lead. Even open-air games have been for the most part too confined and subjective : — it is but yesterday that the campers -out went afield; to-day the boy scouts are abroad; to-morrow our young airmen will be recovering the synoptic vision. Thus education, at all its levels, begins to tear away those blinkers of many print-layers which so long have been strapped over our eyes.
Whether one goes back to the greatest or to the simplest towns, there is little to be learnt of civics by asking their inhabitants. Often they scarcely know who are their own town councillors, or, if they do, they commonly sneer at them ; albeit these are generally better citizens than those who elect them. They have forgotten most of the history of their own city ; and the very schools, till at any rate the other day, were the last places where you could learn any- thing about it. They even wish to forget it: it seems to them often something small and petty to be interested in its affairs. The shallow politician's sneer has done deadly work from Shetland to Corn- wall ; what should have been their best townsfolk have too long felt above meddling with mere local "gas and sewage." Even the few thinking young men and women in each social caste — with exceptions of course, now more and more counting — are not yet citizens, either in thought or deed. If not absorbed by party politics, they more commonly think of be-
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 19
coining administrators, and state officialism is far more attractive than the city's ; the " civil service " is familiar to all, but civic service a seldom-heard phrase, a still rarer ambition. Do they dabble as polhical economists ? High abstracts and sublimates of all these common types of mind are found in all groups and parties, and are to be diagnosed not by their widely differing party opinions, but by their common blankness to civics. One is all for Tariff Reform, his fellow argues no less convincingly for Free Trade ; one stands for Home Rule, and another for Central Government ; one is all for peace, another hot for war, and so on. Yet "practical politicians" as they all alike claim to be, to us students of cities they seem alike unpractical, unreal ; since un- observant, that is ignorant, of this concrete geo- graphical world around them, uninterested in it. Suppose you venture into the subject of Germany, for instance, and attempt any conversation about particular German cities and their respective activities and interests ; you inquire where the interest, say, of Berlin may differ from that of London ; where that, say, of Hamburg may partly differ, partly coincide, or where that other may be comparatively indifferent ? You soon find how much these cities are all one to them ; and you risk seeming " unpatriotic," and this to both alike, if you would have them know more. Such a Tariff Reformer, and his complemental Free Trader, are in agreement in having no suggestions, and even no use, for a Survey of Liverpool and beside
20 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
it another of Manchester, though these of all cities should surely help us towards a fuller understanding of such questions. Their neighbours at the next beer-counter or tea-table, hotly discussing Unionism and Home Rule, and thus necessarily bandying " Belfast " and " Dublin," are commonly no less poor in those concrete images of either city, which our civic studies are accumulating ; and hence in any verifiable general ideas about them also. " Boston," it is said, "is not a place; it is a state of mind." Does not the same apply to the " Belfast " and the " Dublin " we hear so much of, whether in Parliament or in Press? After spending a single summer (of course a time most insufficient, but more than most of even the leaders of controversy would care to give) upon the study of these two great cities, one becomes deeply impressed by this distrust. Neither city is so simple as it is made out.
To get down to the essential facts and processes of the life of cities, let us take a city where there is no burning political question prominent just now. Say, then, Edinburgh, of which our survey, many years in progress, is least incomplete.
Edinburgh ? Edinburgh ! A Scottish member would be the first to blush for such provincialism. Is he still a student? Admittedly not. We have roused the politician, and he reproves us in vigorous strain. He is not going back to the Heptarchy, that he should be asked to map out its petty provinces, much less survey their constituent boroughs : he is
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES 21
not going to concern himself with the parish pump ! Well, though the very importance of London makes it easier to begin with smaller and more intelligible places, let us return thither and do our best.
Some years ago three or four members of the Sociological Society, including the writer, were honoured by an invitation to take part in a sym- posium, which agreed to dine at one of the great political clubs and then to discuss " The Possible Future of London Government." We listened meekly and long, gradually learning what this title meant : not, as we innocently had expected, and even imagined we had been promised, a foresight of better organisation for the great city, a discussion of what improvements and expansions this better organisation might realise, and even some vision of Utopia beyond. Not at all. It amounted to nothing, in brief, save the transposition of Ins and Outs, the substitution/^ of Outs for Ins. Only when in the fulness of time this subject was temporarily exhausted, was it re- membered that a sociological deputation was in attendance. We were then asked to speak : and now, to do the chairman justice, quite to the point, as we had understood it. So our first spokesman began — "May I have a plan of London?" "Certainly," said the chairman ; but there was none forthcoming. " Then an atlas will do " (remembering that the club possesses a not inconsiderable library). " Certainly ; what atlas?" "Conveniently the Royal Geographical Society's Atlas of England and Wales." The waiter
22 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
again returns with the librarian's regrets that they have not got it. " Well, any atlas at all 1 There will surely be some map of London, on which we can make out its constituent and adjacent boroughs?" Final return of waiter — " Librarian very sorry, sir ; he has no atlas in the library." Our spokesman's opening under these circumstances was brief. " That, gentlemen, expresses clearly the difference between your political idea of London and our sociological one. We have understood you perfectly ; your point of view was very interesting to us ; but only when you have got an atlas, and used it, will you understand ours." However, he drew a rough plan ; and we ex- plained our views as best we could — but with scanty discussion — and soon farewells, not followed by reinvitation.
Hence we have to appeal to the reader, their accepted judge, as here ours. Has he an atlas on which cities can be made out ? At any rate he has access to one — the Royal Geographical Society's Atlas of England and Wales aforesaid (Bartholomew, Edinburgh, 1902) — in the nearest public library. If it be not there, let the librarian have no peace till he gets it. For he will find that it contains the one and only really good map he has ever seen — indeed the only adequate one yet in existence — of the distribu- tion of the population of England ; London and its boroughs, and all the towns of England as well ; but no longer as the mere dots scattered over the map, which we learned long ago at school before we were
THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES
23
FIGS. 10 and 11.— Population-map of United Kingdom, with inset of Coalfields of same.
24 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
interested in them, and so have largely forgotten, like so much of the same kind. By courtesy of its publishers we here supply a reproduction of it ; but as this is necessarily greatly reduced, and moreover without colouring, reference should also be made to the large and vivid original. We shall see some of its uses in the next chapter.
CHAPTER II
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING
The Population-Map and its uses. London ("Greater London") as a spreading man-reef. Even its modern form of government, afforded by the L.C.C., is constantly being outgrown. Need of inquiry into smaller cities and city-groups. But here the same growth-process appears, industrial towns and cities uniting into vast city-regions, " conurbations," which the broadest surveys are needed to realise. Conception of urban Lancashire as the vastest of conurbations, exceeding Greater London itself, and yet now demanding com- prehensive foresight and civic statesmanship as a whole. Beside this vast "Lancaston" are arising other colossal city-groups, here generalised as "West Riding," "South Riding," " Midlandton," 'k Southwaleston," and " Tyne-Wear-Tees." Thus is arising a veritable New Heptarchy, whose water supplies and coalfields, and kindred local affairs, are thus the essentials of national existence, no longer negligible as the mere "parish pump" and "coal-cellar" of metropolitan politics. Similar conception of Greater Glasgow and Edinburgh, as " Clyde- Forth." New forms of civic and rural organisation thus becoming needed, yet before these, fuller surveys, deeper diagnoses ; and further again, preliminary con- ferences— representations of all concerned, of all aspects therefore, as well as interests.
GIVEN, then, our population-map, what has it to show us ? Starting from the most generally known before proceeding towards the less familiar, observe first the mapping of London — here plainly shown, as it is properly known, as Greater London — with its vast population streaming out in all directions — east, west, north and south — flooding all the levels, flowing up
25
26 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
the main Thames valley and all the minor ones, filling them up, crowded and dark, and leaving only the intervening patches of high ground pale. Here, then, and in the coloured original of course more clearly, we have the first, and (up to the time of its making) the only, fairly accurate picture of the growing of Greater London. This octopus of London, polypus rather, is something curious ex- ceedingly, a vast irregular growth without previous parallel in the world of life — perhaps likest to the spreadings of a great coral reef. Like this, it has a stony skeleton, and living polypes — call it, then, a "man-reef" if you will. Onward it grows, thinly at first, the pale tints spreading further and faster than the others, but the deeper tints of thicker population at every point steadily following on. Within lies a dark and crowded area; of which, however, the daily pulsating centre calls on us to seek some fresh comparison to higher than coralline life. Here, at any rate, all will agree, is an approximation to the real aspect of Greater London as distinguished from Historic London. What matter to us, who look at it for the moment in this detached way from very far above, or even really to the actual citizens them- selves to-day, those old boundaries of the counties, which were once traced so painfully and are still so strictly maintained, from use and wont or for purposes other than practical ones ? What really matter nowadays the divisions between innumerable con- stituent villages and minor boroughs whose historic
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 27
names are here swallowed up, apparently for ever, like those microscopic plants, those tiny plants and animals, which a big spreading amosba so easily includes, so resistlessly devours? Here for most practical purposes is obviously a vast new unity, long ago well described as "a province covered with
FIG. 12. — Greater London.
houses." Indeed a house-province, spreading over, absorbing, a great part of south-east England. Even the outlying patches of dense population already essentially belong to it ; some for practical purposes entirely, like Brighton. Instead of the ^dJines_Qf divsion we have new lines of union : the very word "lines" nowadays most readily suggesting the rail- ways, which are the throbbing arteries, the roaring pulses of the intensely living whole ; or, again, sug- gesting 4the telegraph wires running beside them, so
28 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
many nerves, each carrying impulses of idea and action either way. It is interesting, it is necessary even, to make an historic survey of London — an embryology, as it were — of this colossal whole. We should, of course, look first into its two historic cities ; we should count in its many boroughs as they grew up before being absorbed ; we should take note of, however easily we forget, its innumerable absorbed old villages and hamlets, its ever new and ever spreading dormitory areas — loosely built and distant for the rich, nearer and more crowded for the middle class, and — where shall we seek or put the worker or the poor? We see, we recognise these many corporate or at least associated units of the body politic, all growing more and more fully into one vast agglomerate, and this with its own larger corporate government, its County Council, Yet even this is already far outgrown ; but in time, if the growth- process continues, as in every way obviously under present conditions it must, this governing body must overtake the spreading growth, and bring all that is really functional London into its province, with economy and advantage to the vast majority of all concerned. Of course, in a general way, all this is already known to the reader — to Londoners, greater or smaller ; but does it not gain a new vividness with such a map before us, a new suggestiveness also ? Do we not see, and more and more clearly as we study it, the need of a thorough revision of our traditional ideas and boundaries of country and
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 29
town ? As historians and topographers we cannot too faithfully conserve the record of all these absorbed elements ; but as practical men governing, or being governed, we have practically done with them. Let the Lord Mayor of London and his Corporation survive by all means, as historic monuments and for auld lang syne ; let there be for the historic City, and for the neighbouring boroughs — not merely West- minster, but every regional unit that can practically justify it, and so far as may be — local autonomy too. We are making no plea for over-centralisation ; on the contrary, we are inclined to think that many ganglia may be needed to maintain the health of so vast and multi-radiate a body politic. But the essential thing is that common arrangements for life and health and efficiency be made in the main according to the present and the opening develop- ments, and not maintained unduly upon the lines of history ; otherwise we shall continue to have local friction, overlapping and wastage, arrests and en- cystments, congestions, paralysis even, instead of the general and local health and economy we surely all of us desire.
Look now at the map of London with any friend, or, if possible, with two — a Progressive and a Moderate. What real difference survives between them when they sit down like plain, open-minded citizens to look at the map — the original, if possible, we again repeat. Do they not agree that both their parties would do well to sit down to it also, to survey the whole
30 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
situation afresh ? If so, our plea for City Survey is growing intelligible ; and even its economy, its positive fruitfulness, would before long begin to appear. As, however, our Progressive and Moderate friends continue these studies, and as the vastness of the problems of London thus increases upon them, they will admit that they are, separately or collect- ively, unable clearly to realise all that is going on in this vast man-reef, and still more to foresee what the morrow will bring forth. Still, one has this definite bit of knowledge and the other that — now of the part of London where he was brought up or lived as a young man or of the places where he works and lives now. So gradually we piece together in conversation a good deal of useful knowledge, it may be even of practical suggestion, here and there. But as our two type- Londoners' studies go on, as with growing interest they would, they would soon come to new points of difficulty, to problems too vast readily to be grappled with ; and one would ask another, " Cannot we learn something as to this from what they are doing in smaller places, in simpler cities than this tremendous London of ours ? There is Birmingham, it might help us." The other might agree ; and even remember that he had heard from an American friend of an active municipality in Glasgow. Suppose they look them up in the atlas. Alas ! these also have spread beyond the simple dots we learned to identify as school-boys ; and instead we see great and growing masses, each essentially like another London. Let us
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 31
try Lancashire, with its great cities ; that will surely help us. There is Manchester, with its great Liberal and Free Trade record ; there is Liverpool, with its equally strong Conservatism ; they surely must have threshed matters out between them. But behold, upon our map these, too, are fast becoming little more than historic expressions. The fact is that we have
FIG. 13. — Lancashire towns agglomerating as " Lancaston."
here another vast province almost covered with house- groups, swiftly spreading into one, and already con- nected up at many points, and sometimes by more than sufficient density of population along the main lines of communication. Here, far more than even Lancashire commonly realises, is growing up again another Greater London as it were — a city-region of which Liverpool is the seaport and Manchester the market, now with its canal port also ; while Oldham, and the many other factory towns, more accurately called " factory districts," are the workshops. Even
32 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
if this process be not in all respects so far advanced as in London, and as yet not organised in practice under any common government, is it not becoming fairly plain, a matter of reasonable foresight, that if growth and progress are to continue much longer as they have long been doing — in some respects of late faster than ever — the separate and detached towns, whose names we learned at school and still for local purposes employ, will become mainly of minor and district usefulness, postal and what not, like the practically unified cities and boroughs of London ? Hence, if we are to avoid the many mistakes and misfortunes of London through the past delay and present confusions of its organisation and government, is it not time to be thinking of, and even to be start- ing, a unified survey of Urban Lancashire ? This, as in the case of Greater London, we should consider at every point with the utmost respect to local history and even to administrative autonomy, yet also as part of a greater whole, already only too much consol- idated at many points, and still growing together. Is it asked, " Of what use is all this ? " Of many uses, but enough here if we cite two— Public Health and Town Planning. Only a word, then, of each ; and first Public Health.
These great communities are already exercised— yet in most cases not nearly exercised enough — about their sanitation and their water supply ; and here our peripatetic Health Congresses and their papers have some arousing influence, though not yet sufficient.
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 33
Moreover, if better crops of human population (as we are nil becoming determined) are to be grown than the present one, the question of a fuller and a far more vital access of youth to the country and to country life and occupations must assume an in- comparably greater importance, and correspondingly greater space than that which has yet been given it by municipalities even with the most exemplary of Parks Departments, bright patches though these show amid our vast labyrinths of streets.
Even in the town-planning movement this en- larged way of looking at our enlarging cities is not nearly common enough. The architect is accustomed to single buildings, or to street plans at most ; the city engineer is accustomed to streets, or to street- quarters at most ; and both are reluctant to enlarge their vision. They still speak as if any such wide outlook and foresight were " ahead of the times " — " might be useful fifty years hence " — and so on through a dozen variants of the grumbling protests which are a main symptom of the senile phase, which fixity to environment may bring on at all ages. But now, returning to Public Health, in each and every one of the Congresses of Health and Sanitation which now meet so anxiously from year to year in one after another of these great cities, is it not obvious to every member of these, as regards the large cities around them, that they are late enough even if they begin forthwith ? Their accesses to Nature and natural conditions have already been
34 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
three-fourths destroyed ; indeed more, so far as the working mother and her children are concerned— that is, the nation of to-morrow. The neighbouring great towns are rapidly linking up by tramways and streets no less than railways ; while great open spaces, which might have been not so long ago cheaply secured as unrivalled lungs of life, are already all but irrecoverable.
Here are already solid arguments for our proposed survey, and they might be strengthened and amplified, were not our problem here and in this volume mainly the clearing of ideas before the shaping of policy.
To focus these developments, indeed transforma- tions, of the geographic tradition of town and country in which we were brought up, and express them more sharply, we need some little extension of our vocabulary ; for each new idea for which we have not yet a word deserves one. Some name, then, for these city -regions, these town aggregates, is wanted. Constellations we cannot call them ; con- glomerations is, alas ! nearer the mark at present, but it may sound unappreciative ; what of " Conurba- tions ? " That perhaps may serve as the necessary word, as an expression of this new form of popula- tion-grouping, which is already, as it were sub- consciously, developing new forms of social grouping and of definite government and administration by and by also.
For our first conurbation the name of Greater London is obviously already dominant beyond possi-
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 35
bility of competition ; but we need some name for the Lancashire region also, and for each similar one we may discover. Failing a better name, since we cannot sink Liverpool and other cities in a " Greater Manchester " or the like, let us christen the vast con- urbation of the Lancashire millions as "Lancaston." It is this ''Survey of Lancaston" which its con- stituent cities and boroughs most need to realise ; and this both in detail and in mass. Imagine it photographed from an aeroplane journey, as well as mapped street by street, like Mr Booth's London Survey, indeed, in some ways, more fully still. Towards the former of these requirements we have little or nothing since Bartholomew's map, already so often referred to ; and in all these ways we can gradually accustom ourselves to visualise the region. What are its existing defects ? and what its remain- ing possibilities ? — What natural reserves still remain to separate its growing villages and suburbs ? — What gardens and allotments are still possible to sanify them ?
Leaving Lancaston, we have but to cross the Pem lines to see along the foot of their eastward slope another dark galaxy of towns. Huddersfield, Brad- ford, and their neighbours constitute the world- metropolis of wool no less distinctly than does Lancaston that of cotton. What shall we call this province, this natural city-alliance ? Why not, in an urban sense, as of old a rustic one, simply preserve the good name of West Riding? Similarly for
36
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
South Riding, as we may call the conurbation cen- tring round the steel and coal of Sheffield. Note, again, the present expansion of Birmingham, which has of late legitimately succeeded in having its overflowing suburbs unified with itself, its extraordinary growth recognised, as now a city rivalling even Manchester
FIG. 14. — Midland towns agglomerating as " Midlandton."
or Glasgow. Invigorated by absorbing its outlying suburbs, Birmingham is already planning new exten- sions upon that bold and generous scale of civic design not so long ago characteristic of great cities ; but lapsed, eclipsed, forgotten with the coming on of the Railway Age. Yet this present expansion is but a step in the old process. A yet fuller recognition of regional facts is what we are here pleading ; for the recent Birmingham Extension Act has little if any
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 37
adequately natural regional basis, but is only a temporary and makeshift expansion after all, especi- ally if prosperity and growth are to continue, as seems reasonably probable. This larger recognition of regional facts involves the conception of a larger city- region — " Midlandton," as we may perhaps call it : and Greater and growing Birmingham is but the capical of this, though its exact limits may be hard to define. The recent union of the " Five Towns " is thus not only a local event, but a regional pioneer- ing, a noteworthy example of an incipient urban re- grouping. And here let us hope that the Duke of Sutherland's generous gift of Trentham may similarly augur a period of better and closer relations of town and country throughout the land than have been those of yesterday.
Pass next to South Wales, where on its magnificent coalfield the same process of development is at work. And, speaking of coalfields, we may conveniently here call attention to the close coincidence of this great centre of population with its magnificent South Wales coalfield, in the small inset map of the national coal -cellars in the top right-hand corner, and thence note the parallelism of each great conurbation to its coalfield, save in the case of London alone. We plainly see the development of a Greater Cardiff, a veritable (South) Waleston, whose exact limits and relation to the metallurgic centre of Swansea are, of course, for its regional geographer to define. Pass next northwards to the Tyne towns, with which we
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must plainly also take those of Wear and Tees, as constituting a new regional community, a natural province — Tyne- Wear-Tees, we may perhaps call it. It is interesting in this connection to recall that our British Gallery at the Brussels Exhibition of 1910, unhappily burned down, was adorned with a well- painted perspective of this very region, shown with all its towns connected up by railways and roads, and presented as a bird's-eye view (or, as we may nowa- days say, an aeroplane view) from above the sea-coast. For does not this map clearly suggest that the economic and social unity of such new city-regions, such conurbations as are here described, is already becoming conscious to them ? The preparation and exhibition of such diagrammatic perspectives would be of no little service in making these ideas clear to all concerned, and in enabling the public and the rulers of each to realise the new situation, the new solidarity which are arising towards a fuller integra- tion, a higher unity of the body politic. The great maps of railway systems, which are at once a con- venience and an adornment of German station-halls, have no little value and educational influence: so, and far more intensively, might enlargements of the conurbation-maps, which we are here discussing, bring before the public the needed conception of a local within a more general citizenship.
In conclusion, let us pass to Scotland. Here, again, the history and geography of popular notions, those of the school books on which we were brought up, and
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 39
on which our children are still examined, are no longer adequate.
G lasgow, as everybody knows, is the main centre of activity and population in Scotland, far outnumber- ing and outweighing Edinburgh ; it is the real capital in many respects. And Greater Glasgow — in the fullest sense, that in which we speak of Greater London — is something far vaster than the present name and burgh limits at all describe ; it includes practically the Clyde ports and watering-places, and runs far into Ayrshire, with inland burghs and villages not a few. It spreads far up the Clyde valley, indeed reaches its strenuous hands across the isthmus to Falkirk and Grangemouth, while its merchants have their villas at Stirling and beyond, as far as Bridge of Allan and even Dunblane. Again, plainly, old thinly-populated provinces are on the way to be covered with houses. Edinburgh has no doubt its marked regional individuality ; and in its immediate growth is, more than is commonly realised, with Leith and minor towns and suburbs already approaching half a million: it is perhaps destined, with due development of its not inconsiderable ad- jacent coalfields, to double this within the century. Though, from historic tradition and from present holiday associations, most people, even in Scotland, still think of the Scots as in the main a nation of hardy rustics, no population in the world is now so predominantly urban, and, as sanitary reformers know, none so ill-housed at that. More than half
40 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
the population of Scotland is crowded upon this central isthmus; and, with the approaching con- struction of the Clyde and Forth Canal (which is so plainly a matter not only of Scottish, but even of national, imperial, and international policy), it is clear that we shall have a linking up of these two great cities and their minor neighbours of Scotland into a new conurbation — a bi-polar city-region indeed,
FIG, 15. — Clyde and Forth towns agglomerating as " Clyde-Forth."
which is more and more uniting into one vast bi- regional capital — Clyde-Forth, as we may soon learn to call it.
Glasgow and Edinburgh are, of course, far remoter in type and spirit than their nowadays small railway distance implies ; and this difference, even contrast, is natural, inevitable, and so far permanent, for they are really the respective regional capitals of East and West Scotland, and contrasted in many ways— geo- graphical and meteorological, racial and spiritual. To Glasgow indeed the contrast with Edinburgh may
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 41
seem as great as that between Liverpool and York ; while a still larger contrast might be made from the Edinburgh point of view, as that between the main cities of Sweden and of Norway, of both of which Scotland in many ways is a condensed miniature ; say, a Stockholm with Upsala for Edinburgh, and for Glasgow a greater Bergen and Christiania. Towns so widely distinct in nature and race, in traditions, arid in social functioning and structure do not easily recognise that even they are but the poles of a vast and growing conurbation : yet here, too, the growth- process is at work, and tends largely to submerge all differences beneath its rising tide. And, broadly speaking, the main limit of the modern city is that of the hour's journey or thereby, the maximum which busy men can face without too great deduction from their day's work ; and hence it is above all with the constant extension and acceleration of the means of communication that each conurbation arises and extends.
It is interesting now to return to the map and make our main conurbations clear, each upon its coalfield. Running downwards, and leaving Clyde- Forth to Scotland, we have in England (1) Tyne- Wear-Tees, (2) Lancaston, (3) West Riding, (4) South Riding, (5) Midlanton, (6) Waleston, each a coalfield with its vast conurbation ; while Greater London, without a coalfield, forms the seventh of our series. What is this but a New Heptarchy, which has been f growing up naturally, yet almost unconsciously to
42 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
politicians, beneath our existing, our traditional political and administrative network: and plainly, not merely to go on as at present, straining and cracking and bursting this old network, but soon surely to evolve some new form of organisation better able to cope with its problems than are the present distinct town and county councils. What are the new forms to be ?
Leaving this sphinx-riddle for the present, and turning once more to the map, we recognise plainly enough that our political friend who was " not going back to the Heptarchy " will have to go forward to it, indeed is already in it. Let him now observe closely, in the very middle of our map, a great irregular white patch practically blank of population, and separating Lancaston from South Riding and West Riding, which, indeed, already are well-nigh run together. This white patch represents the heights of the Pennines, and consequently the water supply of these vast and growing populations on either side. Here, in fact, accurately speaking in synoptic vision, is their " Parish Pump," one, however, no longer to be despised; but precisely the most important, the ultimate and determinant condition of population, and the inexorable limit of their growth. Coal will .still last a long time, and cotton might expand accordingly; but water is the prime necessity after [air itself, and, unlike it, is limited in quantity. Food can be brought for almost any conceivable population as long as ships can sail the seas, and we have the
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 43
wherewithal to buy ; famine one can survive for months ; total starvation even for weeks ; but with- out water we last barely three days. Parish Pump indeed ! the prime necessity of regional statesmanship, since even of bare survival. For life and health, for cleanliness and beauty, for manufactures too, what more need be said ? Now, though our politicians are thus behindhand, are thus, as a class, regionally blind, geographically next to null, and for practical purposes well-nigh all mere Londoners, the elements of a real Parliament for these matters are developing. Witness notably the Health Congresses aforesaid. Thus at the Birkenhead Congress of 1910 there was much serious, and even anxious, discussion of the future of sanita- tion and of water supply for the Lancaston area, and this voiced at once by local experts and by national authorities like Sir William Ramsay ; of whom, as also the most eminent of scientific Londoners, even our politicians aforesaid may have heard, and may well stand in some fear of, if they sneer before him at the Parish Pump.
Return now to the question — What are the new social forms to be ? It is not yet safe for us to speculate upon this until the needful Regional Survey is for more advanced. One suggestion, however, is practical enough ; there should be, and that speedily and increasingly, amicable conference among all the representatives, rustic and urban, of the various cities and county-regions concerned ; and, as a matter of fact, various beginnings of this are being forced into
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existence by the sheer pressure of their common interests. Such meetings will gradually increase in number, in usefulness, in co-operation, and by- and-by take more permanent form. The old Borough Councils and County Councils can no longer separately cope with what are becoming so plainly yet larger Regional and Inter -Regional tasks, like those of water supply and sanitation for choice, but obviously others also. The growth of London and its County Council, its separate boroughs, is thus repeating itself; and its example merits study, alike for its suggestiveness and for its warnings. While, conversely, to the Londoner such .regional excursions may be suggestive. The contrasts of " London and the provinces," as Spend- ing-town and Earning- towns, again of Taxing-town and Paying-towns, and various others, also arise, and might lead him far.
It may not yet be time to press for political re- arrangements : this might too readily come to mean premature disputes and frictions, not to speak of legal difficulties and expenses. But it is plainly time for the co-operation of the regional geographer with the hygienist, and of both with the concrete sociologist, the student of country and town, of village and city ; and also for the furtherance of their labours, the discussion of them in detail, in friendly conferences representative of all the various groupings and interests concerned.
Since these pages were written, and indeed read at
THE POPULATION-MAP AND ITS MEANING 45
the Health Congress of 1910, a prominent minister has raised the question of the needed and approach- ing movement towards decentralisation ; and this in largely kindred form : while later events are pointing in the same direction. The preceding argument may, however, best be left unaltered, as on strictly civic grounds and of non-party character. The present co- operation of all the administrative bodies of Greater London towards the preparation of a town-plan may, however, be mentioned as an example which must soon be followed in other conurbations.
CHAPTER III
WORLD-CITIES AND THEIR OPENING COMPETITION
City-regions in other countries : e.g. France, Germany, United States. City - evolution still only beginning and existing cities ever being rebuilt. Other forms of industrial aggregation : example of Norway — in association with the recent developments of electric industries, from the " white coal " of mountain streams. Nature of these industries, and advantages to population concerned. Analogous case of Switzerland, of French, Italian, and other mountain districts. Relative backwardness and danger of this and other coal-using countries in realising this advent of a new industrial age, a second Industrial Revolution.
So far our New Heptarchy. But if such interpreta- tion of the main groupings of our cities, towns, villages into conurbations overflowing or absorbing the adjacent country be a substantially correct description of the general trend of present-day evolu- tion, then we may expect to find something of the same process in analogous city-regions elsewhere ; it can scarcely be a mere island marvel. France, with its slow population growth, and its comparative lack of coalfields to raise towns from, is naturally not producing such vast industrial conurbations as ours, though around Lille, for instance, there is no small beginning. Yet there is a Greater Paris; the vast suburban quarters outside the fortifications of Paris
46
WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 47
have: obvious and general analogies to the dormitories outside the present County Council London ; and any traveller who is patient enough to stay in his through carriage, and endure the round-about north- easterly passage by St Denis from the Gare du Nord to that of the P.L.M., instead of driving through the city from station to station, will agree that here, at least, is going on an urban growth of confused and labyrinthine squalor, little, if at all, inferior to any of our own ! Along the Riviera, of late years, the pleasure and health resorts have grown rapidly, and in a great many cases they are running together ; at the present rate our not very distant successors will see an almost continuous town, and of one monotonous type as far as man can make it, for a couple of hundred miles. Berlin has, of course, rapidly been overtaking Paris throughout the last generation ; and the designs of its latest town-planning com- petition show that it is now following the example of Vienna in dealing far more largely and boldly with its outlying suburbs than have London, or most other great cities. For an example of our characteristic British type, the development of a great conurbation upon a coalfield, we have no small beginnings in Westphalia. But here also is rapidly growing up a great, powerful, and in many ways magnificent regional capital in Diisseldorf, which was recently but a small " Residenzstadt," not so much bigger than the old village its modest name commemorates : it seems now plainly destined to distance Cologne
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almost as Leeds has done York. Yet the organisa- tion and the civic energy of these German centres so incomparably surpass those of Yorkshire cities or others that such comparisons can only be made in a rough and merely suggestive way.
In the United States, with their rapid development of resources and corresponding increase of population, there is still ample room for growth ; yet even here cities are already flowing together ; and the Pitts- burgh region is but a conspicuous example of a Black Country, in which increase and pressure, if not fore- sight, must soon involve some conurban survey and reorganisation. How vigorously the problem of linking up a great regional metropolis to its sur- rounding towns and their province must be grasped is probably as yet nowhere better evidenced than has been shown in Mr Burnham's bold and masterful planning of the region around Chicago, no less than in his proposals for the city in itself; whatever, of course, be the criticisms of his suggestions in detail The present Greater New York, now linked up, on both sides, by colossal systems of communications above and below its dividing waters, is also rapidly increasing its links with Philadelphia — itself no mean city — and with minor ones without number in every direction possible. For many years past it has paid to have tramway lines continuously along the roads all the way from New York to Boston, so that, taking these growths altogether, the expectation is not absurd that the not very distant future will see
WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 49
practically one vast city-line along the Atlantic Coast for five hundred miles, and stretching back at many points ; with a total of, it may be, well-nigh as many millions of population. Again, the Great Lakes, with the immense resources and communications which make them a Nearctic Mediterranean, have a future, which its exponents claim may become world-metropolitan in its magnitude. Even of Texas —which Europeans, perhaps even Americans, are apt to forget has an agricultural area comparable to that of France and Germany put together, and a better average climate — it has been claimed that with in- tensive culture it might well-nigh feed a population comparable to that of the civilised world.
Our Population-Map of the United Kingdom may thus be a forecast of the future of the coalfield areas of the United States : and the accompanying Popula- tion Map of the Eastern and Central Regions is thus but a faint sketch towards those coming conurbations which it is time to be preparing for.
Of the needful water supplies of all these potential conurbations we leave engineers to speak ; but food supplies are conceivable enough, and at all standards, from the too generous dietary of the American hotel to those innumerable costermongers' barrows of cheap and enormous bananas which range through the poorer streets of New York, and grimly suggest a possible importation of tropical conditions, towards the maintenance and multiplication of an all too
cheap proletariat. What, in fact, if our present con-
4
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ditions of food supply and of mechanical employments be tending to produce for us conditions hitherto only realised, and in simpler ways, by the teeming millions of China? And what of China herself, already so populous, when her present introduction of Occidental methods and ideas has developed her enormous latent resources of coal, of cheap water communications, as well as railways and the rest ? Yet in this old country of ours, in so many ways sleepier than we can now think China herself, how many will still tell you that " there is no need for town planning, the cities are all built " ; whereas, taking even the Empire, and much more the world over, the process seems practically but beginning ; while have not our existing cities, for the most part, before long to be well-nigh built all over again ? True, town-planning schemes, as modest tackings-on, patchings and cobblings, are being considered, even attempted, here and there ; yet we assuredly need far more than these if we are even to "muddle through " in the ever reopening wo rid -struggle for existence ; — far more as we realise that the supreme arbitrament of social survival and success is ultimately neither that of militarist conflicts, nor of industrial muddles, but of civic and regional reorganisation. In this the broadest views of international struggle and of industrial competition combine into a higher one.
But from these visions of indefinitely numerous and multitudinous conurbations, each of teeming
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boroughs, it is a relief to turn away in search of some smaller, simpler, and surely healthier and happier type of social development and integration. Happily a new and vivid example of that also is not far to seek. Every school-boy knows something at least of the historic significance of Norway, that poorest of lands which, as Norse children tell, was left altogether without soil at the Creation, arid so has for its few upland farms only such few particles of soil as its kindly guardian angels could sweep up and bring thither on their wings from the leavings of the richer world. As some compensation, however, their many rivers were rich in salmon ; and these taught their fishermen to venture out along the calm "swan's path " of the fiords as sea-fishers, and in comparative safety to master the art of sailing, behind their long island-breakwater. Thus trained and equipped, their merchant-history, emigration-history, pirate-history, conqueror - history follows, with what effects on Europe everyone knows : but what we do not as yet sufficiently realise in other countries — whose ideas of each other are seldom less than a generation behindhand, and generally more — is how a new historical development in new conditions and destined to take new forms, may be, and actually in Norway is, arising once more. The electric utilisa- tion of a single waterfall is now yielding 150,000 horse-power ; and though this is certainly one of the very greatest, there are smaller ones almost beyond number for a thousand miles. Norway, then — which
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has so long seemed practically to have reached its small natural limits of wealth, industry, and population as to have long fallen out of all reckonings of the Great Powers, of which it was the very forerunner — has now broken through these limits and begun a develop- ment, perhaps proportionately comparable in the opening century to that of our own country in the past one — yet with what differences ? Our Industrial Age in its beginnings, and indeed too long in its continuance, turned upon getting up coal almost anyhow, to get up steam almost anyhow, to run machinery almost anyhow, to produce cheap pro- ducts to maintain too cheap people almost anyhow— and these to get up more coal, more steam, more machinery, and more people, still almost anyhow— and to call the result " progress of wealth and popula- tion." Such swift multiplication of the quantity of life, with correspondingly swift exhaustion of the material resources on which this life depends, has been too much — as our coal-economists now and then sternly remind us — like that of the mould upon the jam-pot, which spreads marvellously for its season, until at length there is a crowded and matted crust of fungus-city, full of thirsty life and laden with in- numerable spores, but no jam left. The comparison is harsh, is even hideous, yet is necessary to be realised : for is it not the goal to which our own and every other " Black Country " is hurrying — that of a multitudinous population at too low standards of life ; a soil too limited for agriculture, even
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where not bricked or ashed over ; in short, of mean and miserable cities subsiding upon exhausted mines.
From this doleful picture of the logical outcome of one set of conditions, turn now to image that arising on the opposite shores of the North Sea, from the streams of " white coal," each and all inexhaustible while the earth spins, and its winds blow over the sea, and the Norse mountains stand. Yet instead of Norway forming cities like ours upon these un- ending streams of energy, these for the most part generate but long chains of townlets, indeed of country villages, in which this strongest of races need never decline, but rather develop and renew their mastery of Nature and of life again as of old ; with everywhere the skill of their ancient dwarf-kings, the might of the hammer of Thor. Are there not here plainly the conditions of a new world-phen- omenon and world-impulse — a Norseman aristo- democracy of peace which may yet eclipse all past achievements, whether of his ancient democracy at home or even (who knows ?) his aristocracy of con- quest and colonisation abroad among older dis- couraged peoples, and even his settlement of a new patriciate upon their comparatively exhausted lands ?
What are the essential applications of these new energies, besides electric lighting and power for tramways, railways, etc. ? These uses are largely metallurgical — that is, on the central lines of the world's progress, from the Stone Age onwards. The
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electric furnace not only gives an output of iron and steel, greatly cheaper (it is said already as much as 50 per cent.) than heretofore, but of the very finest quality ; so that not only our British steelworks, but those of Pittsburgh also, must before long be feeling this new competition.
The command of the new metals like aluminium, of the rare metals also every year becoming more important, which the high temperatures of the electric furnace give, involves further new steps in metal- lurgy. Again, the conditions for labour and its real wages, in the innumerable garden-towns and villages which are springing up in these conditions, each limited in size by that of its stream, and thus con- tinuous with glorious and comparatively undestroyed natural environment, afford an additional factor of competition, more permanently important than are those of money wages and market prices. The favourable situation of these new towns, mostly upon their fiords, is again full of advantages, and these vital as well as competitive.
Again, the regularisation of streams, with the in- crease or formation of lakes as power reservoirs, puts a stop to the spring floodings, which are a frequent source of damage in mountain countries ; and it further admits of a not inconsiderable by-product, in fish culture.
Further, it may be remembered how, not so many years ago, one of our foremost chemists, Sir William Crookes, called attention to the approaching scarcity
WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 55
of nitrogen for the world's wheat crops, associated with the rapid exhaustion of the nitrate beds of Chili, etc. But now the problem of utilising the nitrogen of the atmosphere for the production of saltpetre has been solved, even better than in Germany, by the Norse chemists and engineers. In such ways the country hitherto the poorest of all in agriculture, begins not only to develop more intensively its own soil, but to increase the fertility of all our Northern world.
Such electric development, of course, is not Nor- wegian alone ; Sweden and Finland already begin to share it, and still more Switzerland, which is rapidly undergoing, under the influence of electric industries, a development fully comparable to that by which in the last couple of generations she has adapted herself to the tourists of the Western world. Down from the Alps, along the long mountain backbone of Italy, the same white collieries are opening, and from this main axis of the coming Industrial Europe there run out corresponding lines on every hand. Here France, which it has been so long the fashion in industrial Britain or Germany to think of as having fallen hope- lessly behind, alike in industries and population, sees new resources opening before her, in her large share of the Alps, her Northern Pyrenees, even her central mountain mass with its considerable river courses. Even Spain, with all its drought, and barrenness, and poverty, begins to see a new future of internal colonisation, compensating not a little, as her fore- sighted citizens already realise, for the loss of her
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colonies, that vast empire she left too undeveloped. Or pass eastwards. Though Austria of old failed to conquer Switzerland, she has her own Switzerland in the Tyrol, and Hungary her broad girdle of the Car- pathians. Similarly, and in some considerable measure, for the new nations of the Danube and the Balkans. So in Asia Minor, as for Albanians and their neighbours, there lies an opportunity for the young Turks beyond their constitution-makings at the centre and repressions at the circumference— that of organising a reconstitution indeed. With the Turkish Empire we are, of course, entering more and more fully upon the region of drought ; and here the question arises of the desiccation of Asia and the evolution of its deserts.
We cannot enter here upon the difficult and still unsettled question of how far this evolution of deserts is a cosmic process, destined sooner or later to bring the world into the condition upon which Mr Percival Lowell so vividly insists for Mars. There is also much reason for the view that this desiccating pro- cess has been due, if not to the neglect of man, at any rate largely aided by this ; largely, too, to the mischiefs of ages of war, in destroying irrigation- works and terraces everywhere, of which the vestiges are far more important and conspicuous survivals of antiquity than even are the temples and palaces our archaeologists explore. Far beyond wilful destruction of irrigation-works is their wastage, through that mingling of material neglect and fiscal extortion, to
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which the decline of the vast Turkish Empire, and with it the Persian also, is so largely traceable. It is not necessary here to inquire how far this is due to the ignorance of pastoral and military conquerors like the Turks, and how far to that passive acceptance of the practical unmodifiability of the Arabian desert, which has been so decisively expressed in the philos- ophy and the faith of Islam. The reason for refer- ring to such apparently far-away matters will become clear if they help us to reflect how far our own par- ticular racial origins and regional experience, our lack of experience also, and how far our particular established philosophy and its corresponding popular beliefs, may likewise interfere with our needed industrial and social modernisation. For after all, between the conservatism of the Turk and the conservatism of the Briton there is not so very wide a difference as the latter is given to concluding. And if any wonder how we come to such an opinion, we answer that it has not been formed without some con- tact, both provincial and metropolitan, with the Turk. Yet there is here no real pessimism ; for with Turkey, Persia, even China, showing signs of following the example of Japan in adopting Occidental methods and ideas, there is every hope that our own country may also follow the exhortation of its present king, and wake up in its turn. But, it may be said, are we not of all the Occidental peoples that very one whose industrial greatness and whose correspondingly free political institutions are being copied by all these
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awakening countries ? When we thus so admittedly lead, to suggest here that we lag may seem not even paradoxical, but flippant — absurd, some may say. Yet has not our contemporary industrial majority roundly accused its agricultural predecessors, lords and peasants alike, of failing adequately to recognise the new order which the industrial revolution has been bringing about these hundred years and more ? Indeed, is not the thinking Conservative, however much he may regret the diminishing authority of this older ruling class, the very sharpest in reminding it that its defeats have been at least largely due to insufficiently realising the modern industrial situation? Now, here lies the present point — that nowadays a new difficulty altogether has arisen — namely, that of inducing the leaders of the present industrial world in their turn — Liberal or Radical, Labourist or Socialist here matters little — to realise that they are in presence of the actual birth and present growth of a new industrial order — one differing scarce less com- pletely from the older one, in which they are so fully engaged, than did their industrial order from the old agricultural one. From our present standpoint, that of the evolution of cities, first before and since the industrial revolution, and now anew to-day, it is surely plain that though Lord Salisbury and Mr Balfour may have on the whole represented the older agri- cultural order, Mr Gladstone and Mr Asquith, with, say, Mr Lloyd George and Mr Keir Hardie, have all been representing the Industrial and Mechanical
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Age, of commercial and monetary struggles, though of course from more or less differing approaches. But the present point is that a new order has been again arising within the vitals of this industrial order, to which neither its economic leaders — whether of proletariat or propertariat — nor their respective political exponents are yet adequately awake. Without Arkwright's jenny, and Watt's engine, our coalfields would still be sleeping, without coalmaster or collier, railway director or railway man. Their line of development is thus clear : first the advance of discovery and of invention, and then the application of the latter on ever-increasing scale ; with a corre- sponding development, in strength and in numbers, of the ranks of capital and labour. With these arises and sharpens their conflict of interests, which begins to give us the Labour member, as well as the Capital member; and let us hope sometimes the means of conciliation between them. Along with all this goes the development of wider theorisings in political economy — here orthodox, there socialistic ; and finally the clear expression of all these rival interests and doctrines in the field of politics, and by the person- alil ies we know. But while their discussion concen- trates public attention, it is too much overlooked by all concerned that a new economic order — a Second Industrial Revolution — is once more arising, requiring corresponding changes in economic theories, corre- sponding expression in its turn. To outline this more fully is our problem in the next chapter.
CHAPTEE IV
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC
The Industrial Age as Twofold
A new industrial age is opening : significance of oil fuel, electric industries, etc. As "the Stone Age" is now distinguished into two periods, "Paleolithic" and "Neolithic," so the "Industrial Age" requires distinction into its two phases also, as " Paleotechnic" and "Neo- technic.'' Illustration from synoptic view of Durham. Interpreta- tion of protests of Romantics, Carlyle, Ruskin, etc. Conception of physical economics, and of "natural resources" as no longer in mere monetary sense. Money notations examined : passage from money wages to " Vital Budget " : this conception needed to build the neotechnic town.
Utopias as indispensable to social thought : the escape from paleo- technic to neotechnic order is thus from Kakotopia to Eutopia — the first turning on dissipating energies towards individual money gains, the other on conserving energies and organising environment towards the maintenance and evolution of life, social and individual, civic and eugenic.
Interpretations of war and of struggle towards survival generally from present point of view. Recent advances, towards constructive activities, of American peace-agencies beyond European ones.
HERE, again, this same process is beginning — that of a new industrial age. Following James Watt, the Prometheus of steam, Glasgow gave us the very foremost of all the Prometheans of electricity in Lord Kelvin. Following upon the locomotive of Stephenson, we have motors and electric cars ; and upon the marine applications of Watt's engine, we
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have had the gas engine from Birmingham, from Newcastle the turbine of Parsons, already improved upon ; next the application of oil fuel, the Diesel engine, and so on.
Now, of all the limitations of our predominant middle-class and upper-class points of view, one of the worst is not seeing how widely different are the forms of labour. Not merely in their various pro- ducts, and in various rates of money wages, as economists have been wont to describe. Far beyond all these, different in ways far too much ignored, are their effects. First on the individuals who perform these various tasks, as physicians and psycho- logists now observe them : secondly, on the resultant types of family, of institutions and general civilisation, as social geographers have long been pointing out for simple societies, and as sociologists have now to work out for our complex ones. Take a simple illustration of the first. No one surely but can see, for instance, that the practical disappearance of the legion of stokers, which oil fuel involves, is something, physiologically if not politically, comparable to the emancipation of the galley-slaves, which similarly was brought about through an improvement in modern locomotion. It is, on the whole, well to throw people out of such employment. But finer issues are less obvious, and need tracing. A great idealist, an undeniable moral force like the late John Bright felt himself logically compelled in terms of his economic creed — that of the then believed final machine-and-market order — to
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argue in Parliament against the Adulteration Acts as an interference with competition, and therefore with the life of trade ! Whereas, the simplest, the least moralised or idealistic of electricians needs no public enthusiasms, no moral or social convictions, to convince him that adulteration is undesirable ; since every day's work in his calling has experimentally made him feel how a trace of impurity in his copper wire deteriorates its conductivity, and how even a trifle of dirt between contact surfaces is no trifle, but may spoil contact altogether. Such illustrations might be multiplied and developed indefinitely. But enough here if we can broadly indicate, as essential to any real understanding of the present state of the evolution of cities, that we clearly distinguish between what is characteristic of the passing industrial order, and that which is characteristic of the incipient one— the passing and the coming age. Indeed, before many years we may say the closing and the opening one.
Recall how as children we first heard of " The Stone Age " ; next, how this term has practically disappeared. It was found to confuse what are really two strongly contrasted phases of civilisation, albeit here and there found mingled, in transition ; in arrest or in reversion, sometimes also ; frequently also in collision — hence we now call these the Old Stone Age and the New, the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The former phase and type is characterised by rough stone implements, the latter by skilfully chipped or
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polished ones ; the former in common types and mostly for rougher uses, the latter in more varied types and materials, and for finer skills. The first is a rough hunting and warlike civilisation, though not without a certain vigour of artistic presentment, which later militarist or hunting types have also striven for, but seldom attained, and certainly not surpassed. The latter neolithic folk were of gentler, agricultural type, with that higher evolution of the arts of peace and of the status of woman, which, as every anthropologist knows, is characteristic of agriculture everywhere, and is so obvious save where artificially depressed.
The records of these two different civilisations every museum now clearly shows, and they need not here be enlarged upon. Their use to us is towards making more intelligible the application of a similar analysis in our own times, and to the world around us. For although our economists have been and are in the habit of speaking of our present civilisation, since the advent of steam and its associated machinery, with all its technic strivings and masteries, as the " Industrial Age," we press for the analysis of this into two broadly and clearly distinguishable types ami phases : again of older and newer, ruder and finer type, needing also a constructive nomenclature accordingly. Simply substituting -technic for -lit hie, we may distinguish the earlier and ruder elements of the Industrial Age as Paleotechnic, the newer and still often incipient elements disengaging them-
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selves from these as Neotechnic : while the people belonging to these two dispensations we shall take the liberty of calling Paleotects and Neotects respec- tively. To the former order belong the collieries, in the main as yet worked ; together with the steam- engine, and most of our staple manufactures ; so do the railways and the markets, and above all the crowded and monotonous industrial towns to which all these have given rise. These dreary towns are, indeed, too familiar to need detailed description here ; they constitute the bulk of the coalfield conurbations we were considering in the previous chapter. Their corresponding abstract developments have been the traditional political economy on the one hand, and on the other that general body of political doctrine and endeavour which was so clearly formulated, so strenuously applied by the French Revolution and its exponents, but which in this country has gone on bit by bit in association with our slower and longer Industrial Revolution.
To realise, first of all, in definite synoptic vision of a city, the change from the old regime to modern paleotechnic conditions, there is no more vivid example perhaps in the world than the view of Durham from the railway. We see on the central ridge the great medieval castle, the magnificent cathedral, as characteristic monuments as one could wish to see of the temporal and the spiritual powers of its old County Palatine and Diocese, with its Prince and Bishop, in this case one. Next see all
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around this the vast development of the modern mining town, with its innumerable mean yet decent streets, their meaner, yet decent little houses, with their main life carried on in kitchens and back courts, decent too, yet meanest of all : for here is a certain quiet and continuous prosperity, a comparative freedom from the main evils of greater cities, which makes this modern town of Durham, apart from its old cathedral and castle altogether, a veritable beauty- spot of the coal age, a paragon of the paleotechnic order. When we have added to this prosperous town life the Board Schools and the Carnegie Library, and to these the University Extension lectures on Political Economy and the Workers' Union lectures on Economic History, what is left for the heart of collier or his " representative " to desire in the way of prosperity and education (happiness, domestic and personal, remaining his private affair), except, indeed, to make these more steady and permanent through such legislation towards relieving unemployment and sickness as has been devised ? Wages, no doubt, may still perhaps be improved a little. The cathedral might be disestablished; and so on. But on all received principles of paleotechnic economics or politics, Durham is obviously approximately perfect. / Similarly for our larger colliery, iron, textile conurba- tions and towns — American ones likewise. While the coalfield holds out, our progress seems practically assured ; our chosen press shall be that which can most clearly voice this conviction for us, and our
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politicians must be those who, by this measure or that opposite one, most hopefully promise to assure its continuance. With this organisation for industry in progress, and with its associated system of ideals ex- pressed in the other industrial towns around us, who can wonder at the little success with which Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris have successively fulminated against them ? — or even of the criticisms which their politicians and economists have never been able to answer ? It was, of course, easier to discredit these writers as " romantic," as " aesthetic," and so on, and to assume that science and invention were all on the paleotechnic side. But nowadays, thanks to further advance of science and of invention, we know better. Had Carlyle or Morris but known it (Ruskin had an inkling of this, and more), their view of industry was already far more in accordance with the physicist's doctrine of energy than is that of the conventional economics even of to-day. For after its prolonged darkening of counsel with economic text-books with- out that elementary physical knowledge which should underlie every statement of the industrial process- save perhaps at most, a reference, and that often depreciatory, to Prof. Stanley Jevons on solar crises, or on the exhaustion of our coal supplies — it is really only with President Roosevelt's " National Resources Commission" that the fundamentals of national economy ^aTe becoming generally recognised. For this Commission begins with the national forester, GifFord Pinchot, and includes statesmen-agriculturists
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of the type of Sir Horace Plunkett, indeed has that leader's active personal collaboration. It happily now includes even the economist, albeit as a brand plucked from the burning and teaching a very different doctrine from that of his youth. These now tell their countrymen that to dissipate the national energies, as the American paleotects, of Pittsburgh or where you please, have been doing, is not economics but Waste ; and that to go on dissipating energies for the sake of this or that individual percentage on the transaction, is no longer to be approved as " develop- ment of resources," as the mendacious euphemism for it goes, but is sternly to be discouraged, as the national waste, the mischievous public housekeeping it has been all along. As such studies of the physical realities in economic processes go on, each industrial process has to be clearly analysed — into its physical factors of material efficiency and directness on the one side, and its financial charges on the other. Thus, while we shall utilise more than ever each improve- ment and invention which can save energy, minimise friction, diminish waste or loss of time in transit, we shall also begin to criticise in the same spirit that commercial process which is implied in the great railway maxim of " charging what the traffic will bear," but which, in more scientific language, may be called " parasitism in transit." The paleotechnic mind —whether of Boards of Directors or Workers1 Unions, here matters little — has been too much interested in increasing or in sharing these commercial proceeds,
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and too little in that of maximising physical efficiency and economy all through. And, since all this applies to more than railways, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the vast improvements of modern invention have so largely been rendered nugatory in this general paleotechnic way, and not by any perversity peculiar to the labourers or to the capitalists alone, as they too cheaply convince themselves.
The advance of science is very largely a matter of the advance of notations. But a notation is not
I simply a thought-help ; it also only too easily becomes a thought-cage, hard to escape from. This is, in fact, the history of the great and marvellous arithmetical notation of Money, within which the paleotechnic mind, in all its forms and developments — from school- boy to millionaire, from education-minister to econo- mist— has been and is, of course in varying measure, cribbed, cabined, and confined. From the smallest Labour Union to the greatest Banking Trust, all are hypnotised, from their earliest education with its exaggeration of money arithmetic, into a special- ised insistence upon money gains, which practically amounts to a veritable obsession by these, with consequent practical blindness to real wealth for themselves and to real wages for others. For even where the political economist may prove he has kept his own mind clear, he fails to affect the popular folk-lore his too monetarian science has created.
'This love of money has been broadly and boldly defined by one of the earliest of sociologists as " the
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root of all evil": and the strange thing — which appears when one looks at the economic situation in terms of pure physical science, without any senti- ment at all — is that this saying turns out to be broadly true of the world around us ; and not a little obvious in history as well : witness the fall of Spain, through her fanaticism of gold, even more than of the faith which that also helped to weigh down. The paleotect may descant as he pleases about " our vast; and increasing accumulations of wealth " here in the Bank of England, and there in the village Savings Banks ; but to the direct eye of the social surveyor, as so long before to the impassioned one of a Carlyle or a Ruskin, this accumulation of wealth remains after all too much the same : a vision for the most part of growing infinitudes of mean streets, mean houses, mean back-yards, relieved more or less by bigger ones, too often even duller still.
Let us go on dissipating the national store of energies for individual gain ; and extraordinary results can undoubtedly be obtained in terms of money wealth. Shares by whole safefuls, goodly dividends, and new " savings " by unnumbered millions. Is not this in fact a quintessential prospectus — years of waste - basket compressed and generalised ? — the Plutonian Utopias of " the City " rolled into one ?
But when these fine results come to be " realised " — in the material sense as distinguished from the financial sense — what are they? What is there to show beyond the aforesaid too mean streets, mean
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houses, and stunted lives ? Chiefly documentary claims upon other people's mean streets elsewhere, and upon their labour in the future. Debts all round rather than stores, in short, a minus wealth rather than a plus. Per contra, the neotechnic economist,
(Photo, " Welsh Outlook.") FIG. 16. — Miners' cottages — The Huts, Senghennyd, Cardiff: fronts.
beginning with his careful economisation of national resources, his care, for instance, to plant trees to replace those that are cut down, and if possible a few more, is occupied with real savings. His forest is a true Bank, one very different from Messrs Rothschild's " credit "- — that is, in every ultimate issue, our own, as taxpayers.
Again, under the paleotechnic order the working man, misdirected as he is, like all the rest of us, by his
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traditional education towards money wages instead of Vital Budget, has never yet had an adequate house, seldom more than half of what might make a decent one. But as the neotechnic order comes in — its skill directed by life towards life, and for life
(Photo, " Welsh Outlook.") FIG. 17.— Miners' cottages — The Huts, Senghennyd, Cardiff: backs.
—he, the working man, as in all true cities of the past, aristo-democratised into productive citizen — he will set his mind towards house building and town planning, even towards city design ; and all these upon a scale to rival — nay, surpass — the past glories of history. He will demand and create noble streets of noble houses, gardens, and parks ; and before long monuments, temples of his renewed ideals, surpassing those of old.
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Thus he will rapidly accumulate both civic and individual Wealth, that is, Wealth twofold, and both hereditary. It will be said — even he as yet says it, paralysed as he still is — that this is " Utopia " — that is, practically Nowhere. It is, and should be, beyond the dreams of the historic Utopists, right though
FIG. 1 8. —Miners' cottages, Woodlands, Yorkshire : fronts.
they also were in their day. For their projects of real wealth were based but upon the more rational use of the comparatively scanty resources and limited population of the past. But just as our paleotechnic money-wealth and real poverty is associated with the waste and dissipation of the stupendous resources of energy and materials, and power of using them, which the growing knowledge of Nature is ever unlocking for us, so their better neotechnic use brings with it
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73
potentialities of wealth and leisure beyond past Utopian dreams. This time the Neotechnic order, if it means anything at all, with its better use of resources and population towards the bettering of/ man and his environment together, means these a?
FIG. 19. — Workers' cottages, Earswick, Yorkshire : back gardens.
a business proposition — the creation, city by city, region by region, of its Eutopia, each a place of effective health and well-being, even of glorious and in its way unprecedented beauty, renewing and rival- ling the best achievements of the past, and all this beginning here, there, and everywhere — even where our paleotechnic disorder seems to have done its very worst.
How can this be put yet more definitely ? Simply
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enough. The material alternatives of real economics, which these obsessions of money economics have been too long obfuscating, are broadly two, and each is towards realising an ideal, a Utopia. These are the paleotechnic and the neotechnic — Kakotopia and E utopia respectively. The first has hitherto been predominant. As paleotects we make it our prime endeavour to dig up coals, to run machinery, to produce cheap cotton, to clothe cheap people, to get up more coals, to run more machinery, and so on ; and all this essentially towards " extending markets." The whole has been essentially organised upon a basis of " primary poverty " and of " secondary poverty " (to use Mr Rowntree's accurate terminology, ex- plained later), relieved by a stratum of moderate well-being, and enlivened by a few prizes, and com- paratively rare fortunes — the latter chiefly estimated in gold, and after death.
But all this has been with no adequate development of real wealth, as primarily of houses and gardens, still less of towns and cities worth speaking of; our industry but maintains and multiplies our .poor and dull existence. Our paleotechnic life-work is soon physically dissipated ; before long it is represented by dust and ashes, whatever our money- wages may have been. Moreover, though we thus have produced, out of all this exhaustion of the resources of Nature and of race, whole new conurbations, towns, and pseudo-cities, these are predominantly, even essenti- ally, of Slum character — Slum, Semi-slum or Super-
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 75
slum, as we shall see more fully later — each, then, a Kakotopia as a whole ; and in these the corresponding development of the various types of human deteriora- tion congruent with such environment. Within this system of life there may (and do, of course) arise palliatives, and of many kinds, but these do not affect the present contrast.
The second alternative, however, also remains open, and happily has now its material beginnings everywhere — that of the nascent neotechnic order. Whenever — with anything like corresponding vigour and decision to that which the paleotects have shown, once and again, as notably at the coming on of the machine age, the railway age, the financial age, and now the militarist one — we make up our minds, as some day before long we shall do, to apply our con- structive skill, our vital energies, towards the public conservation instead of the private dissipation of resources, and towards the evolution instead of the deterioration of the lives of others, then we shall discern that this order of things also " pays," and this all the better for paying in kind. That is, in having houses and gardens, and of the best, with all else that is congruent with them, towards the maintenance and the evolution of our lives, and still more of our children's. Then in a short, incredibly short, time we, and still more they, shall have these dwellings, and with them the substantial and assured, the whole- some and delightful, contribution to the sustenance of their inhabitants which gardens, properly under-
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stood and worked, imply. The old sociologists, in their simple societies, saw more clearly than we ; but as we recover their rustic and evolutionary point of view we may see that also for ourselves — " Whatso- ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap " — at any rate shall be reaped, by his successors if not by himself. During the paleotechnic period this has been usually understood and preached on as a curse. From the neotechnic standpoint it is a blessing, manifestly rooted in the order of Nature. For why not increasingly sow what is best worth reaping ?
The life and labour of each race and generation of men are but the expression and working out of their ideals. Never was this more fully done than in this paleotechnic phase, with its wasteful industry and its predatory finance — and its consequences, (a) in dissipation of energies, (b) in deterioration of life, are now becoming manifest. Such twofold dissipation may most simply be observed upon two of its main lines ; that of crude luxuries and sports, and the " dissipations " these so readily involve in the moral sense ; and, secondly, through war. The crude luxury is excused, nay, psychologically demanded, by the starvation of paleotechnic life in well-nigh every vital element of beauty or spirituality known and valued by humanity hitherto. Thus to take only one of the very foremost of our national luxuries, that of getting more or less alcoholised — this has been vividly defined, in a real flash of judicial wisdom, as " the quickest way of getting out of Manchester."
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 77
Similarly, War and its preparations are explained, we may even say necessitated, by the accepted philosophy and the social psychology of our paleo- technic cities, and particularly of the metropolitan ones. In the first place, war is but a generalising of the current theory of competition as the essential factor of the progress of life. For, if competition be, as we are told, the life of trade, competition must also be the trade of life. What could the simple naturalists, like Darwin and his followers, do but believe this ? and thence project it upon Nature and upon human life with a new authority ! The paleo- technic philosophy is thus complete ; and trade competition, Nature competition, and war competi- tion, in threefold unity, have not failed to reward their worshippers. Thus the social mind, of the said cities especially, but thereafter of the whole nation they influence, is becoming characterised and dominated by an ever-deepening state of diffused and habitual fear. This, again, is the natural accumula- tion, the inevitable psychological expression of certain very real evils and dangers, though not those must commonly expressed. First, of the inefficiency and wastefulness of paleotechnic industry, with corresponding instability and irregularity of employ- ment, which are increasingly felt by all concerned ; second, the corresponding instability of the financial system, with its pecuniary and credit illusions, which are also becoming realised ; and third, the growing physical slackness or deterioration -- un-
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fitness anyhow — which we all more or less feel in our paleotechnic town life, which therefore must more and more make us crouch behind barriers and cry for defenders. Hence, in fact, Tennyson's eulogy of the Crimean War, and many other earlier and later ones — like, say, Ruskin's. For as imagined military dangers become real ones, so far from increasing fear, they at once exhilarate and invigorate our ebbing courage. Of all the " Merrie England " of the past, there was but one town which habitually boasted the epithet ; and that was " Merrie Carlisle," just because it guarded the marches, and stood to bear the first shock of Scottish raids or invasions ; and first sent out its hardy sons, now to provoke these, now meet them with counter-initiative. Similarly, it is not in the many coast cities lying open to bombardment, but at London — and this not simply but deeply because it is practi- cally unattackable, besides having the assurance of immediate concentration of all the national resources of defence — that there, of all our cities, the yellow journalist can most readily exploit the popular fears. On grounds like these, which have been only too obvious in other places and times, serious pessimism as naturally arises. Yet here our pessimism is but relative ; for it needs no war, but only the appearance of neotechnic art and science to evoke a correspond- ing courage. Hence, for instance, the joyousness of the aviator amid his desperate risks ; and hence, largely, the calm of Paris throughout the long and threatening Morocco negotiations of 1911.
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC f 79
Since this paleotechnic war - obsession stands so definitely in the~~way of city betterment, let us put the criticism of it in a somewhat different way.
Among lagging peoples agriculture declines ; and, with the lowering of the rustic life, its cognate skills and arts, its joys and spirit, its very health decay also. A vicious circle arises and widens ; drudgeries, luxurious and servile, mean, even abject, appear and deepen, and replace the old simple fellowship in labour ; indulgence or indolence, orgies followed by ennui and apathy, replace rest. Classes become fixed as status through militarism's return ; taboos arise and strengthen ; and sex, the natural and fundamental spring of the moral life in both sexes, perverts into the dreams and dances of strange sins. Of all such " progress," such "wealth," such "peace," men weary. The old courage, which in their rustic fathers had faced the chances of life, and mastered these through the courses of Nature, now finds a main outlet in gambling ; and this increasingly contaminates legitimate commerce. The ruling class thus becomes increasingly one of wealth, with a corresponding increase of types of populace, sub- missively ready for any service whatsoever, if only wages be forthcoming, and finding its hope and ecstasy of life in the prospect of also occasionally getting something for nothing, like their betters at that game.
The older rustic castes, high and low, less apt for
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such modern life, are yet absorbed and enrolled by it, and become guardians and functionaries within, or enter the military caste for external service. Paleo- technic " order " is thus completed, and at the expense of progress ; as the history of Russia, of Austria, of Prussia has so often shown us ; and, as they tell us, ours has increasingly been showing them. In each such country, and even in its metropolis, though so largely thus created and maintained, the spark of soul which is in every man at length begins to sink within him altogether, or else to flare out into social discontent, it may be with mutterings of revolt. The official orator and bard appear also ; as social medicine-men they must at all hazards again arouse manhood, courage, be this even through fear. Thus, fevered with cold and hot, the paleotects run to and fro ; they invent new myths of terror, their guardians new war- dances ; those bring forth their treasure, and these build vast and vaster temples to the fear-gods. They carve their clubs, they lengthen and crowd their war- canoes, and one day they sail forth to battle. Be this for the time crowned with victory and glory, with mastery and empire, these have in them no few germs of decay, which also grow towards their ripen- ing. Is not this, in broadly summarised outline and at its simplest, the anthropology of half the South Seas, even the history of the old pirate and berserk glories of Scandinavia ? The only touch of freshness remaining for such an epitome is that this, in its fuller outline as above, is what the Scandinavian
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 81
peoples are__now thinking and saying of us, "The Gre:at Powers." For now the Norsemen are in an otherwise evolving frame of mind, with correspond- ingly different phase of life, different conception of its defence, different practice towards its survival. Saved by their poverty of natural resources, as we used till lately to think, or by good hap, as it now appears, from the modern industrial crowdings, which we, in our terms of mere magnitude, call cities, they are entering upon the development of culture-cities, which already, in terms of quality of life and of civilisation alike, are actually and proportionally in advance of ours, even though comparatively favour- able examples be taken. Twenty-five years ago it could be said by one Edinburgh man to another : " There is more new music and live science in little Bergen than in big Edinburgh." And now Grieg and Nansen are known along the whole chain of villages and townlets whose electric lights twinkle nightly from Tromso down and round to Christiania itself, known even to us as well. Once, indeed, our Scottish singers and thinkers also were known throughout their land and beyond : but that was in times of comparative poverty, before these days of " business " and " education," now alike so illusory in their numerical estimations.
In summary, then, the struggles of war are not so essential to the nature of society as many nowadays have come to believe ; nor even when they occur are
they so much a matter of big battalions.
6
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Without entering in detail into the social factors of war, which would expand these few paragraphs into a volume, it is enough here to insist upon the thesis of this chapter that our essential struggle for existence at present demands a view-point different from and larger than that of militarists.
Let us give these every credit for their measure of encouragement to neotechnic skill and invention, and for the spirit of sacrifice they inculcate towards the social weal ; but let them also realise that the present main struggle for existence is not that of fleets and armies, but between the Pal eotechnic_and Neotechnic order. And this not merely as regards our manu- facturing productivity, upon which some, to do them justice, insist, but yet more throughout our rural and our urban life. Most simply stated, as we rebuild our cities as well as our fleets, as we modernise our universities and colleges, our culture-institutes and schools, as we have sought to do our Dreadnoughts, there will be far less fear of war and far more assurance of survival in whatever issue. And con- versely, failing this needed uplift of our general level of civilisation, each added weight of armour but helps to keep it down.
The preceding becomes clearer when we turn from the dramatically exaggerated rivalries of Prussian and British militarists, or even from the too purely sentimental protests, or the too coldly legalist endeavours of European Peace and Arbitration Societies, to the increasing Peace Movements of the
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 83
United States. It is too soon to forecast whether Mr Carnegie's colossal foundation is to be helped or hindered towards concrete endeavours by the com- pleteness of the bureaucratic and academic organisa- tion it has announced ; but the smaller International Peace Foundation of Boston, under the excellent guidance of Mr and Mrs Edwin D. Mead, has clearly a side towards constructive peace ; and so, there seems ground for hoping, with Mr Norman Angell's active and growing propaganda, and the associated new Garton Foundation. The same conception has also been emphasised by Jane Addams, that true abbess of Chicago, in whom America possesses such a rare combination of social experience, generous feeling, intellectual grasp and insight, and driving force. As such women, such constructive pacifists, enter and lead the incipient civic and town-planning movement, their heavy-armed and bucklered men-folk will at length learn to grasp the trowel also ; and next begin to lay their panoply aside. Through Region and City, and in course of their revivance and development, lies the peaceful yet strenuous way of survival and evolution.
CHAPTER V
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY
The transition from paleotechnic to neotechnic in actual progress around us ; yet need of strongly emphasising these two types of Evolution as Inferno and Eutopia respectively. Necessity of ideal conceptions for every science : examples of this : need, therefore, of Paradise and Inferno for sociology and civics no less than for theology and psychology.
The beauty of cities is of no mere sentimental interest : the aesthetic factor is recognised in war, in medicine, as at once a symptom of efficiency and health, and an aid to them. The limitation of past romantic criticisms of paleotechnic cities is thus avoided.
The cleansing of the city ; starting from its mountain and moor- land water-supply area, and proceeding inwards to meet town- planning extensions. These extend naturally star-wise along main thoroughfares, leaving unbuilt rustic areas between. These kept from growing together by here placing schools, playgrounds, allot- ments, gardens, etc. Value of opportunities of activity for youth, and for citizenship : civic volunteering.
Cleansing of slums ; slum-gardens, and creation of open spaces. As larger factories, breweries, etc., move to environs, small work- shops may be grouped into their place, and sites thus left clear for open spacing. Needed concentration of garages ; demolition of un- necessary mews ; formation of garden-courts, etc. Such minor changes prepare for greater. Poseidon at Dunfermline.
IN Chapter II. we viewed our immense coalfield city- groups, our conurbations, as in the process of in- definite growth ; while in the next chapter we pre- sented the threatening arrest of the lower industry and cheaper life of our own and kindred lands, not only by internal exhaustion of coalfields, or by com-
84
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 85
petition upon lower levels, but rather by competition upon a higher one — that of the neotechnic order, now so plainly arising in other lands— Norway being but the; best example, as having no paleotechnic develop- ment to speak of.
Yet, as already indicated, and as the reader must once and again have felt— this neotechnic order is open to us also ; we have had no small part in initiating it. Where better may this advance than in a land, one of the best situated of any, still of cheap and abundant coal, of easy communications, of ample and industrious population ? not to speak of resources still only opening, like water-courses and peit-bogs, or of those yet untouched, like winds and tides. Each inventor is busy with his part of this complex task ; and the integration of such progresses is one main aspect of the civic movement.
Since cities are thus in transition, is a defence needed of this two-fold presentment, this sharply marked forking of the path of evolution — industrial, social, civic ? Our general view of the paleotechnic city has been anything but a roseate one : yet the half has not been said. Its evils — as per its reporters' columns, its realistic novels, its problem plays — are here viewed as congruent with its industrial and commercial level, and thus normal to it, not remov- able while it persists, whether by statesmen or by philanthropists, who, alike too much, but poultice symptoms. A view surely pessimistic enough ! Yet this pessimism is but apparent ; its faith is in the
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order of Nature ; and this, in lowered functions, in diseased conditions, does give us disease. But, as we improve conditions, and with them vitalise functions, Nature gives us, must give us, health and beauty anew — renewing, it may be surpassing, the best records of old.
The paleotechnic order should, then, be faced and shown at its very worst, as dissipating resources and energies, as depressing life, under the rule of machine and mammon, and as working out accordingly its specific results, in unemployment and misemploy- ment, in disease and folly, in vice and apathy, in indolence and crime. All these are not separately to be treated, as our too specialised treatments of them assume, but are logically connected, inseparably connected, like the symptoms of a disease ; they are worked out, in sequent moves, upon the chessboard of life. They even tend to become localised upon the chequers of a town plan, and thus become manifest to all as its veritable Inferno. Yet, with the contrasted development of the normal life, no less continuous moves of ascent appear, no less clear and definite city-development also. Our town plans are thus not merely maps but also symbols, a notation of thought which may concretely aid us towards bettering the towns of the present, and thus preparing for the nobler cities of a not necessarily distant future.
It may, again, be said, each of these cities is a logical dream : the city is not so bad as your Inferno, nor is it ever likely to be as good as your Utopia.
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 87
So far admitted. Every science works with ideal con- cepts, like the mathematician's zero and infinity, like the geographer's directions — north, south, east, and west — and can do nothing without these. True, the mathematician's progress towards infinity never gets him there, nor do the geographer's journey ings, the astronomer's search attain the ultimate poles. Still, without these unattainable directions, these cardinal ideals, who could move from where he stands, save to sink down into a hole ? So far, then, from losing our- selves, either in the gloom of the paleotechnic Inferno or before the neotechnic Eutopia of the coming city, these extremes are what enable us to measure and to criticise the city of the present, and to make provision for its betterment, its essential renewal.
" Here or nowhere is our Utopia " ; and our pre- sentments of the city at its worst, in depressing shadow, or again at its best, at brightest dawn, are but the needful chiaroscuro. The hell and heaven of the theologian may have lost their traditional mean- ing, their old appeal to the multitude, yet may all the more for us here renew their significance. When they asked Dante, "Where didst thou see Hell?" he answered, " In the city around me," as indeed the whole structure and story of the Inferno shows. And correspondingly, like plainer men, like simpler poets, he built his Paradise around his boyhood's love.
Absolutely, then, as zero and infinity are indispens- able for the mathematician, so hell and heaven are " the necessary stereoscopic device " of the social
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
thinker, much as of his predecessor, the theologian. Even the material presentments of these — tremendous energies, dissipated and destructive in the one ; orderly magnificence of environment and perfection of life in the other — are concretely applicable, are alike logically necessary for our economic and civic studies. Given the everyday life of our towns, at one time we see their brighter aspects, but at another we feel their extending glare and gloom. V We say with Shelley, " Hell is a city much like London " ; we see how slow must be our journey out of its Valley of the Shadow.
So, again, with the traditional psychologic present- ments of hell and heaven — here of agony, of rage, of hatred, of despair and frost ; or there of joys, of ideal fellowship, of individual ecstasy.
Hence are not pessimist and optimist each right, and each even in his extremest way ? Yet nearer truth than either the image of the Inferno or of Paradise is that of Purgatory ; for before us is the renewal of a great social hope ; behind us the dis- appointment and the suffering of innumerable falls.
Yet less fiery presentment of the city's life-process is needed than any of these sternly mythopoetic ones. What better, then, than Blake's ? — a veritable town- planner's hymn :
" I will not cease from mental strife,
Nor shall my sword fall from my hand, Till I have built Jerusalem
Within this green and pleasant land ! "
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY
Now, as regards the Beauty of Cities. Those who are most in the habit of calling themselves " practical," to maintain this character are also wont too easily to reckon as " unpractical " whatever advances of science or of art they have not yet considered, or which tend to disturb the paleotechnic set of working conventions. Hence they so easily say of us town planners and city revivers, "All these prettifications may perhaps do very well for Continental cities ; but after all they are mere luxuries, and won't pay us here," and so on. Now, if anyone in that mind considers the argument of these pages, he will find that what they are primarily concerned with is very different from what he expects ; and that our problem is— not prettifica- tion, not even architecture, mistress of the arts though she be — but what practical men — men of business, men of politics, men of war — consider to be the most practical of all : namely, their survival, at once local and regional, national and imperial, in the present intensifying struggle for existence, and this in com- petition with other countries ; and with Germany for choice, since their thoughts at present turn so much that way. This fiercely practical reader will also find that all this is discussed without any more reference to {esthetic considerations than are given to them, say, at the War Office, or at the nearest Public Health Office Bureau. The utmost difference is that at places in such grim earnest as these they do know the significance of cleanliness, good order, good looks. They know these as the best and most obvious of
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symptoms, as the outcome, the expression of health and well-being, alike for a child or for a regiment, for a home or for a city ; while our manufacturing and our commercial world, and its traditional econo- mists as yet do not, with exceptions still so rare as to be practically little more than individual ones.
Such individuals the practical man as yet fails to understand for what they really are — pioneers of the incipient neotechnic order. For does he not commonly say, " All very well for them ; they can afford it ! " — thus missing the fact that their sense of order and efficiency, their desire of fitness and seemliness, and their diffusion of these throughout their whole concern, and not only in but by those who serve in it, are vital factors of their superiority ; factors by which their already often conspicuous business success over those of more "practical" competitors, may, as a matter of contemporary history, be often and very largely explained. Those few great industrialists — of the Continent, like Godin at Guise, Krupp in Germany, Van Marken in Holland ; of America, like Patterson or Fels ; of England, like Lever, Cadbury, and Rowntree — who have done best by their workers, have also been all the better served by them, as their eminence, alike in efficiency of output and in resultant fortunes, plainly enough shows. It has long been known that to get the best work out of a horse, one must not put the worst in. The same has, in comparatively recent times, been discovered to hold good of the soldier, of the sailor, even in the
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 91
long-depressed mercantile marine. So why should the great paleotechnic world be so slow in learning this lesson, and be so loyal, so sentimentally self- sacrificing to their economic superstitions as to leave the few neotechnic employers to make their fortunes, not a little through their application of it ?
None will deny that the military world has always known the value of aesthetic appeals, and these of many and magnificent kinds, as a means of increasing alike its numbers and the efficiency of these. But it is a main disaster of our modern, i.e. paleotechnic, industry that our practical men are so largely blind to these considerations in their own dealings, and that they even pride themselves upon their limitations. The name " practical " which they so habitually arro- gate to themselves is but a sophism, self-deceptive though it be ; for where they really find their argu- ments and take their refuge is in the utilitarian philo- sophy. This it is which is the real inspiration, the sole justification of their practice. They think it strong because it still survives, despite the various and vivid protests of nineteenth-century romance and sentiment, or rather of what to them but seemed so. What they as yet fail to realise is that, when weighed in the balances of the sciences, their philosophy is found but futilitarian, or worse. For the physicist their " development of resources," their " progress of a district," is too much the wasteful dissipation of the energies of Nature ; to the biologist and physician the increasing numbers they boast as " progress of popu-
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lation " are too obviously in deterioration rather than in progressive evolution. Nor are these criticisms of physics or of public health the sternest. The sociol- ogist as historian has still fully to explain the practical man to himself. He has to analyse out the various factors which have gone to the making of him and his philosophy together — the uprooted rustic, the machine-driven labourer, and each as a half-starveling, too much even of the necessary food, and yet more of the good of life — the soured and blighted puritan degenerating into mammonised fanatic — the revolu- tionary and radical politician fossilising into doctrinaire. It cannot be too often repeated, too frequently pre- sented in different ways, that the self-satisfied " practical man " who looks down upon all our hopes of the redemption and ennoblement of his industrial and commercial world towards civic and social aims as " mere sentiment," is himself the victim of senti- ments gone wrong; nay, that his ledger-regulated mind is too often but an obsession of arithmetic, and his life of respectable acquisitiveness but its resulting Vitus' Dance, conducted by " the least erected fiend that fell."
Beauty, whether of Nature or art, has too long been without effective defence against the ever- advancing smoke-cloud and machine-blast and slum-progress of paleotechnic industry. Not but that her defenders have been of the very noblest, witness notably Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, with their many disciples ; yet they were too largely romantics — right in their treasuring
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 93
of the world's heritage of the past, yet wrong in their reluctance, sometimes even passionate refusal, to admit the claims and needs of the present to live and labour in its turn, and according to its lights. So that they in too great measure but brought upon themselves that savage retort and war-cry of " Yah ! Sentiment ! " with which the would-be utilitarian has so often increased his recklessness towards Nature, and coarsened his callousness to art. The romantics have too often been as blind in their righteous anger as were the mechanical utilitarians in their strenuous labour, their dull contentment with it. Both have failed to see, beyond the rude present, the better future now dawning — in which the applied physical sciences are advancing beyond their clumsy and noisy first apprenticeship, with its wasteful and dirty begin- nings, towards a finer skill, a more subtle and more economic mastery of natural energies ; and in which these, moreover, are increasingly supplemented by a corresponding advance of the organic sciences, with their new valuations of life, organic as well as human. In their day, when education had withered down into mere memorisings for senile examining boards, for torpid bureaucracies, neither party could foresee the rebound which is now beginning towards the reassertion of the freedom and uniqueness of the individual mind, towards the guidance of its unfolding —witness, as a symptom of this, the world -wide interest in the teaching method of Dr Montessori. In an age of extremest individualism, which had been
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necessitated by the escape from outworn trammels, neither foresaw that return of the sense of human fellowship and helpfulness which promises to rekindle the heart of religion ; and still less that renascence of citizenship, that reconstruction of the City, on which we are now entering, and which inaugurates a new period of social and of political evolution. Too much lost by our predecessors of the industrial age, and as yet all too seldom realised by ourselves, the returning conception and ideal of Citizenship is offering us a new start-point of thought and labour. Here, in fact, is a new watchword, as definite, even more definite, 'than those of liberty, wealth, and power, of science and of mechanical skill, which have so fascinated our predecessors; one, moreover, transcending all these — one enabling us to retain them, to co-ordinate them with a new clearness, and towards the common weal.
From this standpoint the case for the conservation of Nature, and for the increase of our accesses to her, must be stated more seriously and strongly than is customary. Not merely begged for on all grounds of amenity, of recreation, and repose, sound though these are, but insisted upon. On what grounds? In terms of the maintenance and development of life ; of the life of youth, of the health of all, which is surely the very foundation of any utilitarianism worth the name ; and further, of that arousal of the mental life in youth, of its maintenance through age, which must be a main aim of higher utilitarianism,
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 95
and is a main condition of its continued progress towards enlightenment.
At the very outset (Chapter II.) we saw the need of protecting, were it but for the prime necessity of pure; water supply, what remains of hills and moor- lands between the rapidly growing cities and con- urbations of modern industrial regions — for those of Lancashire and Yorkshire, for instance, just as for Glasgow the district around Loch Katrine.
Plainly, the hygienist of water supply is the true utilitarian ; and hence, even before our present awakening of citizenship, he has been set in authority above all minor utilitarians, each necessarily of narrower task and of more local vision — engineering, mechanical and chemical, manufacturing and mone- tary— and has so far been co-ordinating all these into the public service. But with this preservation of mountains and moorlands comes also the need of their access : a need for health, bodily and mental together. For health without the joys of life — of which one prime one is assuredly this nature-access — is bat dullness ; and this we begin to know as a main way of preparation for insidious disease. With this, again, comes forestry: no mere tree-cropping, but sylviculture, arboriculture too, and park-making at its greatest and best.
Such synoptic vision of Nature, such constructive conservation of its order and beauty towards the health of cities, and the simple yet vivid happiness of its holiday-makers (whom a wise citizenship will
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educate by admission, not exclusion) is more than engineering : it is a master-art ; vaster than that of street planning, it is landscape making ; and thus it meets and combines with city design.
But the children, the women, the workers of the town can come but rarely to the country. As hygienists, and utilitarians, we must therefore bring the country to them. While our friends the town
FIG. 20. — Town->Country : Country->Town.
planners and burgh engineers are adding street beyond street, and suburb beyond suburb, it is also for us to be up and doing, and "make the field gain on the street, not merely the street gain on the field." For all the main thoroughfares out from the city (hence- forth, we hope, to be boulevards, and even more) and around every suburban railway station, the town planner is arranging his garden village, with its own individuality and charm; but we, with our converse perspective, coming in from country towards town,
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have to see to it that these growing suburbs no longer grow together, as past ones have too much done. Tow as must now cease to spread like expanding ink- stains and grease-spots : once in true development, they will repeat the star-like opening of the flower, with green leaves set in alternation with its golden rays.
The city parks, which are among the best monu- ments and legacies of our later nineteenth- century municipalities — and valuable, useful, often beautiful though they are, — have been far too much influenced by the standpoint natural to the prosperous city fathers who purchased them, and who took them over, like the mansion-house parks they often were, each with its ring-fence, jealously keeping it apart from a vulgar world. Their lay-out has as yet too much continued the tradition of the mansion-house drives, to which the people are admitted on holidays, and by courtesy ; and where the little girls may sit on the grass. But the boys? They are at most granted a cricket-pitch, or lent a space between foot- ball goals, but otherwise are jealously watched, as potential savages, who on the least symptom of their natural activities of wigwam-building, cave-digging, stream-damming, and so on — must instantly be chevied away, and are lucky if not handed over to the police.
Now, if the writer has learned anything from a life largely occupied with nature-study and with education, it is that these two need to be brought together, and
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this through nature-activities. But — though there is obviously nothing more important either for the future of industry or for the preservation of the State, than vigorous health and activity, guided by vivid intelligence — we have been stamping out the very germs of these by our policeman-like repression, both in school and out of it, of those natural boyish instincts of vital self-education, which are always con- structive in impulse and in essence, however clumsy and awkward, or even mischievous and destructive when merely restrained, as they commonly have been, and still too much are.
It is primarily for lack of this touch of first- hand rustic experience that we have forced young energy into hooliganism ; or, even worse, depressed it below that level. Whereas the boy-scout move- ment already triumphantly shows that even the young hooligan needs but some living touch of active responsibility to become much of a Hermes ; and, with reconstructive opportunities and their vigorous labours, we shall next make of him a veritable Hercules.
With this dawning reclamation of our school- system, hitherto so bookish and enfeebling, there is coming on naturally the building of better schools- open air schools for the most part ; and henceforth, as far as may be, situated upon the margins of these open spaces. With these, again, begin the allotments and the gardens which every city improver must increasingly provide — the whole connected up with
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tree-planted lanes and blossoming hedgerows, open to birds and lovers.
The upkeep of all this needs no costly increase of civic functionarism. It should be naturally under- taken by the regenerating schools and continuation classes, and by private associations too without number. What better training in citizenship, as well as opportunity of health, can be offered any of us than in sharing in the upkeep of our parks and gardens? Instead of paying increased park and school rates for these, we should be entering upon one of the methods of ancient and of coming citizenship, and with this of the keeping down of taxes, by paying at least this one of our social obligations increasingly in time and in service rather than in money. Thus too we shall be experimentally opening our eyes towards that substantial Resorption of Govern- ment, which is the natural and approaching reaction from the present multiplication of officialism, always so costly at best.
People volunteer for war ; and it is a strange and a dark superstition that they will not volunteer for peace. On the contrary, every civic worker knows that, with a little judicious inquiry and management, any opportunity which can be found for public service is not very long of being accepted, if only the leader- ship for it can be given : that is still scarce, but grows with exercise and service. Thus before long our constructive activities would soon penetrate into the older existing town, and with energies Herculean
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indeed — cleansing its Augean stables in ways which municipal cleaning departments, responsible to the backward taxpayer, have not yet ventured upon — to a degree of washing and whitewashing on which the more bacteriologically informed rising generation will soon insist. In " dirty Dublin," for instance, this civic volunteering is making conspicuous and effective beginnings.
But beyond these mere cleansings, we need both destructive and constructive energy. Nowhere better shall we find the smaller open spaces and people's gardens of the opening decade than in the very heart of the present slums. In the " Historic Mile " of Old Edinburgh, that most overcrowded and difficult of slums, the " Open Spaces Survey " of our Outlook Tower committee shows there are no less than seventy-six open spaces, with a total area of ten acres, lately awaiting reclamation, and of these already an appreciable proportion are now being gardened, year by year — all through voluntary agencies, of course, though now approved, and at various points assisted, by city departments and officials. This movement has lately been adopted by the Women's Health Association of Ireland, and such beginnings are in progress, with skilled leadership, in Dublin, London, and other cities.
Towards this reclamation of the slums, our in- dustrialists and town planners have next their far larger opportunity. The innumerable and com- plicated muddle of workshops, large and small, which
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at present so largely and so ineffectively crowd up the working-class quarters of our towns, plainly
FIG. 23. — A children's garden in Old Edinburgh.
suggest, and will richly reward, a large measure of thoughtful replanning. Many of our large industries — factories, breweries, and so on, as experience already shows, may with great advantage be moved to
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appropriate situations in the country, and in this way leave spacious buildings, which may often readily be adapted for the accommodation and grouping of smaller industries. Thus would be set free these minor workshops, largely for demolition, and their sites for open spacing, with a gain to health, to children's
FIG. 24. — Confusion 01 small workshops behind modern working- class dwellings in Edinburgh.
happiness, and therefore to civic economy and pro- ductivity, which would rapidly repay the city for the whole transaction. Hence of this the expense might, most fairly of all outlays, be charged for redemption during the generation now opening.
For a concrete illustration, let me take the well- known case of the West Princes Street Gardens of
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Edinburgh. These as yet retain the bounds of their former private ownership ; but the map of the afore- said open-spaces committee for Old Edinburgh shows how, as they already sweep round the castle, they may next be made practically continuous with some of our slum gardens — thus bringing public beauty into the very heart of what was lately, or still is, private squalor.
Mews, again, are rapidly becoming obsolete ; and are often being utilised as private garages, stores, small workshops, etc. Now, however, is the very time for city improvers. Garages peculiarly lend themselves to concentration, not to dispersion ; and private enterprise is already providing facilities for this here and there, though as yet on too small a scale.
Moreover, the hygienist has fully demonstrated the unwholesomeness of mews ; and the corresponding groupings, into definite blocks, of such mews as will for some time be required, should thus be insisted on by the municipal authorities ; since large collective stables are far more easily, and cheaply, kept in healthy order than are a multitude of small scattered ones.
Some of the existing mews will no doubt afford places for the grouping of workshops, studios, etc., as already more or less in progress ; but large demo- litions of them would also be possible, with not in- considerable gain to the needed open spaces.
Again, the throwing together of innumerable yards
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and drying greens, which at present disgrace the backs of even our best city-quarters, should be more and more comprehensively dealt with ; and garden quadrangles should thus increasingly replace the present squalid labyrinth of wasted greens, cut up by innumerable walls. A single central drying-house for each garden-court might at the same time be provided, the whole thus setting free for vital uses over the city an aggregate of many acres, and these far more accessible, and therefore more useful, than are the parks, for the daily use of childhood and family life, and for happy garden-activities, both for youngsters and their elders.
Such minor (yet in aggregate considerable) changes need but beginnings ; and not a few of these begin- nings are in actual progress. Such modest initiatives, moreover, gently break down prejudices, and prepare the way for that large measure of municipal reorgani- sation which the public of our cities will soon desire. When this desire has been developed, there is no fear but that people will be willing to pay — that is, work —for its satisfaction. The present is the day of small things : our fellow-citizens have first to be persuaded : hence this repeated emphasis on the need of private initiatives. But by all means let each possible step be taken within the municipality, and in its various departmental offices as well as without ; and let public powers be obtained as far as possible, and as fast as they can, utilising precedents wherever these exist. Edinburgh, for instance, has taken more
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powers for the suppression of sky-signs, of winking abominations, and regulation of advertisements gener- ally, than have as yet most other cities ; while Glasgow has, of course, long been an example in larger matters.
As I close this chapter I see from the morning's paper how the archons of a sea-coast city, having in past years built a gymnasium to Apollo, and likewise a temple to Hygeia, whereby their youth are blest, have now also offered a modest sacrifice to Poseidon. This the good sea-god, ever so propitious to the cities of this his long-favoured isle, has straightway re- warded with the miracle of an unfailing spring of sea-water upon their acropolis, albeit well-nigh an hour's journey from his waves, and so copious that they and theirs may bathe therein for ever.
Our Edinburgh acropolis is scarce further from the sea : the very outflow of such healing waters would, moreover, purify innumerable miles of our lofty and well-sloped city ; and Poseidon's priest- engineers might thus have even greater success among us. Meantime, let us hope, they are upon missions round the other small cities of our coasts : the rich and great are often the hardest to awaken.
CHAPTER VI
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE
The Biological view of Economics — "There is no Wealth but Life. Contemporary transition from "money wages," through "minimum wage," to " family budget," and thence to Vital Budget.
The degradation of the Labourer ; in Shakespeare, and in subse- quent writers. Need of a new " Hodgiad," and this in terms of Folk, Work, and Place ; such an interpretation of this historic depression is largely in terms of the deterioration of housing. Essential achieve- ment of "Industrial (i.e. Paleotechnic) Age" here defined as— slum. Slums commonly so called, their origin and their varieties. Applica- tion of Veblen's " Theory of Business Enterprise." Slums too much everywhere : middle-class in Semi-slums. Even wealthy quarters are too much but Super-slums. Illustrations from modern cities at their best, e.g. Mayfair for London, New Town for Edinburgh. Cinderella and the looting of her kitchen : its depression into area. Her approaching deliverance : science the fairy godmother, electricity her wand : Modern Magic and Romance.
The people are still too indifferent to housing : illustrations from Edinburgh and other Scottish cities, with their tenement problem. i Hopeful example of constructive initiative headed by Henry Vivian. \ Concluding appeal to Women.
PHYSICS is thus not the only science which criticises the traditional paleotechnic economy into its essential resultants of dissipated energies, of dust and ashes, however veiled in glittering gossamers of money statistics. Biology too has its word to say : and just as for the physicist there is no wealth save in realised and conserved energies and materials, so for
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the evolutionary biologist, exactly as for Ruskin before him, " there is no Wealth but Life." Is it replied, " We have all to live as best we can " ? That is a characteristic phrase of pseudo-economics, which misleads capital and labour alike into its accept- ance, its repetition everywhere. But taking it bio- logically, as normal evolutionists, resolute not to be deteriorisers, our problem is to live at the best we can, as well as we can, through our twenty-four hours a day in the first place, and for as many days as we can in the second. Our full normal expectation of life should be in advance therefore of that of the past simple industries — not falling short of it, as ill- housed and underfed (when not overfed) paleotechnic communities have done, and are still doing. Towards thus living out our days, certain conditions are fundamental; and first, a certain life -maintaining minimum of real wages, experimentally determined by physiologists. Their experimental results have lately been coming into application in everyday life in this country, as notably to the working folk of York, by its eminent neotect, and corresponding neo- economist, Mr Seebohm Rowntree.1 His achieve- ment has been to get definitely below the money terms of paleotechnic wages, and to define clearly for the first time, as "primary poverty," that line of real poverty, physiological poverty, below which organic efficiency cannot be maintained.
This stage of biological economics once reached,
1 Poverty, by F. Seebohm Rowntree. Nelson, Is.
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this concrete way acquired of looking below " wages " to budget, below " wealth " to weal, there is of course no harm, but immediate convenience and advantage, in comparing the physiologist's minimum ration — the proteids, fats, and amyloids, which the labourer and his family require, and its real and permanent statistical notation of heat and work units, " calories " — with the fluctuating money notation of the trader and his economist. For this notation will now also serve us, instead of mastering them ; it can no longer go on blinding us all to the physical and physiological facts behind it. We are getting, in fact, towards our " minimum wage " : yet the moment this fascinating and handy cash sum begins again to be thought of as being " for practical purposes " the goal of the workman, instead of as a mere book-keeping notation recording the details of how he may have got the said rations, then of course prices will begin to be worked up again by the commercial interest; and this until he is in deeper primary poverty than ever.
Yet even Mr Rowntree has but only begun to touch the question of housing ; vital and fundamental to the family budget, as he and all other constructive workers recognise it to be. AVhat is the very core of economic history if not the story of the home ?
The story is a long one of the degradation of the rustic and the urban labourer, and of their houses, from the best days of real wages, in the later middle age to their lowest levels in the early part of the nineteenth century. And though Thorold Rogers
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and others have done much for the description of its various stages, now of decline and now of catastrophe, the nature and amount of this whole process — its meanings, its present-day results — are still far from realised ; indeed cannot fully be by those of us who have escaped from the process. In the world of labour these have been sunk, not simply below historic consciousness, as in the prosperous classes, but even below tradition, into a dull acceptance of lowered standards of life — submitted to as yet in the concrete, even by most of those who vigorously protest and agitate in the abstract. Here Shakespeare, amid the farce and drollery, the fairy beauty which he weaves around princely dignities and patrician loves in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is all the truer witness, in that he did not more strongly protest against that fulness of degradation he so clearly sees, so fitly names— that of the English yeoman fallen to bottom, that of the craftsman sunk to starveling, and of faces stunted before birth to the characteristic snout — that ugliest of reversions to the low nose and protruding jaws of brute-like ancestry, by which Mr Punch, albeit so kindly a jester among all classes of his own island-folk, has seldom wearied of recalling to the Irishman — as if the Celtic memory were not already long and bitter enough — the Great Famine, and how our statesmen and their economists bade his mother starve through it ere he was born.
Such grim gleanings are but straws upon the long torrent of disasters, which is well-nigh the main
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE
history of the people ; and which even their few and sad annalists have, from time to time, recorded but scantily, and which historians are only now beginning to summarise and estimate, towards that woeful " Hodgiad " which a writer endowed with a true spark of the epic spirit has lately promised us. Happily, such writers are not mere clerks of the recording angel, still less avengers — for these are ever but useless, and worse. The task, though like the diagnosis of a long-standing and intensifying disease, complex, repellent in its details, is a necessary, a purposive, a hopeful one — curative it may be even to some of its present sufferers, preventive certainly to their successors, and in increasing measure. This long depression of the people has been treated from many points of view. Once slavery, next serfdom, now wagedom has been blamed for all things : ex- planations, religious and political, commercial and legal, have each in turn been pushed to the uttermost, and so on ; while correspondingly simple panaceas have been again and again offered, and even applied, yet always with disappointing incompleteness of success — we at last begin to see why. It is now coming to the turn of the student of housing and of hygiene to add his contribution, and to review the whole sad history of labour to its concrete resultants, in place, and work, and folk ; in folk, and work, and place. The rotting cabins of Old Ireland, the tumble- down cottages of the English labourer, the squalid
and super-crowded tenement of the Scot (a prison-
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tower too massive, alas ! to tumble down), are thus so many regional culminants, each of a long and doleful record of social and individual mishaps and disasters, violences and diseases, mistakes and follies, vices and crimes ; and each and all with their intricate nemesis, provoking any and all others in its unceasing turn. Here, then, in and around Old Dublin, Old Edinburgh, Old London, and in all the minor towns and cities these respectively epitomise and influence, we begin to realise the complex conditions on which the Machine Age went to work, and which it has now largely intermingled and combined into its central and characteristic resultants — of "production," by and for the mass of the people. What after all are these ? Such and such bales and shiploads ; imports and exports, the economist is wont to reply ; so many pounds, shillings, and pence. But in civics we look at things differently, and what we mainly see are the modern " poor quarter " and the " industrial quarters," which thus make up three-fourths and more of our industrial towns.
There is no real lack of sympathy or good- will in the world. Individual cases, local miseries, arouse it easily : hence the half-crowns and tracts, the soup- kitchens and mission-halls with which philanthropy so long relieved itself by sprinkling the abyss ; hence even the dispensaries, gardens, and other sounder begin- nings— towards its reorganisation ; for this is at length becoming seen as necessarily thorough, if no longer to be as good as none. Yet nothing in this volume
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—perhaps no generalisation in contemporary science —seems so difficult to most ordinarily well-to-do, kindly, sensible people, such as may read it, as to realise the general view here seriously taken, presented and maintained, of the essential achievement of the Industrial Age, its predominant material outcomes, as essentially and typically summed into and around one single, central synoptic vision of its towns and cities alike, their " composition portrait," their realised ideal. What is this concrete goal and final generalisa- tion of paleotechnic industry and its economics alike, this synthetic achievement and concept of its main doing and thinking ? In a single word, it is — Slum.
Slum : Slum, not merely for a mere submerged tenth, for rural colliery village, for resultant black country and its towns, but even for our great cities. For what but mere Semi-slums are these long dormitory rows, to which our most prosperous skilled workmen, our foremen and guards, even our clerks get home at night, and between whose mean, wee back-yards, or yet drearier and emptier school-yards, their bairns have to grow up, and within whose narrow limits their wromen-folk drudge out all their days.
Business, however, that surely is better off? — since it is of the very essence of the paleotechnic order that the commercial process should outdo the mechanical one. Think how fine it sounds to be " something in the City." Yet to the descriptive naturalist-observer of cities, rendered immune to gold-mania, as all should be, and, as education revives, shall be through
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mineralogy from childhood — its boasted hypnotic magic fails, indeed but evokes contemptuous memories of i he tales of the dragon's glittering hoard and dingy lair, of " the emperor's new clothes," and so on. For " the City " is no longer the true City it once was, and may be again. This focus, yesterday and to-day, of the paleotechnic financial struggle and success— what is it mainly after all, but the exaggeration of its old Ghetto by later imported ones ? — with, beside this, the hypertrophy, in unmatched disorganisation, of its historic seaport ? — and beyond these, the decad- ence of its skilled industries and manufactures ? Ghetto-slums, Port-slums, Works-slums, Shop-slums, Barrow-slums, Pub-slums, Trull-slums, Thief-slums, Doss-slums — all the way out and back again to the Embankment. Is this ugly catalogue after all far out as a rough charcoal sketch, and even map-mark- ing, for a first sociological survey-excursion to con- temporary London Town ? Do not these all chink only too true to the City's simple tune and dance, " The Jingling Purse." And for how many other of the whilom cities of our contemporary civilisation will not a too similar, if smaller, outline serve ? The most penetrating, and hence till lately least read, of American economists, though in his new and seeming- abstruse way the first of American humorists also, Prof. Thorstein Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class is at length becoming a classic, has also more lately given us a Theory of Industrial Enterprise. In this there are for the first time keenly analysed
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out and contrasted the diverse tendencies of the machine process, and of the commercial process, which traditional economists have hitherto treated as in the main a harmonious whole, but of which he brings out the mutual disorganisation they at present involve. His idea once mastered, the student of cities will find that it applies to the places he knows in detail ; and, to begin with, that it throws no little light upon the contrasted commercial wealth of the City and the comparative industrial poverty of East London. Similarly in New York, upon the strange juxtaposition of Wall Street and the Bowery. Yet through all Veblen's apparent pessimism (as through the descriptions and arguments of this volume, we trust, also) there runs an unbroken clue — that of observed and reasoned science — not without threads of life, and faith in it, woven through its tough cord. With direct physicist-like argument, he works out the inevitable, however difficult and gradual, victory of the machine process over the commercial process : for the linking up of the chain of physical efficiencies all the way from Nature to life must needs overpower and eliminate all present or possible parasitisms in transit. Thus in his own way he practically expresses and explains that birth of the neotechnic age from the paleotechnic, which is a central thesis of the present volume.
Return, however, to the proposition above laid down, ugly and harsh as it may seem — that of the essential and characteristic product of the present
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predominance of the lower industrial, or paleotechnic, age being fairly and broadly generalisable as Slum ; the view that to this most undivine event our main economic creation has moved. Now, if this seem exaggerated, unjust even, where in the modern world can this be so much so as amid the solid wealth and luxury of Mayfair, or the spacious dignity, the impeccable decorum of New Edinburgh? Each of these surely is free from slum? Or if, on the shortest walk, or on Mr Booth's London Map, we do find the real and unquestionable article a good deal nearer and newer than we expected, the essential and characteristic patrician streets are surely free? The great squares, at any rate — who can think of slums here ?
With the briefest visit to Dublin, however, such an optimistic estimate is shaken. For here are whole streets of mansions, larger than those of Edinburgh, more richly wrought within than those of London, yet slums already, from end to end. And poor slums they make : mostly of one-roomed dwellings all ; their very spaciousness, relatively healthy of course where the family keeps to itself, is also a temptation to take in lodgers. Thus, even in such really grand houses, we are sure of no continuing city. But to-day at least, say, in Belgrave Square, or Adam's statelier, if smaller, Charlotte Square in Edinburgh — here surely this ugly slum-generalisation does not, cannot apply ? At first sight perhaps not ; but to the present survey it needs but a second glance to say that even
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such fine New Towns, if not a species, are at best a hybrid of the same slum-formation, no doubt there- fore deserving its special name. This, then, we pro- pose to call Super-slum.
Does this harsh epithet need explanation, justifica- tion ? Presumably ; then, with the reader's patience, these shall be submitted.
First, in fairness, a word of recognition of the architectural qualities, superlative in their way, of these great streets and squares of London and Edin- burgh, to which town planners and their pupils will long come, and rightly, to measure, to learn, and to admire. These facades, each with its dozen or score of great houses combined into a single palace-front as long as a cathedral, are all in their way a supreme achievement of the eighteenth-century renascence ; and their master-architect, Robert Adam, may fairly rank among its three mightiest men, with no superior in his own craft, and none in his age in general grasp of the classic past, save Gibbon, its historian, and Piranesi, its etcher. Adam, too, represents the con- vergence and climax of all the available great lines of architectural tradition ; and first of all, that of the best renascence work of England, for the previous century. He knew and rivalled with the best that had been done in France; and he gave his wrork a stamp and quality of his own, not only by his intimate and thorough studies of Roman antiquities, along with his friend Piranesi — but by his inde- pendent reinvestigation of that great palace of
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Diocletian, which has survived so largely through its transformation into the old town of Spalatro.
We must admire the spacious well-proportioned garden-squares upon which such mansions often look ; and here again realise that no man was ever further from being a slum-builder, in intention at least. Yet circumstances, and the spirit of the age, were too strong even for him. Pass through any of these mansions to its other side. In Roman times we should have found a stately pillared courtyard at least ; in medieval times a great cloister-square, an ambulatory, gardens of herbs and simples. At the Renaissance proper its architect would have created a veritable palace courtyard, or a garden like that of an Oxford College. But here, even Adam has been allowed to give us nothing but a bare rough-built tenement wall, such as we can see anywhere in Edin- burgh slums, and an outlook upon a labyrinth of dreary drying-greens, cut up by mean walls into a web of proportionless quadrilaterals, triangles, and clumsy trapeziums. In this wray whole acres lie derelict, spoilt for every vital purpose ; yet all — with that wild and unparalleled prodigality, where lower uses are concerned, which ever characterises the professed utilitarian — all devoted to individualistic washing-days, and seldom any longer used even for that. Gardening has sometimes been attempted, but with little result. At best there is a forlorn tree or two, self-sown, or planted anyhow. So far this spoiled garden-space is airy enough, for the upper
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CITIES IN EVOLUTION
storeys at least : but, in a majority of cases, each mansion is further cursed with its share of mews, as token of its gentility ; and thus, until sanitation but of the other day, there have been provided breeding- grounds for flies, and indirectly for the diseases they carry ; thus again levelling up with slumdom proper.
Super-slum is far too complimentary for all this. What is it but slum, impure and simple? Indeed worse ; for deadly dull, its gardens childless. Some day of course, when its residents have become disenchanted from their isolated gentility, from their obsession of private property in these pitiable back-yard cat-walks, and are again becoming citizens, these paltry little greens will be cheaply and simply thrown together into one worthy garden, with walks for the elders, flower-borders, grass spaces and play-courts for the children, and with one central or lateral building, if need be, for a washing-house and drying-room together ; with the tenement-backs orielled, balconied, ivied, embowered ; with mews and garages concen- trated at a few strategic centres.
What, then, is all such improvement upon the mess Robert Adam was compelled to make, but a detail of that improvement of slums, which is as yet only thought of and practised for the very poorest of them, and that too partially, but which cannot fairly be denied to these of the poor rich. Citizenship, like justice, like hygiene (which are indeed, but details of it), must now carry its missions, and begin its settle- ments in the West End no less than in the East.
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When the proud sisters set about making Cinder- ella into a slavey they bade her stay by the fire, while they went off to their end of the fine old room, which had been kitchen and hall in one, and partitioned it off, as henceforth their " dining-room," and then their withdra wing-room beyond that. But how to furnish these two new apartments ? The only thing they saw to do was to carry off all that was worth lifting from the old home-centre, and about the old fireside. Hence the massive oaken table in our dining-room, and the big dresser that we now call the sideboard ; the old carved plate-rack too, now the overmantel, witli the maidenly little mirror of its lowest shelf enlarged later to megalomaniac dimensions. For the withdrawing-room, and its evening occupations, they took away the old ancestral carved and painted dower-chest, fallen to rag-box — whence our Victorian " chiffonier." With this went the big chairs of the old parents, the well- wrought smaller ones for family use and for guests, even the carven stools. The beaten trays and the polished vessels were of course requisitioned ; even the odd and handy things on the mantel-shelf, henceforth to be useless ornaments ; above all, the harp which had made all hearts and classes one. They left Cinderella nothing save her pots and pans, her broom : but next, since for the daily purposes of their own service, and comfort, table and dresser, plate-rack and mantel-shelf, with a chair or two were found to be indispensable, the looted originals were not restored, but were replaced
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by the meanest and cheapest deal-boardings that Peter Quince the joiner, in the concurrent depression of himself and his craft, could be induced to supply. Among these Cinderella has since toiled on as best she may — centuries of her in the past, millions of her to-day.
By-and-by the proud sisters "need" the whole floor-space of the house for their dinners and their balls; indeed by-and-by, as this area becomes con- tracted in town, the withdrawing-room must be put upstairs, above the dining-room. New surroundings next must be found for Cinderella, with her necessary work and its poor belongings. For such dirty work, such ugly things, not to speak of such an inferior creature, any place obviously is good enough, but where shall we find even that ? The sisters call in the mason, who has lost his medieval guild-comrade- ship and mastery, with its building of church, and hall, and cottage; and so is ready to pass entirely into the service of the grand and wealthy folk, as henceforth their " architect." He has an inspiration, which at once commends itself. He points out a space into which we can now put all these vulgar things underground. True, in simpler previous ages it was thought only fit for cellarage, or for dungeon ; but now, with that modern touch upon old tradition which is most of originality, architectural or other, he has invented the area flat — henceforth cellar and dungeon in one. Thus is evolved the standard house-plan of Belgravia, New Edinburgh, of British
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respectability anywhere, with its increasingly separated social castes.
Though for the long succession of real Cinderellas in every street there has as yet come no fairy god- mother, love may and does deliver her ; she escapes to u home of her own. But her love - prince is kingdomless, landless, homeless : the young pair have for lodging but squalid choice : that of some room or two, at best between the garret and the cellar of the tenement the fallen mason brother has meantime been constructing, that they may pay high rents to the proud sisters still. So when the furnishing begins, and the woman's home-building instinct has its one opportunity in life to order all things duly, she has forgotten — indeed she never learns — that the old beauty, the real art, the true wealth therefore, of the proud sisters' furnishings at their best, had ever belonged to her old kitchen at all. Meantime, they have tired of them also, and bought new Victorian upholstery they think ever so much finer, and their new Cinderella too. When on some rare Sunday afternoon visit, she sees them now in the museum, she and hers pass vacantly by, without even noticing their antique beauty; or, if they do, without a moment's thought — that if such things were for her likes in earlier, poorer ages, why not again, in these richer ones, and that speedily ?
I [ere, then, in brief and broad summary of economic and industrial history, is some account of the general
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depression, the mean ugliness of our towns, and of the origins of the tasteless art of the rich, and the artless taste of the poor. Slum, Semi-slum, Super- slum — to this has come the Evolution of Cities. This is the harmonious environment which lower, middle, and upper class, which labourer and capitalist alike, have created ; and to which they belong : and here are their real wages : within these narrow beats, these essentially parallel streets, in which "upper" and " lower " class matter so much less than either thinks, the minds of the capitalist and his political economist, of the labourer and his economist, of all their woman- folk, are alike half-blanched, half-blackened — grey lives all. Within these still dominant limits and grooves of the paleotechnic thought and life, what prospect is there of adequate escape ? Money-strikes here, lock-outs there, offer but a poor economic prospect ; nor are even the rival political outlooks — behind the scenes, at least — so much brighter. We can but go on looking for the solution of our social enigmas in the study of the world around us, cheer- less though that yet may seem.
We return, then, to our story. But who believes any longer in fairy godmother, or fairy prince ? Do not all our neighbours, whichever their variety of slum, their faith economic or political, alike pronounce upon themselves the magic-expelling, romance-killing word — " practical"- —than which nothing is so self- satisfying, so positively (and literally) "enchanting." So, meantime, Cinderella goes on in the cellar-kitchen
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—in her own when married, just as she did in others' when single ; for the more she changes, the more things practically abide the same. Yet little though either she or the sisters see or believe it, " practically " enchanted as they still are, blind to the sciences and their applications, the fairy godmother is coming, nay, is even here : year by year now she stands waving her fairy electric wand as the herald of the new era, in the domestic labour and consequent life of woman, ready and waiting to free her from all the old elements of dirt and drudgery, and this hence- forth for good and all. Her future in the adequate neotechnic home, characterised by electricity and its labour-saving, by hygiene, and by art, is thus as true princess, that is, lady commanding assured wealth, effective service, adequate leisure, and thus with no limit to her refinement and her influence. As soon as we please, then, we may begin to emancipate Cinderella, no longer depress her through slavey into charwoman and crone.
Of course princesses will have their problems still ; but these do not belong to the present story. Let us rather restate her immediate problem in another way. Let us recall to her, and her men folk too, the story of the prisoner who languished year after year in his gloomy prison ; until one day he opened the door and came out ! The padlock had rusted off; passers-by had often told him so ; but he could not bring himself to believe them. So it is with the public of our towns, rich and poor alike : the speedy
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and thorough passage from all this smoke and squalor and torment, and with vast economy of national and of individual resources, is now fully within our reach. But we are too much depressed by this environment to mend it. Whether obvious slum-dwellers or money-millionaires, we are thus slum-children all, our would-be " practical statesmen " still unpractical, our " economists " not yet economic. Indeed, as every summer's holiday shows, and as every nerve physician knows, we are all rendered more or less neurasthenic by our present too paleotechnic environ- ments.
Does our fairy tale to any still seem vain ? There is no more condensed truth in the literatures of the world than are fairy tales. Wherever Man gains power over Nature, there is Magic. Whenever he carries out an Ideal into Life, there is Romance. When he loses both, there is stony Enchantment, in which so many lie. When he recovers both, he has vanquished the enchanter ; he has won his Bride, and the Kingdom with her. There is not, there never was, a briefer summary of the essential life- adventure than this, and what other can there be ? What better for truly practical purposes ? It is fully applicable even to difficult and apparently modern cases, like the disenchantment of the poor economist, the modern philistine, who was really at bottom not at all such a bad fellow as from his works we have been making him. He has only got enchanted, by thinking he might win Magic without Romance,
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might use power over Nature, not to abuse it, only apart from any corresponding human ideals. In fact, what he tried was to deal with wealth —even to make a " science of wealth " -without taking in Civics ! forgetting, that is, the sweethearts thai; the real working sons of men work to win, and to keep, and who thus together have ever created homes and cities, and all wealth worth the name. And beyond these princesses of flesh and blood appear yet fairer ideals ; hence the goddess and her Temple ; hence Acropolis ; hence Cathedral. All these the neotechnic city has to recover, to renew ; not longer outwardly " restoring," as with the romantics and paleotects, but re-creating, as ex- pressions of the renewing life within.
Towards the disenchantment of the politician, who will be more and more faithfully dealt with as the civic movement advances, a kindred process also appears. Indeed he has always had something of the fairy prince ; though still in the stage of failing to master the clue for this high adventure.
We may now likewise make our peace with the paleotechnic age, as it dies away before a better order ; since its life, its achievements, were the inevitable preparation for those which replace them. Its dirt and disease, its disorder, have been but incidents and accessories to its efforts, and are now to be eliminated. The dust and dirt, for instance, will not much longer be stirred about by the prehistoric individual broom, but by a fuller organisation of hygiene, which will at
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once purify the atmosphere, wash our cities well-nigh germ-free, reopen them to the all-purifying sun ; and thus abate immeasurably the indoor toil of women, itself aided by the better domestic appliances every- where coming within reach.
But the people do not yet care for all this, it may be said. No doubt this is in the main too true. However, a personal anecdote may be permitted as relevant. Looking on with the architect at the com- pletion of a new tenement of workmen's dwellings in the High Street of Old Edinburgh, a block modest enough, of course, yet with some advances in hygiene and aspect over what had been before available, a workman of the neighbourhood tapped one of us on the shoulder : " Pity you haven't a hundred working-men that understand what you're about there ! " " You mean building their own homes ? " " Ay, that's it ! By Jove ! wouldn't they go down the street ! " " You mean their working efficiency would be increased ? " " Rather ! "
This happened more than twenty years ago ; and there are still few signs of the hundred Edinburgh working-men. Their marked individuality — in their leaders indeed an outstanding intellectuality — their mastery of (and by) abstract politics has long raised them far above sharing the petty local interests of us city improvers or town planners, who occupy our minds and hands with concrete trifles like homes and gardens, and pleasanter streets — all very well, no
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133
doubt, but which only your slow concrete-minded German really cares for. Houses and gardens, streets and squares ? No, no. Whole city wards even are too small. " Constituencies " are the very smallest
FIG. 29. — An improved tenement house (1892) in Lawnmarket (Upper High Street), Edinburgh.
units really worth recognising, and these only at election times, when they heckle their rival candidates to tatters more sharply than Government or Opposi- tion will afterwards do. Measures of national, im- perial magnitude are not less shrewdly discussed ; for among such groups of workmen one used to hear- doubtless may still hear — talk as good and clear, as
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shrewd and trenchant, as one gets in club or commit- tee, in college or debate, in learned society or salon. In all cities probably the skilled artisan's opinion is far less behind that of " the intellectuals " than these suppose ; and, in Edinburgh at least, it is too often the intellectuals who fall behind. Yet after all this high and serious converse, our Scots workmen retire to their homes — no, their houses — no, not houses. There is no word which can convey to ordinary old- fashioned English readers — who still cling to the national idea on which they were brought up, of homes as separate houses, of each family with its own bit of ground, at least its yard, however small — the full content and savour which our Scottish cities- Historic Edinburgh, Great Glasgow, Bonnie Dundee, and minor ones, with burghs without number — manage to condense and to express in their, in one sense, high tradition of " Working-class Tenements." Inspiring name ! These are inhabited by the majority of the Scottish people : more than half the whole population in fact, are in one- and two-room tenements — a state of things unparalleled in Europe or America, in fact, in the history of civilisation. To realise these Scottish conditions with any measure of town-planning con- creteness the English reader must build up for himself a model, if indoors, with small packing-cases up to the ceiling ; or, if he be rustic enough still to possess an adequate backyard, small one- and two-chambered coops and hutches would be the thing, if he could get but enough — piled storey above storey, four,
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five, and six, to keep within modern regulations— around a single lofty spiral ladder. Old tenements, of course, are far higher ; indeed the sky-scraper
FIG. 31.— Old tenements : Cowgate, Edinburgh.
became as characteristic of Old Edinburgh, especi- ally after the Revolution of 1688, as they have now become of New York — and with analogous effect on land-values, and consequent difficulty of
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escaping from them, and from their multiplication elsewhere.
Yet this Scotland is the nation which, up to the beginning of the Industrial Age, was, save Norway, the most rustic and the most stalwart in Europe. It is now the most urban ; and how far deteriorated it is happily not here our present duty to inquire.
Into the complex question of historic and con- temporary conditions which have thus brought it about — that the most educated, and politically the most " advanced," of British workmen are the worst housed in Britain, or anywhere else — we cannot here enter. We can merely refer to our " Civic Survey of Edinburgh," and kindred studies, assume the facts, and add to them one more : that when, as of course now and then of late years, some little Housing discussion is raised in Scotland, the tenements, and even their one- and two-roomed components, still find no lack of advocates, and these among all classes ! Not only do individuals speak in their defence, but even local pride is aroused. The fact is, we rather look down upon small brick houses : we admire our lofty piles of stone : we still use their historic and legal name of " Lands." Finally, the whole matter is put upon what are really high metaphysical grounds (which " the practical man " is ever so liable to wander into). We are made to feel a certain fitness in these things, a certain established harmony; in fact a sort of foreordination of Scotsmen for tenements, and of tenements for Scotsmen. Upon these tower-
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ing heights of national destiny, therefore, the economic verdict is easy to give, and hard to refuse — that "we can afford nothing better." Economic explanations are added by some, and political explanations of these by others : none of them sufficient. But without this abstract and philosophical turn, in fact this at bottom theological dignity of argument, the proposition — that the printers and masons of Edinburgh, the ship- builders and engineers of Glasgow, all admittedly second to none in their production, are to be in their economic consumption second to all, and that perma- nently— would be realised in all its flagrant absurdity. To find workmen who can really build their own homes, and go down the street in proper neotechnic style, we must thus for the present leave the Scot to discuss the philosophical, the political, the economic, and other reasons of his national failure as regards adequate housing ; and come to the plainer English workman for a lesson in practice. For Garden Villages and Suburbs are by no means all made by great capitalists like Cadbury and Lever. A bigger record than any of these true captains of industry, or even of all put together, has already been made by working-men. In 1901 a group of joiners in Wales put together among them a little capital of £50 (and it is to be hoped that most other fifteen joiners else- where might also do so without too much difficulty). With this to start with they borrowed something more ; they set to work, and built a cottage ; by-and- by another, and another, and all on co-operative
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principles, carried a degree further than older Co- operators had yet done. And so their business has grown; and with its tenth year (1911) the various groups of the " Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd.," had well nigh completed their second million pounds' worth of bettered houses. The leader of this initiative, the sower of this mustard seed, Mr Henry Vivian, now M.P., may therefore be pointed to as presenting, and not personally alone, the proof that such democratic and co-operative captaincy of industry may before long fairly compare with the more individualistic captaincy of the past, or even excel it — measured by its own financial standards of rapid yet steady increase of production, with reasonable direct dividend ; plus an intensified indirect return of diffused well-being, instead of the opposite. This movement is evoking no little of the truly economic, because civic spirit, the constructive and the administrative capacity which paleotechnic conditions have but depressed and dis- couraged, but not effaced. It shows, too, how even individual " success in life " may be reached along with more general success in living. It expresses the transition from paleotechnic towards neotechnic conditions ; for its housing is growing up steadily into town planning, and this upon a higher standard, not only of space and comfort, but of refinement and beauty also, year by year.
Is there, then, nothing like this in Scotland ? Out- side Glasgow one sees Singer's great new Machine Works — surrounded by new tenements, yet almost
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among the fields. Just outside Edinburgh a whole new village has arisen of late years around a group of great breweries freshly taken to the country — but of tenements again. How can we hope to bring in better housing among a people whose high and abstract cultivation thus lifts them above common ground wherever they may go ? We must fall back
FIG. 32. — New tenement village : Duddingston, near Edinburgh.
upon importing missionaries! Happily, these some- times desirable aliens have lately been forthcoming. Like honey from the carcase of the lion, a peaceful advance of industry and well-being may be gained from the very heart of war. Thus the transference of some hundreds of torpedo workmen from Woolwich to the Clyde lately brought with it the needful dis- content with tenement conditions, with disgust, refusal even ; and a garden village for these soundest, wisest, and most successful of strike-leaders — let us hope some day strike- exemplars — is therefore already
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in progress. In this way, with ocular demonstration that a horizontal distribution of homes is possible, even beside vertically arranged ones, and that four rooms with a garden can be inhabited with greater advantages than two rooms with none, some descent towards material desires of the political intellect of Glasgow, and of its material belongings from their present high eminence, need not wholly be despaired of; while, should anything like this be permitted at Rosyth, even the lofty Edinburgh mind might be- come unsettled.
Have we still touched too little on the human drama ? So far inevitably our problem has been that of preparing to clear off the paleotechnic debris of the play now approaching its conclusion, and of offering suggestions towards the opening one.
The past too individualistic drama, that of the pak otects, as we all now agree, is ending so largely in social failure that it is high time to be staging the civic drama, renewing its long-forgotten ideals. For as we escape from the myths of a homeless individual- ism we see that the city — in one age with acropolis and forum, in another with town house and cathedral —has ever been the theatre and stage indispensable for expressing, with any real fulness and adequacy, each individual life. The contrast between the money wages of the passing present and the vital budget of the opening future is one which must go more and more literally home — and into every life—
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woman's life above all. The tale of Cinderella is thus no mere fairy tale, but literal pantomime in the exact meaning of the word, the actual movements of people and things, shown forth silently, but none the less surely.
Historically treated, architecture has seemed too long but a description of buildings, like fossil shells and corals, past and dead. Yet as an evolutionary science it begins anew with the living and growing city reefs, as we have seen them in their growth overflowing whole plains, ascending innumerable valleys. In this synoptic vision we have as yet had too little touch with the actual living polyps, yet their presence, their essential activity, their vital needs, have been generalised indeed, but not forgotten. The homely hearth in one age, Cinderella's kitchen in another, the reorganised home in a third, this sequence has surely in it some of the needful con- creteness. The old-world rustic order with its work- ing yet prosperous housewives, the comparatively recent and modern contrast of social ranks, with drudgery and futility at its extremes, are broadly recognised as historical strata of the reef; while beyond this we point out, and press, and predict, and plead for the incipient domestic order — electric, hygienic, eugenic ! The drudging charwoman, the futile fine lady alike disappear ; and woman, at once elemental and evolved, vigorous yet refined, will reappear within her home, and be at once effective in the kitchen and inspiring in the hall.
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But such homes, still less whole towns of them, cannot be made offhand by town planners. There must be the effective demand, the revolution in thought from the paleotechnic to neotechnic, from the money gains of man to the vital budget of woman. This has always been instinctively the desire of woman ; and it more fully than ever admits of being realised, given her co-operation with the fairy godmother of science, her entrance to and appreciation of her social powers and duties within her kingdom. Thus in ultimate issue, to solve the problems and accomplish the tasks of citizenship, we now need above all the arousal of woman. In- dividuals are already appearing : Jane Addams, Lady Aberdeen, Mrs Barnett, Mabel Atkinson, may be named, and more ; yet these are but heralds and pioneers ; and their voices are still far from reaching their innumerable sisters. Yet as women have not only responded to each uplift of religion, each advance of culture, but deeply inspired it also, so it will be again ; and their recent and rapid arousal to political interests and discussions is but an earnest of their coming citizenship.
CHAPTER VII
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT
What is the nature and character of the mass of our housing in great towns? Their nucleus, the historic town, deteriorated with Industrial Age ; hence intense housing evils and their results, with palliatives of various kinds and values.
Steps of advance of the housing movement, as from Octavia Hill to Ebenezer Howard, and to incipient recovery of town planning.
HERE is a subject on which many volumes have been written, and many more must be. Of separate papers, of local inquiries and general reports, of legislative and administrative literature there is no end : while of projects and plans, of propagandist articles and prospectuses, though these are already many, we are still only at the beginning. Within the narrow limits of a single chapter, we must evidently keep to main lines, and seek for guiding ideas. Summaris- ing, then, from the very first, let us ask — What is this mass of our present housing ? What have been its origins ? What are its qualities and defects, its present value ? What are the present needs ? And what lines of policy are opening towards meeting these ?
To understand this mingled evolution-process, let us inquire into its main stages of development.
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These must be stated successively, though they have everywhere more or less overlapped; and though they are largely still in progress in many cities.
1. The nucleus of our present industrial towns — whether expanding with the opening of the Industrial Age towards the close of the eighteenth century, or in vaster growth with that of the railway system from the early middle of the nineteenth — consisted of houses of a fairly long succession of preceding generations, of varied sizes and standards of comfort corresponding to their wealth and status, with many varieties of construction, and still more range as regards states of repair. Sanitation methods were of rough and ready description ; as of abundant middens, freely polluting wells, yet themselves mitigated by application to the many surviving town gardens, or easily removed to the still not distant fields. But with the influx of wealth from industries, and from the better farming which in the same age becomes prevalent, the prosperous classes rehoused themselves in new quarters, often a "new town," first of westerly streets, and later of suburban villas. Their former houses they more or less divided up, to house the influx and increase of the working- classes, skilled and unskilled alike. The great demand for small dwellings was thus met, and at rentals which seem at first to have been substantially below the cost of new accommodation. Thus capital was dis- couraged from building, especially in view of the far
higher returns promised by industrial investment, or
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later by railway speculation ; for, though the saying be exaggerated, it expresses a truth — "it was not hundreds per cent., but thousands per cent, that made the fortunes of Lancashire." Even domestic repairs were thus grudged and neglected ; while rising rentals seemed but reasonable returns, assured as they were by the growth and influx of industrial population. Thus squalor, overcrowding, and exaction had all to be accepted by the people, whose lamentable con- ditions unfortunately found no outlet beyond those of political discontent, culminating at length in Chartist agitations. Even this discontent was long delayed by foreign wars, and next directed against the manifest obscurantisms, the obvious omissions and commissions of the rural landowner ; and thus safely guided past the town landlords and the industrial captains, whose more advanced opinions thence- forward became efficiently protective. At length, however, the high returns from " productive invest- ments " began to abate, and the rise of artisan rentals became so high as to attract capital into building upon a large and growing scale ; but this for a standard of housing, accommodation, and comfort too little beyond that to which the working popula- tion had by this time become inured from child- hood, as well as in the main provided by builders who had themselves been accustomed to such con- ditions as if normal ones. Thus arose, unchecked by sanitary knowledge or regulation — and largely upon the sites furnished by the old gardens and spacious
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yards which had been of immemorial value, as lungs and as playing space — that mass of mean cottages, back-to-back houses, slum courts, side tenements, crevice alleys, and other abominations, which, despite subsequent generations of effort, are still too manifest throughout the length and breadth of the land, and in its cities and towns, too often even its villages.
2. Palliatives, moreover, were for long (and are often still) applied to the manifold consequences or accompaniments of these housing evils, rather than to these evils themselves, still less to the town as a whole, to the hive disordered and swarming. The low standards of living, the lapses, loss or perversion of these, though for the most part solidary with the slum, were supposed, even by the best intentioned of all classes and parties, to be capable of amelior- ation, and even cure, by any and every method, save reconstructive ones. First, of course, an overcrowd- ing of prisons ; whence appalling consequences, arous- ing the philanthropist to indignation and to efforts still far from ended. Both to fill and to thin the prisons a ruthless, even ferocious, code of punishment existed, in- volving at length its reluctant and gradual mitigation, so gradual as only now, with children's courts and first offenders' acts, coming even within sight of adequacy. Of the great political reforms, extensions of the franchise, dramatically and eloquently combated for, yet cautiously graded, have bulked most largely ; while the mass of accompanying measures, even up to date, have also been compatible with less or more
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of that general blindness to real wages, to family environment, efficiency, and well-being, which, in this country as in others since the great Revolution, has characterised the abstract mind of the politician and legislator, and the external view, the mechanical routine, of the administrator whom these so abund- antly create. Even where improvement of real wages has been aimed at, as in the repeal of the corn laws ; or subsequently, as by the temperance reformer at his too limited best, these defects have too much persisted, and of course in member and voter alike.
Even in this necessarily brief and partial retrospect of ameliorative endeavours, we would not be un- grateful to the long succession of philanthropists and reformers, the Howards and Shaftesburys, nor to the politicians of various colours who have applied themselves to what seemed nearest and most urgent, fundamental or supreme. But we may best emphasise the present point of view, that of insistence upon the condition of houses — and these not separately with the individualist, nor in vague collectivity with the politician, but in definite areas and groupings, of courts and streets — by naming, as among the very best leaders of this palliative movement, the late Miss Octavia Hill. Her regular rent-collecting, faithful repairing, and moderate dividend - paying, and this over large and spreading town areas, repre- sented, and still represent, the traditional political economy at its best. Had the like of her but begun
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practice a couple of generations earlier along with this economic system and theory, far fewer philanthro- pists and reformers would have been needed, fewer hospitals and prisons.
3. In practice, however, the main palliative, and this so great and constructive as to open a better veritable era, and create a new and ever- accelerating uplift, has been the coming in of Municipal Hygiene, with its medical officers of health and inspectors, its sanitary committees, water trusts, and so on, and with corresponding rise of public opinion. Great clearances of decayed and insanitary areas have thus been made, often indeed too sudden and sweeping. For though garnishing may follow — and that often great and splendid in purpose, it may be even in execution, as of public buildings and civic centres— this period is on the whole characterised by a very substantial element of domination of municipalities by property owners. These accordingly profit in several ways : by generous compensation for clear- ances, by rise of adjacent values, by increased com- petition for the bulk of dwellings remaining, and consequently enhanced rental and capital value of these ; not to speak of renewed deterioration, new clearance, and compensation to match. To estimate to what extent this alternate exploitation of - the people and of their municipality has been going on during the past half century, and throughout the cities of Britain or Europe, as also to what extent— despite tardy and incompletely effective legislative
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endeavours to check these manifest evils, they are still threatening — can but be suggested as a problem for statisticians.
4, Along with the rise of the sanitary movement, and as a main fruit of its legislation, hampered as this was at every step and clause by limited, sordid, or sinister minds, the construction of dwellings was standardised into the vast construction of "Bye- law Streets." These we have noted already at their paleotechnic best as in Durham (pp. 64-5) or in Belfast, or again in abundant average in Midlandton and Lancaston, York-Ridings or Tyne-Wear-Tees ; while below this level, on the whole, stands the Scottish tenement, the bulk of Glasgow, of Dundee, of Leith, and even of modern Edinburgh. In fact it is here worth noting, as a strange example of the ever- returning difficulties and disasters which have beset the housing movement, that some of the extreme examples of tenement crowding per acre have been erected upon the lands of the great Edinburgh educational trusts in pursuance of their legal responsi- bilities, to obtain the maximum return for their stewardship !
5. From these Scottish examples of standardised overcrowding, it is but a step to the model tenements till so lately coming into favour in London, and in Dublin also. For though the philanthropy which has founded the Peabody Buildings, or the yet better "Guinness Buildings" of the Irish metropolis, is not ungenerously to be questioned, their principle must
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be condemned ; as that of maximising population per acre. It is consequently of a still semi-hygienic standard of survival, and even this only for men ; it is more unsuitable for women, and most of all for children. Happily the extreme cost of construc- tion of such high barracks defeats the economy in roofs and sites which was at first so alluring ; but the widespread arousal of cupidity and of speculation through such promising enhancement of land-values per acre has done serious damage : and in many cities at home, and still more abroad (as notably Cologne), it seems to be delaying not a little the needful return of land to more healthy and normal building uses.
6. The construction of workmen's dwellings proper, upon a better hygienic standard, i.e. of modern cottages, in streets of ordinary bye-law type, or even of more or less suburban character, with gardens and increasing detachment, is thus still too rare ; since it involves minimum population, and correspondingly lowered land-values, per acre accordingly. Here and there private enterprise has shown that it can accom- plish something ; while, thanks to the late Alderman Thompson, and his colleagues of Richmond (Surrey), that municipality has afforded, some years ago, what is still one of the best of object-lessons for other boroughs.
7. A type which might have been mentioned earlier in this series is that of workmen's dwellings built by benevolent and far-sighted employers, since
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the conspicuous initiatives of Owen at New Lanark, of Godin in his Familistere at Guise, and on a larger scale that of Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire in Yorkshire, all date back beyond most living memories. But with the Railway Age these promising initiatives were forgotten ; and subsequent examples were rare until very recent times, when Mr Cadbury's successful
,-;
FIG. 34. — Workers' cottages, Cox's gelatine works,iEdinburgh (1893).
village ol Bournville, with its generously designed Trust, and Sir William Lever's striking achievement at Port Sunlight have become famous, though their example is still too rarely followed. A conspicuous example, however, is the rose-gardened miners' village of A Woodlands, near Chesterfield. There may still be hope that new coalfields, such as those opening in Yorkshire, in Fife and Lothian, and in Kent, may more or less follow suit ; why not even villages of older coalfields ? — too often, as the Scottish Housing Com-
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mission has lately brought out, a disgrace to civilisa- tion, and practically in but rare cases at all satisfactory. A new wave of public feeling, however, is still urgently needed ; also a clearer demand for real wages among colliers.
8. The note of social idealism, and in practical yet most disinterested form, has been especially struck by Mr Ebenezer Howard in his famous Eutopia, as we
FIG. 35.— Cottages, Port Sunlight (Sir Wm. Lever).
must fairly call it, of Garden Cities. In this notable book is set forth the town of the Industrial Age now opening — that neotechnic order, characterised by electricity, hygiene, and art, by efficient and beautiful town planning and associated rural development, and by a corresponding rise of social co-operation and effective good-will, which it is a main thesis of this volume to insist upon. Of the Garden City Associa- tion which was soon the direct outcome of his labours, much need not here be said, the more since its own abundant publications are so well known and access- ible. We shall return in a later chapter to their
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work, after the theme of town planning has been more fully entered upon ; but for the steps of progress of tliis movement we may, fortunately, at once refer to the eminently readable and well-illustrated volume of Garden Cities Movement Up-to-date, by Mr Ewart Culpin ; whose experience as at once business
FIG. 36. — Girls' recreation ground, Bournville (Messrs Cadbury).
secretary and propagandist missionary of the Garden Cities Association has given him complete resource and training for thus leading us to the synoptic vievr-point, and showing us the brightening horizon. Wil h this too should be consulted the larger and yet more recent volume by Mr C. B. Purdom, The Garden City, which goes into a vigorous and critical treatment not only of Letch worth and its making, but of the movement which it has so predominantly
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initiated, and thence into the ever-widening civic and social bearings of all this.
9. Among further developments of this garden city initiative by co-operative methods, may again be mentioned the admirable " Co-partnership Tenants " system (pp. 138-9) ; and as the most conspicuous and successful of existing town-expansions the Hamp- stead Garden Suburb. With this great object-lesson,
FIG. 37. — Cottages, New Earswick (Messrs Rowntree).
so convenient to London, the social possibilities and promise of the architect and town planner are becom- ing more and more fully seen, as convincing, as matter of performance ; and the emergence of Mr Raymond Unwin as one of the most constructive of our leaders, and the growing national recognition of the practica- bility of such Eutopias elsewhere, are thus of no small encouragement. We have already strongly protested against the advancing danger, conspicuous enough near Hampstead itself, as well as further afield, of mere would-be copying of this or any other architect's
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157
style ; but such general initiatives cannot be followed too widely, if due regionalism and individuality of design be assured, as in the best cases it is ; as, for instance, at Ruislip.
How an C»Ut* U Planned under Ordinary Bye-Uwj
According tu Ihr Bic-!a*s over torti how Can Ke place,! n. the a
How the »atn* EstaU I* Wanned under Co-par«n«r»Klp Methods by the Harbornv ^
FIG. 38.— Harborne Village.
(a) As planned under Bye-laws.
(b) As executed by Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd.
10. Such suburban development, however, largely awaits a corresponding increase and improvement of communications. It might have been pointed out earlier that the congestion of our towns is far more largely due than we commonly realise to the failure,
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or rather the repression, of the road-carriages, strangely anticipating our modern motor-cycles and motor- 'buses, with which inventors were busy in the first generation of the last century. The man with the red flag before the traction-engine, whom we can all remember, has thus been the very reverse of a herald of progress. The development of suburban railways, still more of tramways, now of motor-'buses (and why not before long of better appliances still) is thus a main condition of suburban development, as Birming- ham, Glasgow, and every other large city knows. In Glasgow, as the city apparently most successful of all in its tramway-system up to date, a discussion is arising which may soon interest other cities. One party proposes to apply the large and growing tramway surplus to create a municipal scheme for the housing of the people, while others argue for continuing the existing principle of management by applying those large sums to the continued extension and further cheapening of the system. Without unduly taking sides in a matter which, like all such questions, should fairly be looked into on the spot, and with every desire — already emphasised (pp. 140-1)— to see the backwardness of Glasgow housing brought up to tramway efficiency, and helped by it, it may yet be gravely questioned whether the first method be the best way of achieving this end. For must not swifter and cheaper communications loosen out the crowded city, and so serve all its interests most efficiently in the long run?
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159
I
1
a-
"o
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In this connection, as in that of several preceding paragraphs (pp. 151-7), attention may be called to Mr Raymond Un win's admirable tract " Nothing Gained by Overcrowding," which should be read, marked, and digested by landowner and by townsman, by builder and workman, by city fathers everywhere, as by members of all political and social parties. No better example of that lucid commonsense which, in each and every advancing science, reforms our popular misconceptions, can be given : and it is again one of the many disasters of modern cities, that these simple plans and their convincing interpretations were not worked out a hundred years earlier, and that they are even now so little known.
11. Meantime, indeed, along with half a dozen of the phases of better housing above indicated (which we may again remind the reader are to be considered as much overlapping), there has been going on the Recovery of Town Planning. This is no new art to us, as eighteenth-century London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and smaller cities without number show ; in fact its loss dates only from the Railway Age. Still we have had to go to the Continent to recover its traditions ; hence our brief survey of housing develop- ments may here end, and a chapter or two of foreign travel be now undertaken.
CHAPTER VIII
TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP
Neec and uses of travel for civics and citizenship. Travellers : in classic and in medieval times, e.g. merchant and adventurer, pilgrim and friar, student and prentice. Later examples : Erasmus or Adam Smith, Ruskin and Browning.
How to travel : pros and cons of railway. Advantages of classic lands, and of Medieval and Renaissance Italy ; eulogy of modern France and of Paris, of the United States also, with examples of their contemporary civic progress and city design : the town planner must, however, above all, acquaint himself with the cities of modern Germany.
IT is no easy matter to change the habits of a people, and above all as regards their homes. We have now long enough been marching round the walls of the paleotechnic Jericho ; we see them beginning to give way : it is time now to be fitting ourselves to help more fully in that vast reconstruction which must follow. For that purpose let us betake ourselves to what has always been one of the greatest factors of education, both of the individual and of the world, and see what is being done in other cities and countries. For the uplift of Citizenship, the renewal of cities, in which we have each a part, no experience of past or present cities can be too great.
Children as we are of an age which was as much
161 11
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astonished and delighted by its new communications by railway and steamship, as we can be with our motors and flying- machines, we have naturally been disposed to think of our forefathers in earlier times as relatively confined to narrow limits, and with but little experience of travel. Yet travel and commerce are prehistoric ; classic history reminds us how the roads and communications of the Roman Empire ranged with unbroken completeness of paving and upkeep throughout the whole Empire, from Tyne to Euphrates, and beyond ; not only with legions on the march, and postmen at the gallop, but with long trains of commerce as well. Through the Mediterranean, for so many ages a Roman lake, as before that a Carthaginian, a Greek, a Phoenician one, the lines of communication have exceeded, in number and in variety, the existing web of steamer- lines to-day. Even in amount of goods, in quantity of passengers, some historians suggest a rivalry, or even more; and this is the less improbable when we remember, or reconstruct from broken olive- terraces and ruined cities, how great in its best days was the agricultural development of these now long deteriorated lands. But the barbarian broke up the roads ; never again to be in good order until Macadam's day, even Napoleon's. Surely in medi- eval days travel must have been comparatively rare ? Yet recall the great overland trade-routes of Europe, like those through Nuremberg and Augsburg, on which depended not a little the prosperity of the
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great maritime cities, like Venice and Genoa, like Bruges and Hamburg. M. Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Olden Times gives a vivid picture of the activity of travel in this country in the Middle Ages ; while a good historical novel like The Cloister and the Hearth owes no little of its vitality to its picture of the roads to Rome with their ever- varying procession of European life.
Chaucer's company of cheery tale-tellers upon the Pilgrim's Way to Canterbury is but the art-con- served instance of what went on in every country, and to all its great national shrines. The magnifi- cence of Peterborough, of Cologne, or Compostella, had thus a far greater than any merely diocesan origin ; theirs was a national appeal, largely even an international one. Excelling all these in its turn was of course the great pilgrimage, that attracting Christendom to Rome ; again, beyond that, the yet greater, to Jerusalem — the Pilgrimage indeed. As in every town of the Mohammedan world one sees the green turbans of those who have been to Mecca, so in any European townlet we may still search out the traces of their ancient pilgrims: witness, for instance, the frequency of the very name (commonly as " Palmer ") in Scotland or England. To the perpetual call of the two greatest of these pilgrimages, and the impassioning influence of the many who returned despite all hazards, at long last in safety, to stir the town with the news, and thrill its youth with their tales, the world owes, for good
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and evil, the Crusades, and all that they imply. Peter the Hermit but concentrated and voiced a widespread sentiment which had been long in the making.
As with merchant, adventurer, and friar, so with the students of the universities. The wandering scholars flocked to them from afar each autumn, each returning to his old home or wandering still farther with the return of summer. Yet none of these manifold threads of travel, nor perhaps all put together, can have equalled, in amount or in social significance, the wander-year of the young craftsman at the conclusion of his apprenticeship. For here was a great process of education ; in fact one of the very greatest of democratic movements in the history of education, and this on its truly higher level : one therefore which every democracy worth the name must seek to recover. It was no mere chance individual wandering in search of employment, as in modern times, such as the economist has too much disguised under his shallow euphemism of "the mobility of labour," but a system of education organised and supervised by the craft-guilds of cities, with no small degree of correspondence and co-opera- tion ; and it was even shrewdly examined upon at its close. Thus when the young man returned to his native town and detailed his journey, mentioning among other places a stay at Freiburg (im Breisgau), the leaders of his craft, as examining board, might ask him, " Where had he seen the devil weeping
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for bis sins ? " —thus testing alike his visit to its great minster, and his eye for the quaint sculpture over its portal. The artistic interchanges of Italy with the Germanic lands have here deeply their explana- tion : Diirer in Italy, Holbein in England, are but supreme examples of the craftsman's wanderings.
So with the interchange and development of literary culture. The Greek learning had been coming from Constantinople long before its final flight before the Turkish Conquest, as Florentine history so conspicuously shows : and the university- transforming and history-making journeyings of Erasmus are but the highest expression of the teach- ing and learning tradition everywhere. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is no mere modern Odyssey of youth : its episode of the strolling players throws thus a vivid light upon the education of Ben Jonson, with his tramp to Hawthornden ; while Shakespeare, as critics of Macbeth suggest, may not improbably have come even further.
Only with that great depression of the people, which is the tragic converse of the uplift of the scholars and gentlemen of the Renaissance, did the culture of travel become at all limited to the upper classes — limiting itself more and more, until we get the characteristic phrase, the "Grand Tour," which my young lord made with his tutor, and often with no small result in culture and thought to them both. Witness for the lords their bringing home of the great picture-galleries of England; and for the tutors—
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and as complemental instances, first studious, then utilitarian — the effect upon the world of Erasmus's journey to Italy as tutor to the young son of James IV. of Scotland; and again of Adam Smith's stay in Paris, with its physiocrats and philosophers, while tutor to the young chief of Buccleuch.
It is worth noting here that the modern eminence of German universities, which in all countries we have learned so much to respect and profit by, is by no means so conspicuous when we merely compare this and that university in Germany with a correspond- ing institution of our own country. The German advantage is a wider one ; and lies especially here— that while our youth at Oxford or Cambridge, at St Andrews or Edinburgh, commonly stay at their one university during the whole of their years of student life, their German contemporaries of the same standing have had, not once but several times over, the vivifying experience, the intellectual stimulus, of the new environment of a great university, a new culture city.
From the pictures of the great mansion-houses the boy Ruskin, as he tells us, largely gained the funda- mental preparation of his artistic life, and of his own later familiarity with the treasure-houses of Italy ; and the analogous Italian culture of the Brownings is again but a conspicuous development of our old tradition of Italian travel. To such artistic pilgrimages are likewise due in no small measure the classicism of Paris — its Prix de Rome, its Villa Medicis ; and also
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that revived interest in classic archaeology, which has left so deep an impression in our northern cities ; for the neo-classic monuments so characteristic of Munich, Copenhagen, and Edinburgh are developments from the same root. Our British and other schools of archaeology in Rome and Athens are naturally in the main still thought of and maintained as for historical inquirers ; but they are also becoming schools in which the town planner of the present, and still more the city designer of the future, may gather not only precedent, or even suggestion, but inspiration anew.
Viewing all countries together, it is of course Italy which most richly rewards her pilgrims, as travellers of all other lands avow. Who that has seen her great cities will not say, with Henri de Regnier :
" Pars, mon fils ; tu verras, comme j'ai pu les voir, Les trois Villes encore dont ma pensee est pleine ; La Cite florentine et la Cite romaine Et Venise endormie en or au fond du soir.
Les trois Villes ainsi chantent dans ma memoire L''hymne de leur beaute et le bruit de leur gloire, Et mon coeur a leur nom vibre <Tun triple echo ! "
Or more generally, in Carlyle's rendering of Goethe's famous verse :
" Keep not standing fixed and rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam, Head and hand, where'er thou foot it, And stout heart, are still at home.
Sure enough for wandering was it, That the world was made so wide !"
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All this is but a faint indication of the full range and active spirit of our forefathers' travel, and enables us to see, what many a thoughtful traveller at the beginning of the Railway Age realised, and not merely Ruskin — the colossal disadvantage of being swiftly projected from railway station to railway station, and missing all the varied experience, and most of the beauty of the way. The modern cyclist, the motorist, have of late years in some measure been recovering this. We thus see the large elements of reason in Ruskin's apparent madness of protest against railways ; but not yet fully enough. Only as that dawn of vital outdoor education, which our boy scouts begin to present over those cramped in school- rooms or even enclosed in playing-fields, progresses into the wider wanderings of which their recent camps (as at Boulogne, etc.) give earnest, shall we again adequately recover the old value and vitality of simple travel. In the past thirty years or so, the writer must have travelled forty or fifty thousand miles, by express train, between London and Edinburgh, but his educative journeys are still only one or two upon the Great North Road, on cycle, or with stoppage and ramble by the way. The train-habit, as we may call it, is to no small extent the explanation of the too common failure of the modern tourist, and has degraded him into mere material for excursion con- tractors, taken about in droves, nay, in coops, like fowls to market. In what previous period of travel could one have met with the like of these London
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ladies who think the Louvre such a nice place for bargains — of the American whose impression of a visit to Rome was only revived as the "funny old place where you bought the yellow gloves " — of the old gentleman who, after a bad dinner years ago, still growls at Florence ! And besides all these vacant folk, there are too many who flutter to the great cities like moths to the candle, lured by its brightness, falling into its flame.
Plainly, then, we need preparation for travel ; an education which will make our youth immune to its evils, alive to its advantages. Nor is this after all so difficult. For a generation the writer has been stirring up the Scottish or London student of his acquaintance to go abroad, to this great continental university or another, according to his professional needs ; and above all to Paris. Why there especially ? First of all to be awakened, and then educated, in that keenest and brightest, most intellectual, most hard-working, and most productive of universities and cities ; first as specialist, but also as generaliser, as man of general culture, alive to the significance of the fine arts of poetry and drama, of criticism and of polite inter- course, and of the place and need of all these in social advance. Above all other reasons, however, the student should go to Paris — to be moralised — and this for two reasons. First, through general contact with what, with all its faults and blemishes — though these are neither few nor small — is yet on the whole the best, the most mutualised, most socialised, as well
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as most civilised of great city populations. Secondly, for the sake of that rare experience, still for a few years obtainable, of direct contact with, and impulse from, characters stirred by the terrible year of 1870-1, tempered in its furnace of affliction, and therefore developed, with a whiteness of intensity, to a con- tinuous stretch of efficiency unknown in our more peaceful cities, our less awakened lands. It is by the effort and combination of such characters, such workers, that there has steadily been worked out that magnificent renascence of France, which has well-nigh wiped out many of the evils of the decadent Empire, abated others, and increasingly grapples with them all ; and which has recovered for her in so many and varied departments of thought and action the veritable leadership of the civilised world. Here was the life-secret of Pasteur and of Berthelot, of the brothers Reclus, of Lavisse, Duclaux, and innumerable others of the great masters and thinkers who are no longer with us. Here too is the secret of the leaders of France at this day : a group of educators, therefore, still as a whole without parallel, whether for arts or sciences, for life-conduct and for citizenship.
Yet France, as we noted in the first chapter, has not to any great extent our special problem of vast conurbations upon the coalfields, and of their in- dustries and minds too largely paleotechnic. She belongs in the main to an earlier and a later formation ; her peasant activity predominates throughout the land, while her metropolis and several of her leading
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cities are more fully advanced in neotechnic arts and sciences.
Shall we, then, go to the United States, with their great and swiftly -growing cities ? Yes and no. Yes ; for in many respects the evolution process of American cities is plainly upon the very greatest scale, no longer merely in output of wealth, in increase of population, but also in quality of civilisation as well. In the fundamental industries, as so notably of iron and steel, America has overtaken and surpassed our output. As regards electrical and other factors of the neo- technic transition she also advances more rapidly. In matters of higher education she has, in the past generation especially, been swiftly advancing to the level of our older European universities ; and in public no less than in private generosity she is in many ways surpassing their utmost material foresight, often even their cultural ambitions. But as she ruefully admits, her citizenship has in the past suffered even more arrest and decay than our own, under the influence of the extreme economic individualism of her still too largely paleotechnic industry, her too in- dividualistic commerce and finance. Yet, happily, there is also in progress a great uplift of citizenship, a daily increasing arousal of responsibility which bids fair soon to place her cities in the very van.
The recent outburst of city improvement and of town-planning schemes, and this from New England to California and back again — schemes always large and ambitious, often comprehensive, even magnificent
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in conception — affords ample and convincing evidence that before long the European citizen and town planner, of whatever nationality, may have to draw his best examples and incentives to civic reorgani- sation and evolution, and these not only in material achievements but in the moral uplifts which must ever lie back of them, from the great cities, the towns, even the very villages of the United States.
Before me lie the plans of American cities, great and small. Here is Washington in its renewal upon a scale rivalling, in some ways surpassing, that of the greatest European capitals. Here Boston, with its magnificent park- system ; and others with correspond- ing examples of park-rings and nature-reserves without number, full of suggestion and of impulse to Europe. Indeed to some of these, the magnificent forest-girdle of Vienna is as yet the only adequate European parallel. Chicago gives us its comprehensive vision at once of a mighty metropolis and of a world- exhibition returned to stay. The rebuilding of San Francisco at least records its lost opportunities.
Each of these American designs, beyond its im- pressive magnitude, displays unity of conception, sometimes only too severe. It has architectural ability as well as ambition ; and a sense of civic dignity, of national greatness. Yet may not the result, however monumental and .reposeful to our generation, as we are seeking to emerge from the confused jostle of modern individualism, be felt by our successors as too cold, too formal, and thus even
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monotonous ? From ancient Egypt to eighteenth- century London, to nineteenth-century Paris, twen- tieth-century Berlin, has it not ever been the fault of the generalising and masterful city architect to become so satisfied with his stately perspectives, his massive facades and formal proportions, as to forget the simpler beauties and graces which are needed by the people, above all demanded by the young ? And has he not thus provoked their rebound ? Hence these disastrous reactions, those outbreaks of confused detail, of childish ornament and of adult vulgarity, by which such sternly architectonic periods have ever been succeeded, as so notably in Victorian London after its stately Georgian days ? And is not this disastrous reaction inevitable, so long as such archi- tects continue to derive their inspiration mainly from the majesty of the State and of its Institutions ?— too little from and towards the human interest of each neighbourhood, the individuality of its homes ? — too rarely also from cultural vision and expression, from social and moral enthusiasms, from mystic and creative uplift ? There is much attractiveness in the more simple and domestic American town designing, like that of Olmsted for the model borough of Brookline. A younger generation of city designers, of whom the excellent city reports and other writings of Nolen, Mulford Robinson, and others are con- spicuous expressions, are no doubt on the way towards reconciling the claims of civic greatness with those of domestic and neighbourhood life.
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Yet with all these grounds of respect for the great countries — for the treasure-houses of Italy, for the initiatives and leaderships of France, for the un- paralleled energy and vital endeavour, the evolutionary promise of America, it is to German cities that we must now conduct the reader. For the vast develop- ment of modern Germany is by no means simply of that army which has so deeply impressed Paris, and with her all other Continental capitals, nor yet of that formidable fleet which has so much become the pre- occupation, almost the obsession, of London. The standpoint of the present volume is that of the main geographic and vital developments, urban and rustic, upon which national survival depends so much more than upon war; as all history shows, from ancient China to recent France. German power, even the fighting power which is such a dramatic element of this, must ultimately depend upon the measure and qualities of rustic and of urban development. Now, it is not a little to the German's advantage that his great economic progress has been so recent. He has swiftly utilised our more slowly gained industrial and commercial experience, and correspondingly abbrevi- ated the lesson, avoiding many of our paleotechnic evils. And with his more educated openness of mind, his more general and more specialised scientific culture, he has often fully entered upon the neotechnic phase of this or that industry, before we have even realised that we are lagging in the paleotechnic one. The loss of aniline colour manufactures, so often
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quoted in the country of Perkin, or of scientific apparatus making in that of James Watt and Lord Kelvin, are but conspicuous instances of this.
It is still more important, however, from the present point of view, that German cities show us, and more than do any other at present, that fertilisa- tion of the youthful vigour of growth by elder and maturer life, upon which renewals of social life so much depend — perhaps scarcely less than does the continuance of organic life itself. For in the heart of her great modern industrial and commercial centres the antique spirit of her great free cities of the Middle Age, which had never died away, is again beating with a new life. This is invigorating and directing city growth in ways which are compelling us of all countries, if we would advance our cities, once and again to visit Germany. We are now profiting by the example of her ancient yet more than modern cities, even as we have in the past generation learned all the world over from her universities — for the most part so ancient, yet none the less effectively modern.
Of her impulse to modern town planners much might be said ; but this has been well said already, from Horsfall's Example of Germany onwards, indeed by every subsequent writer and worker on the subject. Let us, then, profit by this general arousal of interest, and in the next chapters visit German cities in our turn.
CHAPTER IX
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY
Use. of Town-Plairomg-Tetirs : a typical example. Cologne and its development. This and other German cities as examples of the principle of survival through civic policy rather than militarist spirit. Architectural characteristics : qualities and defects. Diisseldorf and its architecture and decoration ; varied expressiveness of these.
WE must not unduly estimate as a civic event our recently instituted Town-Planning Tours to repre- sentative German cities, nor build too largely upon any immediate results from them : yet we may fairly take these as noteworthy symptoms, as contributory evidence of the civic awakening throughout our towns, and surely as a further aid towards this also. For a good many years past it has been a growing custom for this or that Municipal Committee, con- cerned with tramways or lighting, with cleansing or health, to go and see what has been done by their neighbours at home or abroad ; and on the whole with useful results. But, with rare exceptions, notably that of the Birmingham Housing Committee's Continental visit in 1905, we have as yet very few thorough-going municipal inquiries into town planning. Pending these, it is something that, year by year, well-nigh a hundred persons, mainly city
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councillors and officials, largely also architects and others occupied with city improvement and extension, should join together on such pilgrimages ; and then, after a vivifying wealth of new impressions and of mutual contacts, should return to their own towns more convinced than before that something must be done;, and in some measure clearer about doing it. The movement of municipal inquiry and action which Mr Burns's Town Planning Act has effectively in- augurated for Britain, must thus be accelerated and influenced at many points and in innumerable indi- vidual ways. It is, of course, impossible to sum up dogmatically for a hundred people what may be the main result upon their minds of such rapid successions of experiences, such panoramic glimpses of great cities in growth and change. Still, there is some- thing in group-psychology, especially with such common purpose and common environment as here : a certain progress of ideas and feelings becomes fairly manifest among us as regards the problems of town extension and city development we come to study ; and this quite apart from the natural and unanimous response to that thoughtful hospitality and genuine helpfulness which are the gentle retaliation of German hosts for the alarmist shriekings amid which we may too often have left London.
A broad summary, then, of the doings and learn- ings of such a town-planners' pilgrimage may not only afford the needed relief to the general arguments
of the preceding chapters, but go far to supplement
12
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and illustrate them. Best of all, if it suggest to the reader that he may also go and do likewise.
Here, then, in the old pilgrim city of Cologne at a recent Eastertide, we were a goodly company of islanders, well-nigh a hundred strong, and hailing from all parts of the two kingdoms — from Aberdeen to Ayr, from Newcastle to Southampton, Bath to Rochester, in fact from the very length and breadth of the land, and from small towns -and great cities. Our tour was organised by the National Housing Reform Council, whose chairman headed us — the late Alder- man Thompson, Mayor of Richmond, well known by his Handbooks of Housing, which are a veritable encyclopaedia of the housing and city improvement movements and their legislation throughout the world. Our working leader, shepherd and sheep-dog in one, was Henry Aldridge, the secretary of the same body, and active in the corresponding international ones. Of our members the civic fathers, with a few wideawake and foresighted town clerks, made up about a third ; city architects and surveyors and borough engineers, with a sprinkling of medical officers of health, made up a full third also ; while of the rest almost every one had some experience in housing or city improvement, either on the business side or on that of design or construction. The Garden City Association was well represented ; the active and growing " Co-partnership Tenants (Limited) " were out in force also. The Hampstead Garden Suburb and other village schemes throughout the land — of
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which, without being invidious, one may specially note that admirable Woodlands colliery village, which should be so peculiarly suggestive to coalmasters and coalminers everywhere — were all represented among us by their architects and others. There were chairmen of the various Town- Planning Com- mittees which are springing up in not a few of the principal towns now awakening to their needs, a handful of architects of note, largely chairmen of provincial architectural associations. The first Pro- fessor of Town Planning, from Liverpool (Mr Lever's recent foundation), must not be forgotten, nor yet the representative of France, albeit a solitary one ; for M. Augustin Rey, well known for the extra- ordinarily original and able designs for workmen's dwellings which gained him the Rothschild prize a few years ago, was also of the party, and in it all a Frenchman should be, vivacious and inspiring, generously appreciative yet penetratingly critical, courteous yet outspoken — a man of authority there- fore alike among us and in the estimation of our German hosts. Finally came the active group of London newspaper correspondents who recorded our pilgrimage, and the three or four ladies who brightened it.
Thanks to the good organisation of our leaders, and, we flatter ourselves, also to the widely repre- sentative variety of our members, the German cities have taken us most seriously, and we find that their splendid hospitality — at once elaborate and dignified,
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as beseems their civic dignity, and thoughtful and detailed, as from men of administrative skill and care — becomes genial and homely, personal and individual, as kindred interests and interchange of ideas and mutual appreciation bring us together. To be met so courteously and so helpfully, shown all things so openly, answered on all points so frankly, are surely the greatest satisfactions that travelling craftsmen and students can desire, and this has been our hourly portion ; indeed, in almost overpowering measure. On our arrival in Cologne we had but time to brush off the dust and break the fast of our long night journey from London to hasten to the Town House, where, in its stately old hall of ceremonies, after our official reception by the Burgomaster, we were edified by a full and carefully prepared lecture, well illus- trated and documented, and quaintly but intelligibly translated, which set before us first the small begin- nings of the city, from the Roman Camp above the Rhine ferry, and thence through many ups and downs in medieval and modern times to that marvellous expansion of the past generation — from under 100,000 in 1871 to nearly 'half a million to-day. Such a lecture might so far no doubt be given in one of our own Town Halls also, were we as fully awake to the roots in past history and permanent geography of our recent progress and present state ; but the lecturer — the junior Burgomaster be it noted, not the antiquary nor the city treasurer, who with us would have to divide the task — soon went beyond
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all this summary of past and present to what was obviously his main interest — that opening future for which it is his pride and privilege to provide, and so unfalded to our astonished eyes the official and accepted plan of Cologne. This not only summarises in successive vividly coloured belts the expansions of old Cologne up to its recent ramparts, and thence to the more than doubling of the city since their removal in 1881 ; but beyond this again it sets out the future quarters and the main arteries of circula- tion for the growth anticipated within this twentieth century or less. This includes an area exceeding that of present-day Berlin itself, with its two and a half million inhabitants ! And though this vast area is, of course, to be laid out in much less crowded fashion than Berlin, and with parks, gardens, and boulevards on a more generous scale, we could not but wonder at the boldness, unprecedented in our British experience, indeed in the world's, which thus provides for an enlarging future.
Our lecture over, we sallied forth to begin our rounds and see Cologne ; but instead of taking our own cabs, as everyday tourists fairly expect to do, here, to our no small surprise, were rows and rows of well-appointed private motors, each with its smart chauffeur, or sometimes its owner, at our service. Each vehicle, too, was thoughtfully adorned with a couple of little flags, the city's banner on one side and the Union Jack on the other. At a hint from the Burgomaster, himself a keen motorist, the Auto-
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mobile Club had turned out to do us the honours of their city ; and so in long procession, with his Wor- ship driving at our head, we spent the whole afternoon, and certainly saw more of Cologne in the time than most of its burghers can have done or are likely to do. Pauses were, of course, made ; one to climb the little hill of the Stadtwald, the large and pleasant forest park laid out nearest the country, and thence view the city in the distance, with its mighty minster spires rising above the smoke ; and another on our return to the start-point of a steamer journey down stream to view the river front. After this once more our motors were all in waiting to show us the southern quarter of the town, and at length to deposit us at our hotels. Yet even here there was barely time to efface the dust of travel, and dress for the " Ehren- trank," to which the Corporation had invited us. This was practically a public dinner, although its German name goes more frankly to its main business ; and so, with mutual toasts and innumerable English and German speeches, each more glowing and effusive than the last, our first day in Cologne came happily to its end. It is easy of course to overrate such functions ; for as story-telling was once the pastime of pilgrims and their hosts, and now oratory, the essential element of genial fiction remains much the same.
Yet let us not underrate them; it is something that even a hundred citizens — so fairly representative of our country, and for the most part also knowing
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little of Germany save what the passing day might tell them, and that not previously at first hand- should thus for themselves see that the strength of Germany lies not merely nor mainly in her armies and fleets, but in her cities and citizens ; and, having heard so much of her mailed fist, should have cause henceforward to remember her warm and friendly hand. It would be too much to expect from human nature that we should not be gently bantered about our national passion for constructing Dreadnoughts, or sometimes assured by English-speaking hosts that " we dread them not " ; but it is plain economics that these great commercial cities have much to lose and little to gain by war with us, or for that matter with any other of their neighbours, and — what is still better — that they know it. Despite the natural pride of victory over France a generation ago, one is surprised by the outspokenness with which the dis- advantages of that war are sometimes also recognised. The great fact — which London so little knows, and which even our calmer communities are also in danger of forgetting — is that " Germany " means not merely the " Junker- Preussen," which no doubt has in the past generation's politics so much spoken for her, but also " Biirger-Deutschland." Prussia, with its military aristocracy standing completely equipped for war from lofty spike-helmet to boots of monumental magnitude, is no doubt a formidable figure ; but we must not let this permanently obscure the Rhenish, Saxon, and Bavarian burgher, industrious, home-
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loving, and kindly, and of all Europeans through history most willing to live and let live. Yet he, too, has his survival policy — his views as to the best means of carrying on the struggle for existence. In this policy during the nineteenth century, first the advantages of education, and, second, its practical ap- plications to industry and commerce, have been fore- most in his mind ; and these with the results we know. But he sees that civic efficiency and well-being are also of the first importance ; and that group-survival determines that of the individual far more than the older political economy has ever realised. He is thus renewing the civic life and organisation in which his past history is so much richer than ours, and so has new lessons to teach us. Hence it is that we town planners have to come to Germany ; and even that we turn round to our at present too purely politically- minded, military-minded countrymen, to remind them that whatever may be the importance for the survival of nations in the struggle for existence of fleets and armies, this is yet more determined, in the long run, by the efficiency of their regional development, and above all, of their cities and city-life. Behind all the superiorities we may pay for in would-be neotechnic fleets, we are at present plainly in a state of inferiority as regards our too paleotechnic cities ; and it is there- fore time to be attending to their rebuilding, their equipment, their health, education, and general efficiency. This surely should be accounted to us even for patriotism, for imperialism, and these at
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their very fullest and their best. And here, as even in most technical military advances, it is for the militarist to recognise the need and use of the more inventive, initiative, and even more organising mind of the civilian.
We are shown the Giirzenich, the festal palace of the medieval municipality ; and then begins our per- ambulation from the old town through the new, and thence to the outmost limits of the future city, with rapid glimpses of quaint, if sometimes shimmy, old streets and more of broader and more formal new ones. Mostly, of course, our way runs through the modern business and the residential streets, with their extraordinary variety of architecture. Like our own at home, this is mostly bad, but bad in a rather different way. For while our Victorian architects have dabbled in every style — medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth-century, and so on — and vulgarised them badly enough, it was generally by weakening the original ; whereas here in Germany the tendency was to exaggerate and coarsen it. We alike over- load with ornament, for money must be displayed and wasted ; but after all we are rather ashamed of our showiness when done, and do not insist upon it, whereas the inferior German architect and his client are delighted with their perform- ance, and thrust it forward with all the prominence and profusion that the law of gravitation will allow.
In Cologne, from its Cathedral to its boulevards,
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the most prominent influence is that of Paris; for the former the style of the thirteenth century, but for the latter, alas ! too much the style of Napoleon III. and Baron Haussmann. In recent times, however, a new and potent influence has arisen in Germany, as a big block of shops, arcades, and business offices near the Cathedral reminds us — a new style, which is fermenting all over Germany and breaking out here and there into more extraordinary fronts and interiors than the world has seen for long. This is the German form of "Art Nouveau," the style of Olbrich and other notable living or recent architects. The credit of its parentage, the responsibility therefore too, lies largely with Glasgow, of which the initiative and influence on the Continent in architecture have almost been as considerable as in painting. Since no man is a prophet in his own country, it is still some- thing of a surprise to the wandering Scot to find " Mackintosh " almost as accepted a descriptive term in architecture — and this not only in Germany, but from Belgium to Hungary — as in costume in Great Britain. We see his influence in city after city — of course compounded with other elements, other personal equations. Even in the most gigantic and imposing new buildings, like the vast Tietz Stores in Diisseldorf designed by Olbrich, we have still the characteristic severe perpendicularity and horizontality of lines, the squared ornamentation, the alternately fairy and puckish tracery of Mr Mackintosh's Glasgow cafes, which have certainly been among the central
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and the most inspiring influences of this notable new movement and school.
Another great influence, however, in German work reveals itself in such monuments as Bismarck's, near the head of the port in Cologne. Imagine a stern colossus, seated like an Egyptian monarch, but on a towering and battlemented throne, and in full medieval armour, leaning watchful upon a massive sword — dark, grim, and threatening, even sinister and repellent, yet with an undeniable impressiveness of power. A monument very different therefore from the ordinary victory memorials of the popular and imperial melodramatic style, which one meets every- where in Germany, and which are the sorrow and shame of its art-lovers. This Bismarck is Prussia in person, the mailed fist within these peaceful burgher cities of the south, which were not so long ago little more in love with its rule than are Alsace and Lorraine to-day. He is well-placed, sitting there stout and grim in the square opposite the good Burgomaster's bright and elegant villa-mansion with its flower-garden — the perfect symbol of that imperialist militarism and bureaucracy which has laid its grasp and domination upon the life and labour of the German citizen. This, at any rate, is the perspective which the world already sees, indeed too exclusively, whereas the opposite view is no less to be noted — that of the civic life, pacific in its activities, its interests, and ideas.
This spirit of imperial domination is finding many
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expressions in recent buildings, notably, for instance, in Diisseldorf, which also rewards perambulating up and down and in and around for many hours. Here the new building of the Steel Trust is startling in its frank and forceful expression of this newest and per- haps for the moment strongest of economic powers. The pride and display of wealth is manifest in all the palaces of modern capitalism, but rarely is, as here, so frankly that of power and achievement. The block is large enough to have its fa£ades upon three streets and to dominate them all, and stands out conspicu- ously against the grey or white buildings of its neigh- bourhood and the trees of boulevard and public gardens by the intense red of its lofty walling, the green and golden tiles of its old German roof, above which again rises a low spire of leaden grey, yet bright also with gilded mouldings and crowned by its weather-vane, here appropriately a ship. The long mullions of the windows and the massive mouldings around them run down through all the upper storeys to the basement, while from this again huge pilasters rise to the cornice, each ending in the strangest capital, a fearsome grotesque of a type characteristic of recent Germany. Recall Boecklin's ruthless presentments of some of his fellow-citizens in Basle (for which pillorying of them he had, if we mistake not, to leave the town), and imagine this process of idealised por- traiture applied to the magnates of money and steel. Imagine, too, the same process of decoration applied upon an adjacent block of legal and business offices,
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their main ornament again colossal faces ranged below the eaves, no mere commonplace ornamental heads such as one can see over any bank portal, but a vivid and expressive series of grotesques, types of strong and wilful old age in all its intensity of individualisa- tion. Here proud and wrathful, there sly, calculating, covetous ; here sullen and melancholic, there grinning in evil ecstasies of gain or vanity, of lust or malice.
Something like these, though in less obtrusive English fashion, is to be seen in Queen Anne's Gate in London, where some observant and bitter sculptor has lixed for us the faces of the stout old reprobates who were the last survivors of the orgies of the Restoration, and who lived on, in moral and physical disease, chuckling over the triumphs of their gilded youth. We are now far from Glasgow or modern London, which have, of course, no such people — or is it no such artists now ? These new buildings, with their departure from previous conventions, their mingling of boastful expression of modern conditions with stinging criticism of them, stand in contrast to the commonplace street fronts round them as things of another world. They express, as nothing since the Renaissance palaces has done, the dominant spirit of the age, one of temporal powers of industry and wealth and war — wealth won by strength and labour, by thought and forethought, by exchange or specula- tion, by exploitation or taxation, by conquest and indemnity. Spiritual powers are for practical pur- poses considered as extinct ; save, indeed, that the
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great cathedrals are valued as show places, baits for the tourist traffic which continues, in its profitableness, the pilgrimages of old.
That this is no exaggeration each new building to which we are conducted with legitimate pride bears additional witness. Not far from the red and glowing devil's smithy of the Steel Trust we come to a yet more startling edifice, this time appropriately in form of a temple, with pediment and columns complete, but broad, unaspiring, almost low, yet all the more monumental, massive, almost cyclopean. Cyclopean, indeed, in its hugely heavy ground floor, or rather entrance basement, with its courses of gigantic stones, the upper and lower with a deep, dark, open space between, like the jaws of a mighty press, and this press repeated in tier above tier and in long horizontal perspective. The slender attenuated figures of the sculpture groups above the doors, the golden legend — of Discount Company, Limited — which illuminates the low, flat, far-spreading pediment, are scarcely needed to explain the meaning of this great new temple-palace. Such elaborations but complete this, that he that runs may read ; so that only one more detail of decoration might still be added — upon the broad, plain, hewn-stone gable a mosaic in red and gold, of Watts's " Mammon upon his Throne." The bank directors have not, of course, quite this view of their building ; it admirably serves their purpose, not only of use but of display : as an advertisement of their magnitude and their stability, over half Germany,
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nothing more excellent could be desired. Yet if we think our German friends a little lacking in their sense of humour, a little slow in the uptake, we are by no means just. Here, for instance, over the door of this fine new higher grade girls' school, a building as sober in detail and as restrained in general effect as British taste or convention could desire, we note over the entrance door but one small ornament — but this an owl's face, with spectacles, and these askew and ready to fall. The old spirit of civic freedom must submit, no doubt, to the established order ; but this cannot prevent it from having its jest at its expense. In small things or in great the German burgher and artist have a good deal of what we commonly think of as French directness, the habit of looking facts in the face, and of expressing their view of them with at least the courage of their opinions. Prussia, too, no less than France, has her note of bitter wit, her flash of sarcasm ; moreover, we are in Diisseldorf, Heine's own town, and which keeps much of his and its French radical spirit to this day : more, in fact, than Berlin or Emperor William quite approves, if all stories be true. What now has all this criticism of modern German architecture to do with its town planning ? More perhaps than either most of our countrymen or their hospitable guides yet realise, as we shall see in the next chapter.
CHAPTER X
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS
German Railway Stations as illustrative of better organisation than in other countries. Frankfort New Docks as a masterpiece of town planning, in its co-ordination of port and railway, engineering and commercial activities, and above all in its systematic provision of housing, with gardens, parks, etc., for its dockers. General criticisms of German methods : their recent progress. Camillo Sitte's rehabili- tation of medieval town planning. Limitations of German methods : advantage of English cottage system (Letchworth, Hampstead, etc.) now being admitted in Germany, and provided at Ulm.
Applications to British cities, and to industrial progress generally. Criticism of the London Docks scheme. Conclusions.
To understand the character or the origins of German town planning we must observe something of that order and regulation both of surroundings and of life which is so manifest around us. Of Prussian militarism and Imperial bureaucracy we are not here to speak ; their qualities are known to all the world, their defects not unknown also. But from the State railways, strategic or other, to the corresponding development of railway stations, is a necessary step ; and the space and the arrangement of these within the ample accesses to and from the city impress us as something rarely even attempted in this country— though the laying out of Euston Station shows us
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what considerable elements of civic design we have mostly thrown away throughout Great Britain. The stations of the great German cities, although necessarily the best known, are not nowadays the best. That of Frankfort, for instance, which twenty years ago was a world's wonder, is far surpassed — not in size but in arrangement, in convenience, in proportional economy, yet in architectural beauty — by the more recent construction of younger and less important towns. That of Wiesbaden, for instance, is a marvel of good design. Its booking-hall is not merely free of that mixture of sordid ugliness with coarse and showy ornament so common with us ; it is corre- spondingly relieved from that bustle and puzzle, that hurry-scurry and disorder, both of passengers and of baggage, to which we are so painfully accustomed. So striking, yet so effortless is the ordinary progress of affairs in such a station — despite no lack of active circulation, be it understood — that we pause awhile amid a group of eager architects to make out it? explanation. This, we are all agreed, lies in admirable general planning and fully studied arrangements in detail. Entrances and exits are spacious and perfectly placed in relation to each other ; the main hall is kept clear, not blocked with the wooden shanties which with us so often interrupt direct view and passage ; booking and baggage have each their side of the hall, all operations concerned with the latter being provided for within a nobly arched recess or
transept, so leaving the main body of the hall
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uninterrupted for thoroughfare and for that clear and self-possessed view of one's immediate arrangements which is so essential. The information and booking arrangements particularly interest us. A large recess is subdivided into a threefold chamber by vertical screens, and these plainly labelled " Maps," " Time- tables," " Fares," with the respective particulars, so that the passenger is trained to take care of himself, and the time of the company's servants is saved accordingly. Again, at the outer entrance one finds a set of slot machines, but here architecturally treated as wall-features and for practical purposes — the first for providing those penny platform access tickets everywhere required for non-passengers ; the next for supplying the ticket most frequently required, that to the nearest town, so saving ticket clerks not a little. At the ticket offices proper further time- and trouble-saving devices are employed ; thus, when traffic presses at any point, the usual window closes, and one on each side is opened for stations A to K and L to Z respectively, the passengers again sorting themselves out without difficulty. Such economies of time and labour, such intelligent co-operation of the public, may be dubbed " impracticable " by those who have not seen them working ; yet neither by natural intelligence nor readiness of adaptation need we think ourselves inferior to German travellers. But our eyes are so blurred, our nerves so worn, our tempers so strained by the hideous huddle of advertise- ments on every wall, obstacles on every side, noises
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in either ear, that we can but muddle through, arriv- ing at our train or destination no doubt, but in a more or less battered condition, and so far disadvantaged in our life-struggle from the very beginning of every day. If but one of our stations could be Germanised by some such hygienist-engineer as here designs them, the example would soon be insisted on by the public, and carried out with profit, despite advertisement losses, by the companies. So much, then, for one of the actual factors which have at once made for town-planning schemes and helped to educate their designers. Now for a larger example.
The British engineer has so long held pre-eminence that neither he nor we readily realise that he has in certain ways to begin his education here anew. I do not of course speak of his special tasks, of mechanical, electrical, or civil engineering ; though in each of these there are whispers that he may also learn from as well as teach his younger Continental brethren. Where the German engineer impresses us laymen is that instead of concentrating upon his immediate problem, say, of station or port alone, and this in indifference to its effect upon the town — witness the more than usually huge, hideous, and ill-planned stations of Edinburgh — he sees his task in relation to the community who are to use this, to the workers who are to serve in it. He does his utmost to meet the claims of health and housing, and even of that civic amenity which with us has been so long over- looked and therefore destroyed, but which we are
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now recognising when almost too late as an indispens- able element of human happiness and social progress, and even of material prosperity. Of this changed attitude of mind and its material outcome there can be no better illustration than the magnificent new port of Frankfort-on -the- Main. This we have been shown in lecture, on plan, and in visit, with the fullest detail, and with legitimate pride. Here, in the twentieth century, Frankfort is repeating the example of Glasgow in 1780, and adapting its river to the ever vaster commerce and deepening draught of the opening time. But note the way in which this greatest of problems for such river cities is now handled. First the whole needful space for the proposed port extension is acquired by the city, and over 1000 acres are clearly planned out from the very start. A hundred acres of this is water-surface, and the disposition of this into a series of minor havens for shipping, for coal and wood, for manufactures, etc., with a total of nearly eight miles of quays, determines the corresponding groupings of depots, warehouses, and stores, and of factories of different kinds ; while to serve this new quarter forty miles of new railway line are also being laid down. Along with this commercial and industrial expansion the corresponding growth of population is similarly being provided for, not left to the chances of speculation, as with us. Over twenty-five miles of new streets are being laid out, including two long boulevards, one with a garden promenade. Two
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 197 main types of house are to prevail, the larger of three
•Bi ••••••••••I
FIG. 40. — Frankfort new docks. Note specialised havens, railway lines to industrial quarters; also dockers' village, with garden boulevards, park and lake.
rooms with a habitable kitchen, the smaller with two rooms and a kitchen, and grouped, as usual in
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Germany as in Scotland, in flatted tenements ; but for the first time in Frankfort it is proposed to follow English example and have also a village of workmen's cottages as well. Not only are there trees in the larger streets as well as in the boulevards, but a park for this new neighbourhood is also being provided, with playgrounds for children and facilities for games also. A swimming-bath too is not forgotten. Finally, to assure opportunity of direct touch with Nature, the town's forest is being extended to meet the new park.
Here, then, in progress is a complete example of German town planning to-day — the attempt to meet, no longer piecemeal and from day to day, but with intelligent foresight, the complex needs of a great town of progressing affairs and growing population, and of supplying the demands of modern industry without forgetting those of modern populations. Place, work, and folk — environment, function, and organism — are thus no longer viewed apart, but as the elements of a single process — that of healthy life for the community and the individual. We do not, of course, say our German cousins are completely successful : we have our criticisms to make ; yet it is much to have shown us such an example.
In the great development of railway systems, of river navigation, canal systems, and inland ports, of course with a corresponding increase of populations, we see the civil engineer naturally developing into the town planner. The skilful and far-sighted organ-
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isation of the arts of war, in which Prussia has given the world so many lessons, has had an influence on the arts of peace far exceeding anything since the days of Napoleon, or at least their would-be revival under the Second Empire, to which that of Germany presents not a few resemblances also. The burgher rule of the once-free cities has thus become more organised, more homogeneous throughout the Empire ; and with this the old burgomasters, once answering to Scots provosts (magistrates of longer tenure of office than English mayors), have become a profession of administrators, highly efficient, but first of all officials. Continuity of policy is more assured upon this system ; undertakings are more readily gone into upon a large scale, and the local civic tradition tends to be brought more rapidly into contact with the largest conceptions of economic development, of national pro- gress, and of imperial greatness. But do these pro- fessional burgomasters and city planners as fully inherit the best traditions, the ancient spirit of the city which the chances of life have given them to rule as did its own children in the days of its historic grandeur as one of the free cities of the Empire ? And under their rule, conscientious, strenuous, and capable though it be, can we hope for any considerable renewal of the old blossomings of art, of culture, and of policy to which history and monuments alike testify so richly? Such are some of the questions which keep arising in the background of our minds. As our hosts show us their accomplished works, their
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plans and projects for the future, we are impressed by their high average of skill, intelligence, and fore- sight, and by the way these all testify to the higher professional training, the larger outlook of a people more educated and more ambitious than our own ; yet at times also we feel a certain disappointment. Their best design is not so good as it should be : it lacks something of the spontaneity and originality, invention and freedom, of the artist proper, and hence falls short of the few best things which recent England has to show. Dr Stuebben, the great authority on town planning, to whom Cologne and now Berlin owes the direction and general design of its con- temporary expansion, is, despite all his unquestionable merits, too much of a Haussmann redivivus ; and he also, in his restrained way, loses that touch of light- ness and exuberance, that expression of the joy of life, which enlivens the official monotony of modern Paris. His successor in Cologne realises this, and is modifying his designs in detail as fast as may be in harmony with the later and freer taste. Gently curved streets nowr tend to replace straight ones. Haussmann's star crossings, widely-opened squares, and other pompous and mistaken forms of laying out are being abandoned for simpler, more economical, yet more beautiful street-junctions ; and new places are inspired by older models.
After the influence of Haussmann and Stuebben there has also come in that of Camillo Sitte, that admirable architect of Vienna, who has done for the
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appreciation of the medieval city as a whole what the romantic revival did for its cathedral or town- house. Since then we have come to forget that these were once regarded as chaotic and barbarous, and that the very name of " Gothic " was given to pointed architecture as a term of contempt and abuse. But while we have learned better as to the separate build- ings, and so admire what our grandfathers reviled, we have remained under the impression that the quaint and curved and complex street network of the medieval city was of mere accidental growth, and that the narrow streets surrounding the cathedral and the buildings clustered and crowded around its walls were thus only fit to be cleared away, so leaving the cathedral exposed to full view on all sides. Hence the nineteenth-century cathedral restorers and city improvers have united their forces towards such clear- ances, of course at vast sacrifice and expense, and thus it is that all manner of old churches, small or great, from St Giles's at Edinburgh to Notre Dame de Paris, now stand isolated, each upon its modern place — often, indeed, as at Cologne, surrounded by modern hotels on all sides, with unlimited tramway developments, not to mention the exuberant display of a big railway station not by any means deserving such a eulogy as do some of its later rivals, and in any case inappropriate here. But while we in British cities are still for the most part cheerfully proceeding with the removal of such characteristic minor features of the past as are necessary to isolate our monuments,
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and set them in the midst of the incongruous and transient utilitarian ugliness of the present, it has been the great achievement of Camillo Sitte's memor- able book to convince architects and art lovers generally that the antique city planners knew what they were doing better than we had ever realised, that their crowding up of the cathedral was no mere concession to the exigencies of space within a populous and small walled city, but was also the very condition of its towering sublimity, the artistic enhancement of its effect. Thus, in fact, it has come to pass that German cities are repenting themselves, late in the day though it be, of these too sweeping improvements, and are actually taking counsel — even, as at Cologne, having architectural competitions — as to the best way of building up their old cathedral place once more ! Could the whirligig of time more fully bring its revenges ?
It looks, in fact, as if the great and progressive cities had been experimenting for the benefit of the smaller and slower-moving ones, and as if they were increasingly to be viewed, not so much as in the last generation, as examples, but in some respects also as warnings. Can the vast schemes of city extension of Cologne or Dtisseldorf really satisfy the coming generation, who will have to inhabit them ? We venture to think not. Moreover, beside the archi- tectural criticism, it is time to be coming to the economic one — that this comprehensive town plan- ning, with all its merits, has brought with it not
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only municipal outlays which the town must pay for, but an unforeseen and not easily prevented de- velopment of land speculation ; and that the inflation of land values which this involves is keeping detached houses, or even semi-detached villas, within the reach of only the very well-to-do. For the mass of the people the utmost that is being done under these conditions is to get them into broader and more airy streets, with proximity no doubt to boulevard and park, such as our townsfolk might often envy, but with a fixation of those tenement conditions from which Continental cities, like Scottish ones, have so long suffered, and which it is the rare good fortune of English towns, with all their dulness and muddle and confusion, to have escaped in the main hitherto. Hence, despite all our admiration of the comprehen- siveness* of the German conception of town planning, we also learn here in Germany to think of the loose- spread English towns with increasing respect. That Battersea is in many ways but a poor little place beside Berlin is obvious enough ; but for its popula- tion of under 200,000, as Mr Burns proudly reminds us, it has more individual houses than Berlin with over two millions, lodged as these are for the most part in towering tenements, be these arranged in well- to-do flats or humble ones. The more moderate land values consistent with a small population per acre admit of the continuance of the cottage system, and even of its substantial improvement, its trans- formation more and more — if not indeed to the type
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of Garden City and Hampstead Suburb, at least to something fairly approaching these. Whereas given the high land values evolved by crowded habitations in old quarters, maintained by city outlays and en- hanced by free speculation, how can the German city practically hope to reduce these, to admit of loosen- ing out the population to that comparative thinness per acre which all agree is necessary for healthy continuance ? At Ulm the city has been unusually alive to this problem. A wise burgomaster and town council have been purchasing all the available land in the neighbourhood, and are now succeeding in establishing good beginnings of garden villages for its workmen in suburbs more nearly corresponding to Mr Unwin's masterpiece at Hampstead than one can often as yet see in Germany. At Cologne, Diisseldorf, etc., the need of such cottage suburbs is at length becoming recognised, but their creation under the circumstances indicated above is now no easy matter.
The historic and artistic spirit is far more manifest in Frankfort and in Cologne, and as we proceed east- wards it grows even more influential. Nuremberg and Rothenburg thus afford a delightful conclusion for such a tour as we have been making. Here indeed we have two types admittedly superior on the whole to any others in Germany : one of the great city, the other of the small; and each living on, well based upon its old foundations and activities ; in the one case of world commerce and art manu-
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factures, in the other of homely rusticity, simple yet educated and refined, These two towns, then, especially teach the lesson town planners everywhere most need, that town planning is not something which can be done from above, on general principles easily laid down, which can be learned in one place and imitated in another — that way Haussmannism lies. It is the development of a local life, a regional character, a civic spirit, a unique individuality, capable of course of growth and expansion, of im- provement and development in many ways, of pro- fiting too by the example and criticism of others, yet always in its own way and upon its own founda- tions. Thus the renewed art of Town Planning has to develop into an art yet higher, that of City Design — a veritable orchestration of all the arts, and corre- spondingly needing, even for its preliminary surveys, all the social sciences. Here, then, is the problem before us on our return to survey our modern towns, our ancient cities anew, to decipher their origins and trace their growth, to preserve their surviving memorials and to continue all that is vital in their local life ; and on this historic foundation, and on a corresponding survey and constructive criticism of our actual present, go forward to plan out a bettering future with such individual and collective foresight as we may.
From Germany, when we come home again, we are naturally asked — Well, what are we to do here ? The answer is not easy ; there are so many answers.
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Learn from Germany ? Certainly yes ! Imitate Germany ? Certainly no. With all her plannings, with all her commanding foresight, her public enter- prise, it is still from Letch worth and Hampstead, from Woodlands and Earswick, and the like, as of course from the old-world villages they continue to renew, that we may best learn to house our people in moderate numbers to the acre, and with that most essential of conditions of health for children, wife, and man alike — that is, of cottage and garden. In Scotland we forget this. The evil Continental tradi- tion of walled cities and crowded population, and consequent persistence of high site values, still weighs heavily upon our long war-worn land, so that even at new industrial villages — say Duddingston, a mile out from Edinburgh — the brewery workers' tene- ments are already towering up as high as the malt barns. Here, too, our workers are still even more ignorant and thoughtless of their own health than are we of theirs. How many people of any class in our Scottish cities, though every one has its medical school, know that one of our best Edinburgh gyne- cologists was accustomed to point out that there is a distinct stratum of women's ill-health, and with this of children's also, on the fourth storey, and of course upwards? Why? Because while a woman will contentedly go up and down one stair or two, or even three, the fourth is the last straw, and when carrying a basket on one arm and a baby on the other a very substantial one. She is thus physically
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overstrained, and so becomes liable to one class of complaints and more ; she at least gets into the habit of going out as little as possible, which of course opens the way to new series of ailments, while it enfeebles the children from the very beginning. For similar reasons the high, separate family houses of the familiar well-to-do London type can no longer so easily get servants ; and so far well. In every way. then, high dwellings are to be discouraged. Hence, as our "health-conscience" develops, and as well- being, success in life, and so on come to be reckoned less habitually in money- wages, and more in terms of the real environment which these are only of use to buy, the high houses of German or Scottish towns must tend to be abandoned in favour of the cottages of the coming garden suburbs. Still, as the working family under existing conditions cannot afford a new house with adequate number of rooms for its members, they will increasingly find the present small middle- class flats in high dwellings — as these become vacated for separate houses, or garden-suburb cottages — more readily within their means. Thus also a too dis- astrously rapid depreciation of such properties tends to be mitigated.
Though some have found fault with Mr Burns for not giving complete and immediate powers in his Town Planning Act to municipalities at once to scheme out vast future areas in German fashion and to deal with existing built areas as sweepingly as Haussmann did with Old Paris, his caution is also
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to be praised. We are not ripe for such magnificent schemes ; we are not to be trusted with such sweep- ing changes. To plan suburbs here and there is something to begin with, and these will react as fast and as deeply on the existing town as it can well afford. Moreover, we can soon take larger powers when we have learned more fully how to use the proposed ones. Can nothing else be done mean- while ? Much ; for the recent discussion of the Town Planning Bill and Act has certainly begun the most critical period in the history of cities since their great expansions with the Manufacturing and the Railway Age. The " Reform Bill Atlases" of 1832 for Scottish and English towns are here well worth consultation. On each page we have practically still the little old-fashioned town, much as it was in the Middle Ages, its few and narrow streets still mainly the obvious crossings or convergence of the country roads around. But outside its group of dwellings altogether sweeps a wide red line, sometimes far into the fields, the parliamentary boundary, with its allowance for the then expected growth. Pity that this foresight, like political thinking so largely, was not brought down from its high parliamentary level upon the concrete area it included : for here would have been our town plan two full generations earlier ; and with this how much wealth and time, health and happiness, might have been saved ? Not but that there were already beginnings of town plans, even partial realisations of them indeed, far earlier ;
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witness not only the classic case of the New Town of Edinburgh, and much of Bath also, as well as much of the best of London, but examples in smaller towns as well ; notably the stately lay-out of Buxton, or of the newer parts of Perth to north and south, with their formal terraces overlooking the magnificent Inches. But all these belonged to the spacious and enlightened period of the late eighteenth century. With the Napoleonic wars, and with the expansion of production and the low state of depression of the producers which accompanied and followed these, all the designs of worthy city development were lost sight of or thrown aside. Thus that main mass of the modern town, which is already our curse and incubus, was swiftly heaped together ; mean cottage- rows, or barrack tenements with slummy common stairs, for the workers ; ugly house-rows, or desolately respectable, semi-sanitary flats for the bulk of the middle classes ; and even for the richest the dreariest mansions, the ugliest villas the eye of man has ever seen.
This bulk, then, of these our everyday towns is not normal but abnormal, waiting to be scrapped with other evil fashions of a by-going age. For tradition of towns worth living in, our few medieval or ciarly renascence houses and monuments, as in Chester, or York, or Old Edinburgh ; and our eighteenth-century dwellings, as in Bloomsbury or New Edinburgh, are, each in their way, far more
inspiring and serviceable, more enduring probably
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also, than is the vast mass of nineteenth -century growth.
Practically, then, our immediate need is educa- tional— most effectively through a Civic Exhibition, and this twofold. First and most easily realised, a local exhibition in each city; and essentially of its own site and origins, its own best past, its present good and bad alike, its possible opening future also. But beside this we need a great exhibition : of a type better than international ones, which may mean anything or nothing — an Inter-Civic Exhibition- showing what great cities have been, what the best of them still are, above all what they aspire to be. Upon the irregular and broken ascent of man, though so often sadly turned back and delayed, he has once and again grown conscious not only of his own personal self and family, or of his social group or clan, his tribe or nation, but also of his great social hive, the city : at times again, as lately, and largely still, he has become forgetful of this. But all history confirms in detail of life and art what language pre- serves in literal word, that not only " politics " but "civilisation" itself are essentially products, not of the individual, but of the city. Of such civic exhi- bitions there have been many initiatives, that of Alt und Neu Coin in 1913 and that of Dublin in 1914 may be especially remembered ; while inter-civic com- parison has reached a widely comprehensive inter- national level in Lyons with 1914.
Too many of our German hosts, and still more, I
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fear, of us, their guests, are plainly accustomed to think of town planning as an art of compass and rule, a matter to be worked out, between engineers and architects almost alone, and for their town councils. But the true town plan, the only one worth having, is the outcome and flower of the whole civilisation of a community and of an age. While starting from its fundamentals, of port and road, of market and depot ; and from its essentials, too, of family dwell- ings worthy to be permanent and hereditary homes, it develops onwards to the supreme organs of the city's life — its acropolis and forum, its cloister and cathedral. Now in our day we have again to develop the equivalents of all these. It is, in fact, for lack of these that our cities reek with evils. The psychol- ogy and treatment of our besetting sin and national disgrace of alcoholism is no such simple matter as we think. For the individual — the Celt especially — drunkenness is times without number a perversion of mysticism. For the community — Scottish especially —it is the nemesis of the repression at one time by asectic puritan, or at another by mammonist utilitarian, of the natural >joy, the Dionysiac ecstasy of life. To progress from our recent conditions to public sanitation and housing has been much, and to dream of garden cities and garden suburbs, and here and there to begin realising them, is far more. More important still, however, is the next step, that from such town extension planning towards city develop- ment. But where is this movement to be adequately
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initiated ? Well, why not in Liverpool ? in Birming- ham ? or, say, in Glasgow ? where the need is at its very sorest ? Its glorious Clyde valley, that great fiord with its mountain shores, its lovely isles, is an admirable natural region, till lately (and why not again ?) of the fairest of the earth. Here, too, in rare degree are the resources of population, of intelligence and science and skill, of constructive and organising power, of artistic and architectural originality, even of social feeling and civic statesman- ship as well : why, then, may not the neotechnic city here most readily replace the paleotechnic one ?
It is not Germany which will save us, not Berlin, nor Paris ; not Letchworth nor Hampstead either ; though each can give its lesson. Or take Glasgow, as worst-housed of modern cities. In that industrial evolution which is the determinant process of modern history, it has been foremost in invention and initiative, and this once and again. The modern man, with Watt's steam-engine as burden upon his back, with Smith's Wealth of Individuals clasped to his bosom, is essentially — that is, both practically and spiritually —the citizen of eighteenth-century Glasgow, though he be now housed in one of its distant manufact- uring suburbs, called Birmingham, Bermondsey, or Brooklyn. Again, here is his son, for whom electricity is replacing steam, and for whom some tincture of more social and moral philosophy is replacing the old hard-shell individualism. Be he from Oxford or Cornell or Charlottenburg, is he not still young
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Glasgow at its best, disciple of Caird or of Kelvin ? Why, then, need we despair of a third movement, also already here, in which the artistic originality which has stirred all Europe, and this alike in paint- ing and architecture, the yet mightier architecture of the ship, in which the Clyde still claims to lead all rivals, may be combined with the civic statesman- ship which has won modern Glasgow perhaps her widest and most honourable fame of all ? This surely would be the fitting crown of all these repeated in- itiatives, this pre-eminent world-leadership of the technic age. Quite definitely in Glasgow to-day there meet — so far no doubt everywhere, yet here in their very intensest form — all the conditions of civic and national decadence on one hand, and all the resources of recuperation on the other. Let us set about fully surveying the problem, meditating and testing the policy ; and soon it might be the turn of German town planners to cross from Rhine to Clyde. At best, however, for years to come, we cannot fully overtake the progress of the German city, with its many years' start of us, its ever-increasing thought and effort. Let us briefly sum up, then, our main impressions of what it has to teach us. To those who were visiting German cities for the first time, and even to those of us who knew them previously, their historic greatness, their characteristic individu- ality and legitimate civic pride, their vigorous grap- pling with present-day problems, and, above all, the breadth and boldness of their preparations for an
i
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enlarging future, made up a daily lesson which none of us are likely to forget. At home we have our historians absorbed in the past, our business men in the present, our Utopians in the future ; but each is as yet isolated in his own aspect of the moving world. Whereas, to see that your German burgo- master or councillor, official or citizen, is much of all these three rolled into one — that I take to be one of the best and most needed lessons of such a journey, one of the suggestions which may be most fruitful after home-coming. It is much for the lovers of the past that historic memories and associations are not, as with us, forgotten, or sneered at as sentimental if revived, but are known and valued as the spiritual heritage of the community ; that ancient places and monuments, old-time streets and houses are not swept away wholesale on this or that crude pretext of convenience or of sanitation, but are cleansed and conserved as the very nucleus of the city's material heritage. It is a mental illumination, too, for our " practical man " to see not only education and health held in higher esteem than with ourselves, but natural beauty preserved, developed, rendered accessible to all, from river-front to mountain-forest ; to see, too, that art is not something outside everyday life, some- thing " unpractical," at best to be grudgingly supplied in schools as a reputed aid towards the design of marketable commodities ; but something to be viewed and treated as a worthy and social end in itself — in architecture, sculpture, and painting, in concert, drama,
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and opera. To us, who so largely belong to towns greater in number of population, and proportionally even richer in monetary wealth than are these German ones, it is the most useful of experiences to see civic greatness estimated in more spiritual elements, and public wealth more applied than with ourselves towards creating an environment of material beauty and general well-being.
Again, it is good for John Bull, with his robust immunity to every science, and his one cherished metaphysical theory — that there is no such thing as theory, and no use for it if there is — to meet business people — city fathers, men in large affairs, who are yet open to social and speculative thought, who are boldly applying and generously advancing all the science of their age on every hand, and who are daily growing clearer-headed, richer, and more powerful in consequence.
We have all had impressed upon us the contrast in matters military between Marshal Moltke in his staff-office and Major Muddlethrough in his easy- chair ; and of naval alarms we have surely had enough and to spare also. But there remains a real and use- ful field for each of our many Cassandras, who will do us the service of broadly contrasting the strong points of the German cities with the defects and weaknesses of our own. Let them point out to us our ports, which have grown up anyhow, our towns, in which factory and railway, slum and suburb, are separated by mere accidents of personal ownerships,
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or crushed together by mere planless growth, and which we then patch and cobble as best we may, and at infinite cost and labour, and with no organic unity, no adequate utility, and no beauty when done. Whereas, at Diisseldorf or Frankfort, we recall the new port skilfully planned throughout, with its specialised havens, its depots and factory quarters, its railway and power-station, all complete ; and with these the new town-quarter, not left as with us to chance planning and building with its monotonous mean streets, but with boulevards and gardens, even its parkway beyond these to the city forest. How shall we persuade the engineers of the London or other Dock Commission that it may even be good business thus to provide for their dockers' health and pleasure?
So important is this question that we shall venture to express it further. Compare, then, this Frankfort plan with the vastest dock scheme as yet before the world, and for the extension of the greatest port of its history — the £14,000,000 scheme for the extension of the London Dock System, as adopted by Lord Devonport and his colleagues about 1910-11 ; and of which we have since been accustomed regularly to hang a reproduction in the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition wherever it goes, side by side with its smaller contemporary of Frankfort, this being chosen as an illustration of the best port and associated town planning up to date and for moderate outlay
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(some £2,000,000). Its companion is shown not only as the biggest and costliest up to date, nor even, as we venture to suspect, as probably presenting, alike in proportion to outlay and in principle, less of engineer- ing design and of industrial economy than elsewhere heretofore ; since these are naturally questions for engineers, for merchants and manufacturers, and for the financiers who dominate them all. The prime interest for a Town Planning Exhibition of this stupendous scheme lies in its naive and total ignoring of the human element of docking, in its overlooking not only of the essential map of London, that of Mr Booth's great survey, but with it of the main, basal, social, economic, and therefore also engineering fact, that such great new docks — be they good, bad, or merely indifferent, and whatever their economies in working — will still require a vast increase of dockers, whose adequate proximity, whose health and other conditions are as fundamental to the working efficiency of the docks themselves as can be this to their financial returns to all concerned.
Thanks partly to the efforts of this small exhibition (but increasingly also to more vigorous forms of exposure), the promise and potency of these London Dock plans, as at present approved, towards increasing the congestion and intensifying the slumdom of dock- land, and this to a degree unprecedented in paleo- technic civilisation, are becoming realised ; presumably also the corresponding exacerbation of those recurrent labour troubles of which London Docks afford so
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many tragic and costly instances — instances which their surrounding conditions and design, working and management, so largely and so lucidly explain. Conversely, the no less great possibilities, not only indirect, as civic and social, but direct, as industrial and financial, in short — in every way economic — of a reconsidered scheme on modern lines are becoming manifest. That is, of such an effective reyisal of them as would be a matter of course in Germany, by a co-operation of engineers and town planners, at once acquainted with the best modern solutions and with local needs, and with needful skill and good-will to deal with them.
Viewed in its larger aspects, the problem is thus no less than that of the whole reorganisation of East London. It extends even beyond ; for its efficiency and prosperity of course mean much for the City and for Greater London. This dock scheme, moreover, is a central example — as yet for worse, but if revised for better — to all the maritime cities of our island, of the empire, and even beyond. Yet even the narrowest view, that of immediate dock-working and its fore- casts, this needed reconsideration must be seen to justify itself. Hence such appeals as those of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association cannot surely much longer be ignored by the Dock Authorities? If they are, the questions must surely before long be asked, and that more urgently, of and by higher authorities ; else surely docker and town planner may fairly ask, what is the use to us of the L.C,C. or even
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of Parliament and its responsible ministers ? But in hope that these last questions will be unnecessary, we may pass on to other matters.
So enough of docks ; let us pass now (as doubtless do at times many of the very dock directors we have been criticising) to towns of the opposite type, those avowedly for health and pleasure. Be they large like Wiesbaden, or small like Homburg, we find no less comprehensive unity of design, no less civic boldness in realisation. Pleasant gardens and palatial Kursaal, gentle promenades and spacious forest-drives and rambles, are all combined into a pleasing and varied whole, which retain the visitor till he feels at home, and thus attract him to return, and to spread its fame wherever he goes. Compare with all this our poor watering-places and health resorts, each and all more or less bungled and vulgarised, too often from hideous railway station and mingled mean and garish streets to spoiled sea-front or defiled woodland. True, we have some better examples ; but no first-rate ones : for amid the many recent endeavours of our watering- places to improve their attractiveness, where shall we find any serious or sustained example of the collabora- tion of town planner, park and garden designer, and gardener with architect, sculptor, and craftsman ? True, the joint municipal and railway bill-sticker now promises us all this ; so the communities concerned must soon see to a more adequate performance. Even their beginnings of this are found to pay : why not go further ?
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German town planning, as we have seen, has its eminent qualities, its manifest dangers and defects also ; but enough here in conclusion to repeat and emphasise the general impression at its best. It is that of a growing association of civic and social action with architectural and artistic effort also in unison, and these to a degree lacking in our British towns, or lapsed even where in past time it has existed. Our own Arts and Crafts movement insisted upon the needful relations of art to the community-life from which it arises, which it expresses, and with which it declines. Here, however, German cities are actively entering upon this new advance of city life and creative art together : and now also is our own oppor- tunity. We have to live in towns : and, on the whole, with all respect to Garden Cities and Garden Suburbs, we have to make the best we can of the existing ones. Here, then, is a point for the reader, an outlet for his energies. He knows how the im- provement of towns and cities on their administra- tive and utilitarian side has already notably advanced, and is advancing, that more general social idealism for which these hope and strive, even under the existing rules of the municipal game. Hence in each city, amid the incipient outburst of town planning and city improvement schemes, good, bad and indifferent, with corresponding formation of civic betterment associations also, of all kinds and qualities, there is likewise opening everywhere a new field for the artist, a new audience for the socialises Each
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of us may say he is already busy enough with his own work : but such a ramble as ours through German cities will soon convince him that for our poor muddled towns there must also be ways of increasing their efficiency and his own together, of bringing civic survey and forethought towards material realisation, and this within the reasonably near future. There is a time to dream and tell of Utopia ; but has not this been going on long enough ? Here in our present phase of industrial and municipal develop- ment the opportunity is arising for saying, " Here or nowhere is our America" -our Eutopia in some measure realised upon earth, our new age at least begun. Zionic hopes and Fabian policies are neither of them to be despised ; yet surely there is place in the world for Promethean efforts, for Herculean labours also, and all these localised as of old. May not individuals supply the needful fire, and groups the needful strength ? The Augean stable, the deadly marsh, the ever-renewing hydra- hended evils are not far to seek.
CHAPTER XI
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING IN RECENT PROGRESS
Eutopia in progress : developments of recent years in England, Germany, etc.
Metropolitan improvements, of Athens, and next of Dublin. Rise of municipal life and leaders. Constructive progress in British cities and in American ones, yet limitations persistent. The housing situa- tion in Canada and Australia.
Phases of progress in India.
Home politics turning towards city betterment : corresponding call for fuller knowledge, and its diffusion.
EUTOPIA, Limited, is thus becoming established, both as regards housing and town planning : and though we cannot here attempt to report on these great move- ments, for which a whole volume would be needed (one, happily, soon out of date), some estimate of progress in these leading directions may be outlined.
First of all, then, let us once more recognise that along with the Housing movement, and beyond its main phases, which were sketched out in Chapter VII., we have fairly entered upon a larger and more com- prehensive recovery of town planning : as also that for this impulse we peculiarly owe gratitude to the example of Germany, whose greater civic traditions and whose later and far less acute paleotechnic develop- ments, along with more adequate education — technical,
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scientific, and cultural alike — have on the whole been making her transition to the higher neotechnic order of industry more speedy, natural, and effective than it is as yet in the English-speaking world. Such warm appreciations and frank admissions have not in the least prevented us from recognising, as in Chaps. IX. and X., the limitations of German town planning, nor from valuing those superiorities of our own cottage homes and garden villages and suburbs, which Germans are now as frankly visiting and learning from in their turn. For it is just in such countries, whose village life has so largely suffered from ages and crises of war beyond number, that we find, alike from the historic and the rural standpoint, a more vivid appreciation than we have ourselves of this present renascence and readaptation of the English village, since this in its way is often, thanks to its long-continued peace, the most beautiful the world can show. Here in this renewal, in fact, is the foremost recent advance of England, and the best gift to civilisation she is at present offering ; one peculiarly helpful, encouraging, and suggestive alike to war-beaten countries like most Continental ones, like Scotland and Ireland un- happily also, as well as towards amending the paleo- technic confusion of old and new world alike.
Hence once more returning to Garden Suburbs, and this time reviewing their progress in the first three years after the passage of Mr Burns's Act, their progress has been going on encouragingly as compared with earlier years of the movement, though still slowly
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in view of the populations to be reached. As the report for the Garden Cities Association for 1913 conveniently sums up for us, in that year some twenty-five new schemes were set on foot, covering 1500 acres with new buildings, with maximum of twelve houses per acre, thus providing in that year for an ultimate population of 90,000. The total area now comprised in the schemes is over 15,000 acres, planned to house some 300,000 people. The same area, developed in the ordinary style, would have a population of between one and a half and three millions. These schemes are on various scales of density, the 4500 acres at Letchworth providing for only 35,000, practically the same as for Hampstead with its 700 acres. The total population of the estates at present is 11,000 in 4500 houses. 2500 acres are fully built. Upon land and houses about three and a half millions have been spent, co-partnership societies accounting for about a million of this. Every company started last year has been registered under the Acts necessary to obtain Government loans at 3J per cent.
Although, as we have seen in a previous chapter (VI.), neither Scottish towns nor villages have yet been contributing much in the way of positive example, a Royal Commission on Housing (1913-14) has ranged over the country as well as the towns ; and from its evidence, necessarily largely of a kind to stagger civilisation, a correspondingly drastic Report
cannot be wondered at.
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Much disappointment has been felt by the long delay at Rosyth — not without official obscurantism, and of the time-honoured tenacious standard of the Admiralty behind it — where the one apparently assured new town of these islands has been put off year after year, with corresponding injury to the neighbouring burghs, and delay of what should already have been a great national example. With 1914, however, this state of delay has ended, and a fair beginning has been assured with 1915.
In Ireland the agricultural progress of the last half- generation has found a notable expression of recent years, in a large measure of provision of dwellings for agricultural labourers, some 40,000 or more by the beginning of 1914.
In Germany garden-city estates are of late being developed, some ten or thereby up to 1912. In Ulm the combination of great municipal enterprise in land purchase, with corresponding regulation of town extension on garden- suburb lines, and exclusion of land-speculators accordingly, is rapidly making this one of the most well-developed of modern cities. For here we may set out below the great cathedral spire which is the city's historic centre, ramble out- wards in well-nigh every direction through surviving medieval and renaissance beauty, and thence pass onwards into the growing area of modern town plan- ning, without finding those zones of more or less paleo- technic character with which we are so familiar. Such a city must thus rapidly overtake those of earlier and
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ruder modern development ; and may well suggest the future of our own old-fashioned cities, like York, for instance, especially as the advancing methods of electric power-transmission from not too distant collieries are borne in mind. In fact, is it not possible, even probable, that in course of the transition from paleotechnic industries to neotechnic civilisation, not a few such changes of relative importance may take place between town and town?
Similar beginnings are in progress in other European countries ; not only in France, Italy, Hungary, and Sweden, countries all accessible to English ideas and initiatives, but upon a larger scale at several points in Spain ; where industrial and reconstructive movements have rapidly been growing, since the loss of the last provinces of her colonial empire turned public attention to the needs and possibilities of internal development.
Most impressive, however, of all appeals to the civic; imagination, since deliberately renewing the central and initiative city of the cultural past of Occidental civilisation, is the present replanning of Athens ; and it is likewise no small evidence of the advance of town planning in this country, that the designs chosen for this magnificent work should be from the not previously very Hellenic atmosphere of Lancaston — by Mr T. H. Mawson, one of our most effective garden designers and writers, and prepared through large town-planning schemes in Canada and
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elsewhere for this highest of town-planning oppor- tunities. The wide bearing of this particular scheme, corresponding as it does with the rise of Greece, after her Turkish and Bulgarian campaigns, to a larger position in the near Eastern world, and to her still unsatisfied ambition of appeal to the Greek race, are manifest enough ; while for us Westerns the question arises — may she not once more, as of old, have some- thing to teach us ? There certainly is one lesson to begin with. A worthy metropolitan city has always been realised as a main national or imperial asset ; and sometimes also, as in Athens of old and again to-day (and of course supremely in the case of Jerusalem), as a centre of racial unity, and accord- ingly of spiritual appeal, in ways far exceeding boundaries and frontiers.
Where in the world can be the next such ambitious civic development ? Not improbably in Dublin. There overcrowding and misery have at length be- come acutely felt ; yet the memories of her metro- politan past have long been renewing into an approach- ing future ; and there, moreover, deepest, yet in their way most potent of all, there lie the tradition and pride of an ancient culture second only to that of Hellas, and more directly and deeply continuous with it than we realise in lands which have under- gone the Roman influence, and thence had it more or less effaced or transformed by the barbarian invasions.
In the present endeavour towards the replanning of Dublin, which has lately been made the subject
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of an open competition by the generous initiative of the Earl of Aberdeen, as in the preliminary Civic Exhibition promoted by his no less public-spirited consort, there has been from the first the same set of motives as in Athens. It will be said, and so far truly, that this coincidence has been for the most part unconscious ; but so much the better. The interest of Dublin as a reviving metropolis is not to Ireland only, nor even to the sister cities of Great Britain, much though these stand to gain, both commercially and culturally, by the rise of her wealth and influence : it appeals to the Irish race, through- out the United States as throughout the Empire ; and thus, little though hotly opposed partisans may as yet see it, it will renew a too long interrupted bond for the whole English-speaking and Anglo- Celtic world, as well as for the sea-divided kindred of the Gael.
Returning thus by way of Dublin to home cities generally there are great elements of hope. A better attitude in town and county councils has been arising. Old councillors are improving or retiring ; and new ones are coming in who may be as yet immature, and only semi-articulate, but who are more awake to public and civic interests, to the condition of the people, and their need of improved housing. There are also signs that the body of their constituents in the working-class may soon be interesting themselves in these problems, and this for their own sake ; and they even offer a fresh approach to that rise of money-
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wages on which labour agitation and endeavour have too predominantly specialised. The L.C.C. and leading municipalities throughout the country have, for a good many years past, been increasingly leavened by a growing minority of such councillors. Effective local and civic leadership began, even a generation ago, to appear. Thus, though estimates necessarily differ as to the political careers of Mr Chamberlain or of Lord Rosebery, all parties have agreed in appreciating the first as a great and constructive mayor of Birmingham, and in praising the record of the latter as the first chairman of the L.C.C. Yet the most eminent and effective civic career of our time (we trust in the future typical, not exceptional as heretofore) has been that of a studious and strenuous Battersea engineer, who from lifelong local experience in his borough and larger responsibility for London, has risen to general civic legislation, as ruler over many cities. Mr Burns's Housing and Town Planning Act of 1910, and his vigilant ad- ministration of it during its initiative years, have at length placed both these movements upon a new level of effective progress, and of public interest accordingly. The municipalities are thus aroused and stimulated. Through the establishment of a Town- Planning Committee in each Corporation, a vast new field of usefulness is being opened for their constructive minds and efforts ; and though these members and staff are still for the most part but serving their apprenticeship, often late in life, in a new and complex
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art. their work is proceeding apace, and with many elements of promise. In fact, a new spirit is abroad in our towns, both in inquiry and in endeavour.
It is beyond us here to particularise adequately, and it may seem invidious to select : enough here if we merely cite as examples of how our cities are entering on a constructive phase — (1) the circular road system of Liverpool ; (2) the large town-planning schemes which are following upon the initial success of Harborne Garden Suburb with the recent extension of the municipal boundaries of Birmingham ; and, as greatest, (3) that immense endeavour towards co- ordination of the increasing labyrinth and ever- complicating maze of Greater London, for which Mr Burns has shepherded its innumerable local authorities, along with the L.C.C., to co-adjust their town-planning schemes, and needed roads, both radial and circumferential. The long-delayed town plan of London, and this at its vastest, is thus fairly in course of preparation, and it will be in broadly approximate draft before the new council-house is ready to receive it. The associated problems are all now coming up, as of open spaces on one hand, of railway development upon another. Here again it is encouraging to note that the Northern Junction Railway was in 1913 repulsed in four months' fight from drawing a reckless and widely destructive trench through the extending Hampstead Garden Suburb, and with further damage upon some of the best districts in North and West Lo ndon. Railway development is of course necessary ;
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but the two generations are now ending in which ignorant directors and ruthless engineers, with scarce an idea of town planning among them, have been overriding the vital interests of cities, and with them even their own. The railway system is no longer above the community, even in houses of parliament so largely dominated by railway interests as have been ours. Here surely is a message of hope to sister American cities, where Juggernaut still drives his cars through the streets !
American cities, as we have already recognised, are actively entering upon an era of civic progress ; and the transition from abstract and barren politics to con- crete and constructive civics has nowhere more clearly begun. Of American city planning a crowded chapter might here be written, and followed by others on the improvement of smaller towns, even of villages ; and on rural development accordingly, culminating in that conservation of national resources which is now at many points being assured. Of great designers like the Olmsteds and their best pupils, of their con- temporaries and rivals of this generation, as of the city development commissions and improvement trusts which have given them scope and means, it would be unpardonable, even in a general sketch like the present, to omit cordial appreciation ; and this not only of their actual work, but of its educative influence upon the Old World. From Olmsted's charming garden suburb of Brookline, which is the very jewel of Greater Boston, to the monumental
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magnificence of renewing Washington, we would fain reproduce plans and give due account, and similarly from Mr Burnham's imposing and comprehensive schemes for Chicago, as from Mr John Nolen's ably conceived schemes of " Replanning of Smaller Cities."
CF.NERAl. PLAN KliMl'DKUM : < >F HO \\OIU:
Fid. 42. — Parks and parkway girdle tor a small American city: Roanoke.
Of nature reserves, great and small, of noble parks and city park-rings, of parkways and boulevards, of people's gardens and children's playgrounds, much also should be shown and said. For examples of civic magnificence choice would be not a little embarrassing, since we must consider not only the great; and old world -cities, like Boston and New York, but provincial capitals, from Albany westwards and southwards ; while even what in this old country
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would seem but minor towns are planning to have " civic centres " of the best. Universities alone would overflow the most compact of chapters with an out- line bare at best ; and so on. In summary, then, we here abandon all attempt at summary : an entire volume, setting forth the " Civic Examples of America," is what is needed ; and this, it is to be hoped, some European city student and town planner may before long supply.
It is thus in no ungenerous spirit, but an altogether friendly one, that we reluctantly devote the little space which remains to the less favourable side of American progress. Yet it would be altogether unduly opti- mistic were we here to forget, as various groups of city improvers seem to do somewhat too readily, that neither town-halls nor civic centres, parks nor park- ways— beautiful, desirable, necessary, even urgent though these undoubtedly are — can abate the yet greater necessity and beauty, desirability and urgency of providing, more and more efficiently, for the homes of the people ; since these in great American towns, as in industrial England, are for the most part still but on a too paleotechnic level. But since it has been here impossible to do justice to the qualities of American towns, it is needful to leave to American writers the task of describing their defects. Mr Stead's well-intentioned criticisms of Chicago gave deep offence ; and this without his going fully into those defects of its housing and town planning which are at once a cause and consequence of social evils,
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and act and react in vicious circles with them, just as in great cities of Europe. Enough here if it be frankly suggested, that the optimism of progress- so long and strongly prevalent in the United States, and undeniably of so much more value to rapid material developments and to individual energies than is the tone of pessimism too common in the Old World — has yet been having its dis- astrous side, blinding the public to that still too paleotechnic progress on which we have insisted in earlier chapters. Such prolonged optimism has had in it a good deal of what biologists call a "survival in isolation "- —isolation from the older France which has meantime outlived the oratoric ecstasies of her political revolution, and from that older England which since Carlyle's and Ruskin's day has been increasingly outliving her orthodox political economy, with its mood of self- congratulation upon "our unparalleled material progress."
Ot' American housing, then, the little that can here be said, may best be but to give two or three references. First, to the pioneering work and works of its housing reformers, like Dr Elgin Gould and Mr Lawrence Veiller ; of its Settlement workers, of whom Jane Addams is but the foremost; of its charities organisers, like Dr Devine. Second, to the later and rapidly growing literature of City Surveys on lines similar to those of Mr Booth's London or Marr's Manchester, but with due local independence, and upon a more convenient and
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workable scale, between the copiousness of Booth's volumes and the brevity of Marr's.
The papers of recent Housing conferences, e.g., Cincinnati 1913, may also be referred to ; and in this last, as an excellent type, at once critical and constructive, we may cite the paper on " Garden Cities " by Mr George E. Hooker of the Chicago City Club, one of the first and most efficient of those rare guides of public opinion, in whom citizenship and journalism, and each at its best, unite. In this connection we may recall Mr Charles Ferguson's University Militant, and finally the chapter on " Civic Progress in America " in Mr Victor Branford's Interpretations and Forecasts, with its vivid insistence upon the steps of civic progress, from the paleotechnic slogan of " the City Big " to. the nascent neotechnic idealisms of " the City Beautiful," " the City Better," and "the City at its Best."
Much though our optimism as to the condition of the American (working) people may have been shaken down to its British level by periods of residence in New York, Chicago, and even Boston Settlements, by visits to Pittsburgh or St Louis, to Philadelphia or even to monumental Washington, hopefulness naturally renews itself in a Britisher when he turns to Canada. Surely in these new Canadian cities — of whose progress we hear so much, alike from themselves direct, and in unparalleled literature of land and shipping advertisement, as
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also at the centre of Empire, and even in those remotest vales and glens whose sturdiest sons are so largely emigrating thitherward — there, if anywhere, we must look for working homes of real comfort, of true prosperity. The prosperous i'arming home- stead is indeed fair to see ; and the uplift it expresses from British labourer to Canadian yeoman-farmer is one of the greatest of social achievements ; the more since the destruction of the English yeornan, of the Scots cottar, has so long seemed irreparable. No wonder, then, that this admirable prospect should send a new hope through our working world, and bring out its sons by weekly thousands from single ports with every spring. But what becomes of those —after all a great and necessarily ever-increasing majority — to whom the yeoman's estate and well- being and status remain unattainable ? Town life, of course, for the most part ; and so far, it may be, well : but at what level of town, on what plane of progress ? Still too much what they left at home, the paleotechnic ; and with its housing, at least at danger-points, trebly compressed — first by the willing- ness of the new colonist to " rough it a bit," so train- ing him to accept (and to maintain) conditions of toil and even imperfections of sanitation he and his women- folk would have complained of at home. Secondly, by construction, rendered costly, and this not simply by good wages, for that would not essentially delay com fort all round — but, as so often for housing elsewhere, by the high price of building capital,
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in its competition with other outlets. Thirdly, by the contagious frenzy of land and site speculation, which seems even to outrun the intensity of that mental, moral, and social disease even at its worst points in old Europe, but which we in Europe, with our innumerable high-dividend-paying Canadian Trust Companies are assiduously fomenting and exploiting in our turn. As with the United States, however, we may best leave the criticism of Canadian cities from the housing point of view to others ; in this case to the report of the man who most especially and completely combines the points of view of the experience of the workman, the builder, and the civic statesman — Mr Henry Vivian, M.P., of whose co-partnership achievements we have already spoken (pp. 138-9). What, then, is his report ? Compressing it as we must, and fairly may do, does it not sub- stantially coincide with that to which we came for our own cities (Chapter VI.), in their characteristic product, tendency, and line of paleotechnic evolu- tion— as in too many points attaining positive slum- dom, at others too largely on the way thither ?
Australia, with its remoteness, its dreaded desert- interior, its patriarchal wealth and pastoralism (not without Job-like risks of ruin), has not been attracting colonists in multitude, at any rate since its lures of gold were eclipsed by yet brighter ones in other lands ; and thus labour conditions in towns seem rising faster than in those of other new lands, whose con- gestion is more continuous and more severe. Yet
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how far have the political ambitions and constructive opportunities of its unprecedentedly successful and powerful Australian Labour Party as yet turned to the realities of life, as housers and town planners understand them ? Are we simply ignorant ; or are they, like their analogues at home for the most part, still largely playing at the old political game of party " outs and ins," in which barristers and financiers are everywhere the real experts, as at best occasionally scoring amateurs ? From the facts that the British Association's 1914 visit to Australia has included Town Planning as a prominent feature of its economic section's programme, and that a leading Australian, as well as British, town-planning organiser and ex- ponent, Mr C. C. Reade, with an expert colleague from the old country in Mr W. R. Davidge, have actively prepared the leading cities for this visit, there are good grounds for hoping that Housing and Town Planning may soon enter upon a new genera- tion of activity in Australian cities, and that — not contented with Canberra, however monumental a new Washington it may become — the old lay-out of spaciously combined city parks and building areas which are the glory and fame of Adelaide, may be revived as again an example throughout the Commonwealth, and beyond. Again, that the natural beauty of Sydney be preserved and developed ; and so on throughout other cities, great and small.
For the cities of South Africa from this distance,
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and with the insufficient knowledge such remoteness involves, the situation seems broadly similar to that of Australia. But in India it is largely different, and still more beyond clear estimate from this distance. New Delhi in its imperial way can but be a greater Canberra ; but the problems of the great regional capitals are also coming forward. Bombay, with its expanded dock-system has new population- growth to plan for : the authorities of Calcutta are at present studying the best utilisation of a sub- stantial sum of five millions or thereby, obtained by the capitalisation of an Improvement Tax (a method which may reward study elsewhere) ; and at least one able and suggestive scheme for the improvement of that great city, not forgetting the abatement of its congestion, has already appeared, that of Mr Richards' stately volume on The Conditions, Improve- ment and Town Planning of the City oj Calcutta and contiguous Area, a report by request of the Calcutta Improvement Trust. Interest in city con- ditions is also apparent in Madras; while to the cities of more than one of the feudatory princes, Mr Lanchester has of late given a fresh con- structive impulse, and this expressed with a wise conservatism, a respect for Indian architecture, craftsmanship, and ways of life.
Without entering unduly into imperial politics, it may here be recalled that city planning has ever been a part of imperial policy. But this is not permanently limited to the expression of the powers
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and glories of the ruler or the state, as on the whole from imperial Rome to modern Paris or Berlin, and now from Whitehall to new Delhi. The people, in all cities alike, must increasingly ask, with homely directness, " Where and when are we to come in ? " At home we see the answers beginning to emerge, and housing — neotechnic instead of paleotechnic — as one great part of it. But this involves a far more neotechnic order of civilisation generally, urban and rust ic alike, with bettered agriculture and civil engineering ; and further, an urban civilisation far more hygienic and more finely skilled, better organ- ised in its mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing industries, in its commercial and financial order, in its education and culture, its administration and progress. What if this broad conception of general social evolution — as from a paleotechnic to a neotechnic order of society, through development and transformation or replacement of our present methods of industrialism, transports, and commerce, with corresponding advance of and change in science and education, in finance and government correspond- ingly— be also broadly applicable to the Indian Empire as well ? This question would of course lead us far, yet in outline it may be simply stated. The beginnings of our Indian Empire were as a mercantile com pany ; of which the directors and clerks naturally evolved into an administration, and their factory guards into an army ; so that their transformation a
couple of generations ago into an imperial adminis-
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tration and army was in principle natural enough, however catastrophic at the moment, and in detail. The impartial and non-commercial outlooks of these have obvious advantages. Yet as time has gone on this simple governmental structure, of traditional Civil Service and standing army, has been increasingly supplemented. Notably, for instance, by educational machinery, and still more in technical directions. Hence the railway and the road engineer, the forest conservator, even the botanic gardener ; then too the geological surveyor, and at length and above all from the peasants' point of view, and therefore increasingly the statesman's — the irrigator, with his substantial recovery of the ancient past. The corresponding advance of agriculture, comparable not only to the renewal of Ireland, but this, in population and in area, for whole Irelands by the dozen, is plainly approaching; and with this a renewal of education, and on lines widely different from that mingled bureaucracy of cram, pseudo-classical and pseudo- utilitarian, of which the supremacy in India, as at home, is happily at length abating. With all these constructive changes must naturally come an increas- ing well-being, both rustic and urban ; and its ex- pression in bettered homes and villages and towns, in improving cities, and these from below and within, as well as from above and from without.
Here, then, is the field for a further and fuller co-operation of East and West, one richer in mutual service than all the interchanges of John Company,
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greater and stronger because more constructive than any preceding expressions of regional and civic well- being, or even of imperial unity, in prosperity and peace.
In every way, then, and throughout the Dominions and Empire, as in the United States or at home, civic progress is beginning ; while in this, though the housing movement be of central importance, it again is but part of that general progress which it is our essential theme to insist upon — from the present predominantly paleotechnic civilisation - - variously compounded in each place and phase of mechanical, militaristic, and monetary factors — towards a higher neotechnic phase, characterised by finer industries and arts, by geotechnic and hygienic endeavour, by rustic and urban improvement ; and all involved with a corresponding rise of social and individual ideals and practice accordingly. ,»v
We return thus to our own country. Encourag- ing as are all these advances of Housing and Town Planning as compared with their earlier years, such progress still needs to be greatly accelerated, in view of the cities and populations to be reached. It is satisfactory to know that many schemes are even now before the Local Government Board, and that far more are in preparation : but even with all these, and the curve of uprise which they indicate, further acceleration is needed. Hence — aided alike by success- ful examples, as of rural housing in Ireland, and by bitterness of need, as in the recently realised condition
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of housing in Dublin — the movements of Housing and Town Planning begin increasingly to engage the attention of Parliament, between times of more dramatic — or more trivial — excitements. These associated questions are thus maturing towards measures accordingly, and this among the active and socially awakening minds in every party. Witness the Housing Bill brought forward in 1914 by Opposition members (significantly by younger ones), and by the corresponding promises of the Government not to rest content with criticisms of this in detail, but to grapple with its problems before long, and comprehensively. We shall not enter here into the differences among the great parties ; nor yet simply rest content with the substantial measure of agree- ment they show : but as we began by broadly and generally outlining the great transition from a lower to a higher industrial and social economy, so let us continue. Hence, after concluding this chapter with its sketch of progress as yet attained, we may best apply our remaining space to the consideration of the educative resources of the movement, its Town Planning and Civic Exhibitions especially; and, above all, towards outlining these continued advances of social inquiry and survey, which are still needed in every community, great and small. For without such advances of fuller and better diagnosis before treat- ment, municipal effort in detail, and parliamentary legislation in general, must remain in the immediate future too much as they have been in the past — far less
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wisely conservative, less progressively liberal, and less constructively social and vital than they both ere long may be. Can we but gain the needful civic and regional knowledge and insight, and the practical sym- pathy and corresponding skill which these develop, a new advance of our cities will have begun indeed, and a new uplift of civilisation may be well-nigh assured.
CHAPTER XII
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS
Exhibitions in their origins, medieval, renaissance, and industrial. Initi- ative of London and rise of Paris Exhibitions : most important and fruitful of the initiatives and outcomes of these has been the Civic Exhibition. Examples and advance of this in German cities.
Retrospect and criticism of London Town Planning Exhibition of 1910. Rise of Cities and Town Planning Exhibition : its record and aims. Outline of its plan at Ghent.
FIRST a word on exhibitions in general. In the Middle Ages each craft-guild had its exhibition of literal " master-pieces," contributed by skilled journey- men, aspirants to the rank of mastership ; and so it seems to have been for a time at the Renaissance, with its advance of many arts into a new and brief perfection. Picture exhibitions have long been pursuing the same purposes of self-expression and mastery, beyond their simply commercial one; and soon after the clear advent of the Industrial Age, general exhibitions began to take form ; in Paris, it is said, as early as 1793. A generation later came the first proposal of an international exhibition of industrial progress. It is worth noting that this fitly came from the discoverer of those early imple- ments and remains in the caverns of Dordogne which
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proved to Lyell and his reluctant contemporaries the vast antiquity of man ; for M. Boucher de Perthes was a true student of the past ; no mere antiquary and collector, but a thoughtful inquirer into the pro- gressive control by man of his environment, and thus interested in all that the advance of his appliances might signify in that remote past, or again in his own scarcely less marvellously evolving present. Here in fact he had reached a true, a central, a continuous epic of humanity — "Tools and the man I sing!" But the period of the Industrial Age, full enough in enthusiasm and hope to carry out such a dream into deed, could only arrive twenty or more years later, when, to the comparatively familiar achievements of the steam-engine, of the spinning-jenny and the loom, had been added the impressive magic of railway and telegraph, as fully renewing the wonders of the world. Thus appeared the great International Exhibition of 1851, so that its Crystal Palace remains to this day, and has been rightly preserved from recent danger of destruction, as the monument of not only the material uplift, but the spiritual culmination of the paleotechnic order at its very highest. After this our British manufactures, despite obvious elements of superiority, found themselves, however, in too many respects distanced by those of more incipiently neotechnic peoples and cities — hence Paris Exhibitions increasingly assumed predominance for the next half-century, culminating in 1900. This superiority was not a little aided by the intelligent
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classification and comparison, as museums of industry, introduced by their organiser in 1856 and '67, the social economist Frederic Le Play, whose various in- fluences on sociology and social betterment are alike still spreading ; but their super-eminent position was assured by the moral and social uplift after 1870-71, with its artistic, technical, and scientific productivity, which has repeated, and in its own way even sur- passed, that of Germany after 1809. General ex- hibitions have also been continued in many countries, as notably in the United States: witness especially the architectural impressiveness of the Chicago Exhibition of 1892 towards arousing that concept of " the City Beautiful," which has since been working wonders ; or, again, the ambitious " Panama Exhibi- tion " at San Francisco to commemorate the opening of the great canal.
Looking back over the central series of Paris Exhibitions (1878, '89, 1900), we may now ask, What was their most significant and fertile exhibit, the real clou of each exhibition ? For the first, it seemed the Trocadero Palace ; in the next the world-wonder was the Eiffel Tower, since sky-scrapers as yet were not ; and, for the third, surely the magnificent " Rue des Nations," unparalleled union as it was of national self-expressions in international amity. After all, the highest portent and most enduring influence has proved to be the appearance in each exhibition, and on an ever-increasing scale, of a " Pavilion of the City of Paris/' For here was the most organised of all
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great modern cities becoming increasingly conscious of its own collective life, and striving to express and advance this to and through its people by vivid and graphic methods of every kind. With this also we may take the growing development of a section of new type, instituted by Le Play in 1867, that of Social Economy and Industrial Welfare. Here, then, we had the advent of a new type — the Civic Exhibi- tion— which was henceforth increasingly destined to replace the older exhibition of technical appliances and details, of products and even masterpieces, as yet but aggregated for rivalry or gain, and not yet integrated and inter-organised towards social well- being and civic use.
Yet French cities have still remained under the crushing inhibition of their over-centralising and money-exporting metropolis ; while German cities have been in course of unprecedented expansion ; hence this fertile idea of the Civic Exhibition has since 1900 been finding its main development and expression north of the Rhine. Thus Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Leipzig, Diisseldorf, and other cities have each had its own civic exhibition, and always of value and interest, local and comparative, or both. And generally with even popular success. True, the large " Building Trades' Exhibition " of Leipzig in 1913 had the extraneous and imperial aid of a battle centenary ; but the modest and excellent " Old and New Cologne " of the same year not only ran on its own merits for six months, but has been repeated for
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1914, with additional features contributed by the " Werkbund," an association answering to our own " Arts and Crafts." This, we may here note, under the auspices of the new and enlightened Board of Trade Exhibitions Department, has at length, in Ghent in 1913, removed the paleotechnic reproach too frequently associated with our past appearances in exhibitions, and won pre-eminence ; pre-eminence indeed so frankly and internationally recognised as to obtain an unprecedented appreciation and compliment, that of invitation to repeat its architecturally arranged as well as beautiful display in the galleries of the Louvre. In such ways the revolution in exhibitions is becoming complete ; for instead of mere individual agglomerates, mere heterogeneous products, coarse and fine, we have increasingly the conception of civic life influencing architecture, and this marshalling arts and crafts, and with no small enhancement of individual effect and significance accordingly.
Though the need of Civic Exhibitions 4n British towns has for many years past been urged, neither the example of Paris nor the influence of group and individual endeavours at home could accomplish their effective beginning, until at home the movement of garden cities and town planning had made itself widely felt — and with this the example of Germany was realised, and the interest in American city im- provement also awakened — and above all, until the wide discussion of Mr Burns's Town Planning Bill,
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and its successful passage as an Act, gave concrete- ness and urgency to the movement. True, the Sociological Society had at times since its foundation in 1 904, discussed the expediency of promoting a Civic and Town Planning Exhibition, and of bringing the idea before other societies — architectural, geograph- ical, statistical, etc. Its representations to the Guild- hall Town Planning Conference of 1907 did indeed result in the formation of a " Cities Survey Com- mittee " among their members ; and soon afterwards among its own was formed " a Cities Committee, to promote the Survey and Investigation of Cities, and the study of Civics," and this " in the first place by promoting Civic Exhibitions." Such success as these attempts obtained, though real, was chiefly indirect ; and this by help of their leading architectural members, more than their strictly sociological ones, for whom civics is still lacking in canonicity, as no longer, since Aristotle, an academic subject. It is, moreover, disturbing to the usual alternation of approved ^and time-honoured sociological inquiries ; as, on one hand, philosophic contemplations of Society " in the abstract, or at most of " societies " not too concrete ; and, on the other, the discussion of anthropological data, sometimes vital enough, but generally belonging to societies too primitive to have attained the civic stage at all. In 1910, however, an effective start of the Exhibition movement was made in London. Co-operation was organised between the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Royal
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Academy ; and leading architects, town planners, and active associations came forward, and were cordially aided from the Continent and America. Thus a large and instructive exhibition was got together, and a well-attended Conference was held, under the active and encouraging presidency of Mr Burns ; the whole resulting not merely in a read- able and well-illustrated volume, but — thanks to the real merit of the exhibition and the value of its dis- cussions, aided by a particularly "good press"— in a marked advance of public opinion and interest thenceforward.
For the main significance and lessons of this London Town Planning Exhibition of 1910, the writer may here condense his report upon it to the Sociological Society ; since its essential criticisms of much contemporary town planning remain valid ; while its practical suggestion has since been bearing fruit.
This exhibition will be remembered as a date and landmark in our social progress. Avowedly only a beginning, it expresses a great step beyond traditional politics and beyond current sociology also ; to a more direct and realistic mode of thought, and to a correspondingly more direct and practical form of action. For here we have done with arguments concerning "the Individual and the State," and we know nothing of parties and elections, of votes or the demand for them. We have got beyond the abstract sociology of the schools — Positivist, Socialist,
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or other — with their vague discussion of " Society " and its " Members," since we have reached the definite conception in which all these schools have been lacking — that of Cities and Citizens. Thus our corporate government, and our individual energies, find opening before them no mere remote and deputed activities, but a vast yet definite field of observation and action ; and these capable of ex- pression more vivid, of notation more definite, than even speech or writing ; to wit, the surveyor's maps and relief models, the architect's plans. Towards this extension and renascence of the city, this enlarging life-scope of the citizen, our Town Planning Exhibition and its Congress appear, as the appropriate educative agencies of citizenship. Throughout the length and breadth of the land these are beginning to arouse city and citizen from their long torpor ; and to bring a new concreteness, a fresh possibility of research and discovery to the still half-metaphysical social sciences ; and they are appealing to the press and through it to politicians of all parties, to women of all camps.
Such an exhibition should be visited and studied by every responsible and thinking citizen ; yet not uncritically. An almost unreserved welcome may indeed be given to the plans and projects of garden suburbs and garden villages ; as notably also to various specific plans and researches, such as those of hygienic orientation, i.e. of buildings to light, houses to sunshine. More open to criticism are the
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various designs for the development and reorganisa- tion of great cities : Paris, Berlin, Chicago especially. For under the dark austereness of some designs or the meretricious beauty of others, one main impression appears. All these agree far too much in expressing too little but the imperial, the Cgesarist, type of city ; which is essentially the same whether it be imitated from the Paris of Louis XIV. or of Napoleon I., or from the correspondingly magnificent designs of Washington : it is not really original or recent. The strategic boulevards of Haussmann and Napoleon III., the pompous perspectives and parade-grounds of Berlin, reappear with too little of essential change of spirit in the proposed transformation of Chicago. We may so far call a Garden Suburb a " Demopolis " ; but do not these new cities threaten one and all to become each a new " Tyrannopolis," and this however benevolent in intention or republican in name or design : for, despite all their magnificence of public buildings, each is still too much without a true Acro- polis. The great city is not that which shows the palace of government at the origin and climax of every radiating avenue : the true city — small or great, whatever its style of architecture or plan, be this like Rothenburg or like Florence— is that of a burgher people, governing themselves from their own town- hall and yet expressing also the spiritual ideals which govern their lives, as once in ancient acropolis or again in medieval church or cathedral : and we cannot feel that the designers of any of these great
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plans have as yet sought new forms for the ideals which life is ever seeking.
In our present phase, town-planning schemes are apt to be one-sided, at any rate too few-sided. One is all for communications, another for industrial developments. Others are more healthily domestic in character, with provision for parks and gardens ; even, by rare hap, for playgrounds, that prime necessity of civic survival : but too many reiterate that pompous imperial art, which has changed so little from the taste of the decadent Caesars of the past to that of their representatives in the present. Such plans mingle both exaggerations and omissions with their efficiency: in their too exclusive devotion to material interests they dramatically present the very converse of those old Spanish and Spanish- American cities, which seem almost composed of churches and monasteries.
To avoid such exaggeration, yet incompleteness, what is the remedy ? Clearly it awaits the advance of our incipient study of cities. For each and every city we need a systematic survey, of its development and origins, its history and its present. This survey is required not merely for material buildings, but also for the city's life and its institutions, for of these the builded city is but the external shell. Hence the suggestiveness of the partial survey of Edinburgh, one of the most typical of cities, especially as rearranged in completer form in later exhibitions, with surveys of other cities, great and small, British and Continental.
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Here is a vast field of social inquiry, inviting the co-operation of specialists of all kinds ; on the one side this should be organised by scientific societies, and above all the Sociological, next doubtless by schools and universities ; but as soon as may be it should be undertaken by the citizens themselves, aided by their municipal representatives and officials, and housed by their museums and libraries. We have already a Geological Survey, and are beginning those of Agricultural Development and Forestry ; but yet more urgent and more vital is the need of City Surveys. These are at once the material and the starting-point for the Civic and Town Planning Exhibition, which will soon become as familiar an incident of the city's life as is at present its exhibition of paintings.
Organisers and students of this exhibition could not but feel that its rapidly accumulated collections, despite their value and suggestiveness, had been at once too heterogeneous and too incomplete ; and the more orderly endeavour above suggested was resolved upon. From the " Survey of Edinburgh," for many years in progress at the Outlook Tower, a selection had been made and developmentally arranged ; so that here, more than elsewhere before, the essential conditions and phases of a city's historic past were shown as determining its qualities and defects in the present. Past and present were also shown as pre- senting the problems of the city's opening future,
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and as conditioning their treatment also. This exhibit was therefore felt to present a needed sug- gestion, and even nucleus for a further exhibition of smaller but more typical and systematic character. Hence, with the help of a small committee, repre- sentative both of town-planning practice and of civic and sociological studies, the new " Cities and Town Planning Exhibition" took form at Crosby Hall during the following winter, and was launched with a vigorous appeal by Mr Burns, as its president, for education on the university level in town planning and in civics together ; and a recommendation of the exhibition as an itinerant agency to London boroughs and other cities.
The principle of this new exhibition was no longer simply that of seeking and accepting examples of good contemporary work as it comes, important though this always must be. It involved an ordered design ; that of presenting a type-selection of housing and town-planning schemes of suggestive character towards city development ; and further of working towards the comparative presentment and study of the evolution of cities — historic, actual, and possible. Of this great process, the architecture of a city is but the changing expression, and its plan but the record, say rather the palimpsest. Hence this new exhibition was on one hand greatly reduced in scale, yet on the other as greatly increased in complexity. From the first it has continued the sociological and
civic inquiries which had underlain its beginnings in
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Edinburgh, and of which some of the methods and results had been outlined in papers at the Sociological Society, etc., in previous years, and which had also been in progress for some time in beginnings of a " Civics Laboratory," temporarily housed at the Uni- versity of London.
The exhibition was next invited by the Corpora- tion of Edinburgh, to whom the extensive galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy were granted for the purpose. The exhibition was opened by Lord Pent- land, then Minister for Scotland, and by the Lord Provost, each delivering an address. Success far ex- ceeded anticipation. It was visited during its three weeks by 17,000 persons, including workmen in the evenings and school-classes in the forenoons. Thence it was invited to Dublin, as part of a general exhi- bition organised by the Women's Health Association of Ireland, from which it went to Belfast to co- operate with the Sanitary Association's meeting, under the auspices of the Corporation. Through the active interest of the Viceroy and of the Countess of Aberdeen, who had also opened and aided these exhibitions, a further small exhibition was held at Dublin, in conjunction with the meeting of the Institute of Public Health, at Trinity College. This exhibition was devoted to initiating the survey of Dublin and of Irish towns, and to examples bearing on their possible improvement. The Housing and Town Planning Association of Ireland was here con- stituted, and has since entered upon an active career ;
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while the Irish National Museum, first among great public collections, initiated a Department of Cities and Town Planning.
With further growth the exhibition formed the chief element of the " Exposition des Villes," which was a feature of the Ghent International Exhibition of 1913 ; and in conjunction with which was held the first international " Congres des Villes," with its members drawn from many cities — Aberdeen to Bucharest, Stockholm to Naples, indeed from San Francisco to Calcutta, — and which was of interest in both its sections, of Town Planning, and of City Life and Administration.
At this stage we may set forth the scheme and aims of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition as it appeared in more developed (though still too incomplete) form at Ghent in 1913, and state these essentially as they were presented to the members of the Congress of Cities, and at times to later groups of visitors.
Let the reader think of this big International Exhibition as in an historic city anxious to express and reaffirm itself, and this in various ways. First as the provincial capital it has always been, and also the regional capital of the Flemish population of Belgium, in contradistinction to Brussels as the Wallon and French-speaking culture-capital ; and further, as the world-city it long was — for in the Middle Ages, and at the beginning of the Renaissance, it was largely in advance of London and Paris alike, as Charles V.'s
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famous boast — " Je mettrais tout Paris dans mon Gand " — still reminds an incredulous modern world. It was thus a natural and fitting place for civic sociol- ogists to be called on (or at any rate allowed) to make a Congress of Cities — which claims to be the world's first International one — and with these, a Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, the beginnings of a Summer School of Civics and Citizenship, and all amid civic festivals, old and new. Nor was the movement inspiring the exhibition solely one of civic and regional patriotism. Nationally, it represented the post-Leopoldian regime, determined to purify the national and civic life from the defects and vices of the past reign ; and, internationally, a keen conscious- ness of the immense importance and growing signifi- cance of Belgium as a Key-stone State, whose very material and military weakness, in the midst of great armed Powers, gives her an advantage of common appeal to them all — an appeal impossible to any one of these, through their respective jealousies.
Here, then, was the situation — one eminently favourable for civics, as well as suitable for town planning ; and thus befitting our united " Cities and Town Planning Exhibition " to the full.
A disadvantage of the town-planning movement, as yet, is that people think it merely or mainly suburban, and architectural at best. But its needed renewal of home life and home conditions throughout the industrial world is (and will be) delayed — our
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admirable, but comparatively few, garden suburbs and occasional central improvements notwithstanding — until the larger civic movement, now plainly nascent, and in well-nigh every land, has gathered strength, and become more clearly intelligible and purposive throughout the world.
That which at present makes the delay and difficulty of the civic movement will become its strength and appeal in the long run. For at present the historian is in the library, in the museum, or the university — in the past anyhow. The builder and architect are in the active present, but in the present too much alone. The thinker is too often a dreamer, occupied with the future indeed, but a future which to others seems too remote for practical purposes. But a Congress of Cities, a Cities and Town Planning j Exhibition, stand for utilising all three types of man and \ mind. These too seldom meet, and therefore shrink from each other ; but such programmes reconcile and bring together not a few of the best of them. Hence, when each of our previous exhibitions has closed, after its two or three weeks in any great city, it has been amid a civic atmosphere notably modified in this way. The antiquarian lover of his city's Past, whose treasures we have brought before his fellow- citizens, admits an awakening to the Present, and to this as an opening Future. So too the " practical man," hitherto absorbed in the present, confesses he has come to see more of his city's roots in the past, of liis responsibilities to his successors. Above all,
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the exhibition helps some of the best minds of each city to distinguish, in the past, its Heritage (respect for which makes the Conservative at his moral best) from its Burden (revolt from which makes the Radical and the Revolutionary at his moral best). It thus does something towards helping both parties in their quest of a social policy. Of all this our exhibits of old towns, like Edinburgh and Chelsea, with old buildings conserved and yet renewed to vital uses, are a beginning and a symbol.
In such ways, too, our exhibition at times even reaches the " utopist " and the " crank," for it suggests applying the idealism of the one, the in- ventive energy of the other, to the needs of the present ; and these also stir up the " practical man," who does not wish to be left behind, to needs and opportunities.
In each city the Town Planning Exhibition has effected more or less of this education of public opinion, and towards practical results. Sometimes this im- pulse is a diffused one, as in Edinburgh, with results manifold, but not easy separately to trace. Sometimes there are immediate definite results to which we can point, as in Dublin : e.g., formation of a " Cities and Town Planning Department" of theNational Museum; formation of a " Town Planning Association of Ireland " ; with initiatives of improvement for Dublin itself, and in 1914 a Civic Exhibition on a larger scale than heretofore in the English - speaking world, with Competition for a General Town-Plan
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of Dublin, involving housing and metropolitan developments alike.
After these preliminary explanations it is time to come to the exhibition itself, conveniently as it was at Ghent ; yet let us first describe its setting within what was in various respects one of the best thought- out and most vitally executed International Exhibi- tions since that of Paris in 1900, and of the most distinctly civic character. First the " Exposition de la Ville de Paris" deserves a visit, both on its own merits and in recognition of its repeated initiative in the education of other cities for more than a genera- tion past. Next must be mentioned its " Square Communal," or " Place des Quatre Grandes Villes," with its four noble and characteristic civic palaces, erected by Ghent, Antwerp, Liege, and Brussels respectively. Each was something of its own Civic Museum of the Past and Exhibition of the Present, while each, too. had some suggestion for the Future. Yet each of these was arranged — or unarranged — in its own way ; and though the general effect was rich in artistic and historic interest, even of varied practical and social suggestion, any common historic or scientific method was lacking to unite the four. Thus the study of each was rendered more difficult ; and their detailed comparison impossible. In fact, while the architecture and the general conception of these buildings was a great and encouraging evidence of the return of civic life and interest, their lack of
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unity in detail illustrated the backwardness of civics also. Here, however, came in the use of our Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. This occupied a large gallery beside the Palace of Brussels, and open- ing into that of Germany ; it not only brought exhibits from many cities, but these better arranged from quite a number of distinctive points of view— the geographer's and the historian's, the statistician's as well as the sociologist's. For this exhibition has made a beginning, as yet the most clear and definite beginning, of the comparative study of cities ; each shown like a living being, in constant relation to its environment ; and with the advantages of this, its limitations too. Like the living being it is, a city reacts upon its environment, and in ever-widening circles. It may transcend its limitations, here economically and there educationally ; or, first in thought and next in deed. Hence its character and aspect in each age; hence its varied eminence and influence accordingly ; until once more it changes, with circumstances or with the times, outwardly, inwardly, or both. At one time it may conspicuously advance, at another show more of arrest and decay, poverty and disease, vice and crime. All these are modified by war and peace, and these have corre- spondingly varied consequences and reactions, now of deterioration, or again of renewal.
In such historic survey there is no neglect of town planning ; though in each city we visit the alderman, the borough engineer, the anxious reformer too, may
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sometimes fear this as he enters. Yet when he gives a second look, and gets as far as the gallery of Garden Suburbs, or that of Central Improvements, he sees tha t these are typical ones, naturally arranged ; intelligible and helpful accordingly. He comes to recognise how the garden suburb and the central improvement, in which he may have been interested, are related ; and how they gain completeness and value from each other, and from his city's past. Each garden suburb is not merely an escape from the noxious squalor of the merely Industrial Age, or from the dreariness of the merely commercial one, to healthier individual lives, to brighter family existences : these are growing together, before long to form an expanding ring, of a healthier city in the future. So with the central improvements also : when rightly managed these preserve the best traditions of the city's past, yet purged of its decay, its active sources of continued evils. In some cities, and these often the most historic and influential (Rome and Paris above all), the central changes have often been too violent and too costly, casting out good with evil. Other cities — too numerous for mention — as plainly remain conservative in the worst sense, too tolerant of evils, ancient and modern, which are blocking the light of better days, past and to come.
Our illustrations of many cities are thus not simply for historic interest and interpretation, but for practical guidance. Whatever the student of cities can observe and interpret, foresee and suggest, the active citizen
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will not be long to devise and to apply. Yet " we learn by living " ; the student of medicine must go to the bedside as well as to dissecting-room and study before he really understands the working of the human frame ; and likewise with the student of cities ; he must work in and for his city, were it but to investi- gate it more clearly. Still, in medicine and public health, it is found best to let diagnosis precede treat- ment, and not, as with the would-be " practical man " so much hitherto, to adopt the best advertised panacea of treatment, before any diagnosis worth the name. So it is with cities ; the rival panaceas of their party politicians have too long been delaying the surveys and diagnoses of the civic sociologist.
The " Survey of Cities," which we thus reach, is a main feature and purpose of our exhibition. This survey must take in all aspects, contemporary as well as historic. It must be geographic and economic, anthropological and historical, demographic and eugenic, and so on : above all, it aims towards the reunion of all these studies, in terms of social science, as " Civics." This youngest branch of science, as yet but a little-noticed bud upon the ever- spreading tree of knowledge, may before long be recognised as one of the most fruitful of all. Its legitimacy and its interest are still often unrecognised by the sociologist, himself too abstract, or merely anthropological or racial, for lack of civics. This too general thinker upon human affairs has for some time been seeing that between his long favourite extremes of Individual
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and State, there lies the Family ; but here the City is shown to mould the individual (it may be even more strongly), and — not merely as governing metrop- olis— to dominate the State. So far we see to-day ; hence our civic observations, speculations, and con- troversies, our emerging theories — in a word, the rebirth of sociology, as above all the Science of Cities. But as this new or renewed science grows clearer, and its results begin to be made plain, as already in some measure in our exhibition, it begins to appeal to the citizen, and this not only to the thoughtful individual here and there, but to thousands. It is worth noting that these thousands largely belong to classes hitherto not much occupied with municipal politics. The appeal of civics seems as yet rather to highly-skilled workmen and women, to teachers and artists, and to the young rather than to the fixed and old. To the conventional and apathetic minds, still too common in municipal government and administration, as in the larger national machinery, this new fermentation of thought seems of little practical importance, since not appreciable at the polls, not yet formulated into definite programmes. Yet the municipal statesman, who is appearing or preparing in many quarters, must soon organise and voice this deeply changing constituency.
The citizen already comes into contact with science after science : witness Engineering in its many brarches, of which but the latest is Electricity; witness Public Health, in no few ramifications.
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Education likewise, and at all its levels, from Kinder- garten to Polytechnic and University, has been coming more and more within the civic view. Economics and Law, older interests still, are now changing and developing ones. Housing, though an old story, is becoming transformed, by conjunction with Town Planning. At this stage the City becomes again reviewed as a whole, as he who understands a town- plan sees all the town as from an aeroplane. All our activities — industrial and commercial, hygienic and educational, legal and political, cultural, and what not — become seen in relation to one another, as so many aspects and analyses of the city's life. To make this life more healthy and more effective, the unrelated individual activities with which we have been too long content are found insufficient ; we need fuller co-ordination and harmony of them, like that of the instruments of the orchestra, of the actors in the drama. We expect this of soldiers in the field, of workers and organisers in the factory, of assistants and partners in the business. Is it not for lack of this orchestration, of this harmonious organisation, upon the larger civic stage which our town-plans so clearly reveal, that our cities, full of detailed efficiencies of many kinds, are still so far from satisfying us as collectively efficient ? The time, then, is ripe ; the place is every city ; each needs its Civic Survey and Exhibition, its Civic Study and Laboratory. Its municipal departments have elements of all these ; and these increasingly, even consciously — witness the
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four Civic Palaces above referred to. Local conscious- ness diffuses and intensifies ; it also widens into com- parison of city with city. Thus, in fact, appear the methods of a Science of Cities — that our cities should be individually surveyed, scientifically compared ; as their architecture long has been — cathedral with cathedral, style with style.
Hence our Cities and Town Planning Exhibition (despite incompletenesses on every hand, of which its workers are not less conscious than can be their most critical visitors) boldly raises the theme of this needed Science of Cities. Its surveys are descriptive — fragments of a " Politography " ; but it is also struggling to be interpretative — that is, towards becoming a true " Polito/ogz/." Of the bearing of civics on the social sciences, from economics in particular to sociology in general, we attempt some graphic outlines. Of its practical bearings and applica- tions— towards improvements, towards revivified cities, suburban or central — indications are on our walls. It is time briefly to indicate the arrangement of these civic galleries, the more since at Ghent it was possible to develop this more comprehensively and clearly than in previous smaller and less spaciously housed exhibitions.
To present an adequate vision of cities, past, present, and future, every city would need its own gallery, even palace, to correspond with the above-mentioned Belgian four, and these upon an extended scale.
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We are in the day of small beginnings. Cinemas are already showing us the way : the city's reference library and museum are seldom without some suggestions for us ; and our exhibition gathers as it goes. Our galleries of maps and plans, elevations and perspectives, pictures and models, are stretching towards a kilometre of wall-length, and compressed by selection when necessary. Arrangement is no easy problem, since we are not simply exhibiting town-plans, but aiming towards the indication, in part even the elaboration, of a Science of Cities: hence the need of selecting types, as clear and illustra- tive as may be, amid the mingled wealth and poverty of available materials. Our description henceforward may be followed upon the accompanying plan (page 271).
First of all, our visitor must be made to feel, and this strongly, the profusion and the confusion of the subject. Hence our Entrance Hall is hung, like a private study or corridor, with a medley of things new and old, of pictures, plans, and views, archi- tectural or civic, each interesting, but without obvious relation or association to any mind except the owner's. From this opening presentment of the confused beginnings of interest in the subject, it will be noticed on the accompanying plan that we may enter the gallery of " Modern Civic Administration " without further studies on the right hand, as the manner of our city fathers has been: hence this has but little
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systematic arrangement, and is mostly alphabetical at best ! What is the usual alternative to this rough and ready education of the practical man ? That of the educationalist hitherto, and of the architect usually also, has been to go forward, into the room of Classic Cities. Here, then, are Athens and Rome above all, with some illustration of the glory of the one, the grandeur of the other ; and next of Hellenic and Roman influences throughout history and civilisation, as in Constantinople. To these are added indications of Babylon, of Jerusalem, and other distinctive and influential cities of the past.
From this classic gallery not only the scholarly student and architect, but the public they have so long been guiding for good and ill, readily pass on into the next gallery, devoted to " Towns and Cities of the Renaissance." This has examples of initiative historic buildings, and culminating masterpieces of later developments and deteriorations. It includes indications of the system of education and life, especially as architecturally expressed, which these have transmitted to the present.
Among these renaissance cities a few have most conspicuously survived in the struggle for existence, through innumerable crises of war and changefulness of peace. These are now the Great Capitals of Europe ; with which are naturally shown cities con- spicuously derived from them, at this or that period
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—e.g., Spanish American (especially from Madrid, at the Renaissance), Washington (especially from Paris, at the close of the eighteenth century). Hence a larger gallery, mainly devoted to the " Great Capitals."
The exaltation of their day of undisputed pre- eminence has here to be brought out ; first through the centralisation due to the wars of generations ; next through the rise of railways and telegraph systems, and the administrative and economic con- centrations to which these give rise ; and, yet more lately and fully, through that intensification of imperial powers and claims of which every great European metropolis gives increasing example. How such imperial considerations have determined the town planning of Berlin in our day, as that of Paris by Haussmann a generation before, are but salient examples of a process manifest everywhere, from Rome or Vienna to Washington, conspicuously now in London, witness Kings way and Whitehall.
Yet when all these supremacies of the Great Capitals are expressed, and even emphasised to the fullest metropolitan satisfaction, there is another process at work, little though the megalopolitan mind yet recognises it. Three or two generations ago, and less, these great metropolitan cities were alone com- pletely organised with all the apparatus and resources of the complete civilisation of their time. In some respects this is still true. There is only one Louvre, one British Museum, one Smithsonian ; just as only
one War Office for each great country. Still, even
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war to-day is segregating, decentralising : much more has industry been working out its own strategic points, though finance may still for a time hesitate to follow it. Culture ever refuses to be completely concen- trated ; nor can the ultramontane ascendancy of Rome be repeated. As even the culture-supremacy of Paris was disputed in the Middle Ages by the rise of universities in every land, so again the supremacy of Paris or Oxford to-day in their own countries ; as renewed universities like Montpellier, and new ones like Liverpool, are increasingly bearing witness.
Every considerable city, in short, seeks to complete itself. It no longer contentedly accepts provincial inferiority ; it finds itself with the means, and in- creasingly with the will, to develop its own civilisation within and not merely draw it from without. Thus Glasgow is not content simply to derive its livelihood from its own characteristic activities, while taking its ideas from Edinburgh, as in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At the close of that century it stamped its utilitarian philosophy and practice upon the world by producing the characteristic economic thinker in Adam Smith, to match the initiative industrial worker in James Watt. And though till after the middle of the nineteenth century Glasgow took her art from the London Royal Academy or its minor Scottish sister at Edinburgh, her awakening to the best French painting, her contacts with that of the Netherlands have since deeply fertilised her own creative sources ; so that to be a simple " member of
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the Glasgow School" has become a better recom- mendation to the world's galleries than to be an academician of London and Edinburgh put together. Similarly the most vital and progressive university of Great Britain, in the last half-generation, has not been Cambridge, London, or even Manchester, but Liverpool.
Of any fuller civic awakenings, beyond such after all partial developments, examples are naturally few. One, as yet little realised, may be cited here, as ex- hibited at Ghent : the model (fig. 44) which illustrates the rise of Cardiff, from that mere export-centre of the South Wales coalfield which London still thinks it, to deliberate design as a regional metropolis ; in fact, as the fourth national capital of the British Isles ; and one determined to be even more complete than Edinburgh or Dublin. This ambition is being ex- pressed in the creation of a civic centre far surpassing that of any other British City ; in fact, in some respects more comprehensively (though not as largely or subtly) planned as one well known to every town planner, that of Nancy, when the southern capital of King Augustus of Poland, in his capacity as Duke of Lorraine.
In such ways, without a separation from the Great Capitals, their gallery runs straight on to include Central Improvements, among Great Cities generally.
These typical developments are indicated round the walls, city by city. It is also needful to show how the
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various problems common to city life are being met
;
niUD's r.vK \u.\\ DI-TAI-IIAVS i~v\iii< W.IKS r!.>ir^F/rJo.
FIG. 44. — Cardiff: Civic Centre well advanced in progress.
and handled by architects and town planners — e.g., Railway Stations, from the squalor and muddle still
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so characteristic of the land of their initiative to the well- designed order of later German centres, the lucidity and magnificence of the Gare d'Orleans at Paris, and the stupendous achievements of St. Louis and New York. Here we contrast the crude dock design of London with the admirable scheme of Frankfort ; and so on for other elements of the economic world. So too for education, and from kindergartens to universities. Such comparisons obviously need as many galleries as we have screens ; yet even to begin is something ; with each exhibition some progress is made.
Enough here if the main idea be made clear. The cathedral-builders of the thirteenth century viewed Notre Dame itself — consummate achievement and initiative as they saw it to be (the " Paris Exhibition " of the year 1200) — not as an unapproachable wonder, but as something henceforth to be surpassed, and this even for minor dioceses and cities, by new world- masterpieces. So once more the citizen and the civic designer are coming to think and act. No department of city life, even in the smallest cities, need be pro- vincial, petty, mean, insignificant. To-day with gathering knowledge and incipient science, to-morrow with arousing imagination and renewing art, a new great age of cities is preparing. Our garden suburbs, our ( entral improvements are mere beginnings. Thus in Ghent, the great town-house, the civic belfry, the cathedral, have become consciously the centre of an extending spiral, of which the International and
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Civic Exhibition of yesterday were view-points and outlooks, and these towards an uplift of civilisation — civilisation in its old and literal civic sense.
Despite decentralisation thus preparing with the awakening and development of secondary cities and regions, the conception of the World-City, which at its best has inspired every metropolis worth the name, is not exhausted. It even develops; witness the project of a " Ville Internationale," devised by Signor Andersen (fitly a Scandinavian resident in Rome), as nothing short of a Super-Metropolis, in which European Civilisation, if not the world's, should centre and culminate. The location of such a city is wisely left undetermined ; but of the magnitude and stimulating value of the conception, there can be no denial. That such creations are not "merely Utopian," the growing influence of the Hague with its World- Areopagus already demonstrates. Similarly for such creations as the Temple de la Pensee of M. Garas, in whom architect, poet, and philosopher combine.
Hitherto we have travelled along one main line of civic study, that to this day most authoritative ; yet is it not felt that this series, from old Rome to new, too little considers the citizen as a personality, and misses much of the personality of his city likewise ? A partial answer begins in the adjacent central corridor, with its indications of Racial Anthropology, which has long been so dear to Teutonic and Anglo-
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Saxon historians, and is now widely imitated on all sides, from Pan- Slavonic to Pan-Keltic. Following upon this we come naturally to Civic Demography, thence to illustrations of the new-born Eugenic movement, and to a selection from recent Child- Welfare Exhibitions. Past origins, present facts, future developments are thus considered, and for the people's life, as well as for their homes.
Our study of cities will now seem to many as in principle complete, however limited and inadequate in detail. For here, from the current and dominant metropolitan point of view, we have what seems really significant for the study of cities. What need of minor town-studies? In Berlin Emperor and city architect have planned, and Mr Houston Stewart Chamberlain's great work has gone through its editions : Imperial London already sees in Kingsway its second and Colonial Whitehall. What need, then, of considering " the provinces " ? Similarly for other great countries : of our visitors, few are interested in the small cities of their own land, much less in those of smaller peoples. Recall how Germany sneers at Kriihwinkel, England at Little Pedlington !
Yet, in the study of cities, little Jerusalem counts for more than Babylon the Great ; and in many ways Athens even more than great Rome itself. This conception cannot permanently be left out of civics : quality is not so entirely a function of quantity as quantity is apt to think. With those to whom this idea is not too unfamiliar or uncongenial, our explana-
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tion of the exhibition must therefore start afresh, and once more from its Entrance Hall. Suppose, instead of beginning with the gallery of Civic Affairs, or at the Great Cities, with the body of the public, we follow our children. These are interested in simple natural conditions to start with — in stories of hunter and shepherd, of miner and woodman, of peasant and fisher. So we enter the gallery devoted to " Geography " ; not as mere gazetteer, but as yielding and illustrating the fertile principle of Geographical Control. This conception is of the settlements of men, from small to great, as initially determined by their immediate environment ; and though thence extending into larger and larger towns and cities, yet retaining profoundly, even if obscurely, much of their initial regional character and activity, spirit and type. At one time they may transcend their original limitations, yet at another they may exaggerate their past defects. Thus local character and history — which have been described at one time as providential, at another accidental, by recent historians again as racial — turn out to be regional and occupational at bottom. Here, then, is a fundamental mode of approach and of developmental investigation for the Science of Cities ; and one full of interest, as geographers and sociologists begin to realise. Moreover, from this gallery we may return to that of Classic Cities, as scholars everywhere are doing, and with new interest of fresh light. Still more is this the case with the gallery into which this one immediately opens, that of " Medieval Towns and
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Cities"; with their development and history, as widely distinct from that of the classic world, and plainly conditioned by local and regional surroundings.
From this medieval gallery we may now cross over to revisit that devoted to the Renaissance, and there observe how this destroyed as well as replaced the medieval past. Thence, however, let us return to consider, and with patience, the smallest and least familiar gallery of the present arrangement, yet one of the most significant, that of "Wars" (figs. 45-48). Wars of the Reformation and Renaissance, with their destruction of the Medieval Cities, and, with them also, of the smaller states ; and all this by the more favourably situated cities — which thus arose as the Great (War) Capitals, which we have before con- sidered, but then too independently of their essential origin and history. This proposition, of course not unknown to historians, yet never sufficiently em- phasised, is here elaborated and strengthened, until our whole historical perspective is changed ; it alters our view of the Great Capitals, and, of course, of their present civilisation largely with it.
Return once more to this gallery of Wars and their results : it further suggests how all these wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries prepared populations — depressed, impoverished, and embittered — for the coming in of the Industrial Age, and of its various revolutions. Here, then, we enter upon the gallery of "Industrial Cities," and with fresh
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lights upon their gloom: that of the paleotechnic industry, already enlarged upon in earlier chapters. We press on to the larger and brighter gallery of " Garden Suburbs, Villages, and Towns " ; with their
FIG. 45. — A Netherlands town (Goch) early in seventeenth century, still unspoiled by war. Note surviving medieval walls, internal gardens, and spacious out- lying ones (much reduced).
hopeful promises of Garden Cities ; for these, albeit as yet mainly in the future, are plainly attainable.
But to assure such Utopias, we must know our ground. Hence follows the next room, that of "Surveys of Towns and Cities." Here begin to appear results of value, to education, to science, and to action. The comparison of towns, small and great, is seen to be
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fruitful: the smallest may illuminate x the greatest; witness the comparison of Tay and Thames, that of Scone with Westminster, and Perth with London. That the study of historical cities, of Edinburgh or Chelsea, of Paris or of Ghent, may thus yield fresh
Fi'J. 46. — Mons : beginning of fortification by modern bastions, necessitated by seventeenth-century wars. No external gardens.
results, may be readily enough accepted : but it is surprising to realise how even the smallest and obscurest of old and comparatively forgotten towns- say, Saffron Walden in Essex, or some yet smaller, say, Dysart or Largo in Fifeshire, perhaps above all their many analogues in the Low Countries — or again some small new, manufacturing village, say, in Germany or the States — may each throw some fresh and unexpected light upon the shaping of the historic world. The geologist and the prospector know how
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regional surveys, and even minute and microscopic inquiries, may be necessary ; and so in every natural science, and in public health and medicine. Thus the Study and Survey of Cities— and each not only on to-day's town-plan, but on those of yesterday and
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* MONS FIG. 47. — Mons, as fully fortified, in eighteenth century.
of to-morrow— must before long become as clearly recognised and accredited a branch of science as is nowadays the Geological Survey of every civilised State.
American City Surveys have been already men- tioned, and with due appreciation. As regards civic theory and sociological interpretation, however, with all their intensiveness, these seem scarcely as
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productive as they should be, and doubtless soon will be. For amid the vivid and growing intensity of the American city's present, and its complex inter- miriglings of culture- elements and social types from all regions and cities of Europe,*all levels^and phases
FIG. 48. — Another Netherlands town (Grolla) as example of scientific fortification of seventeenth century. Civic interest, with gardens, etc., so manifest in Goch, have now disappeared (but modern interest, as for party warfare essentially, is well represented in the margin).
also, the deciphering of social origins and the un- ravelling of contemporary factors are far more difficult than anywhere in Europe, even in its vastest and most seething capitals. Hence the significance, even for modern American inquirers, of our Surveys of more homogeneous cities, whose past steps in progress or deterioration are more plainly recorded and pre- served, whose types are less protean, and whose
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present conditions are less fluid. From all these, our main thesis becomes clear — that Region and II Industry, Place, Work, and People, are reobserved and reinterpreted by such studies ; and these in ways far beyond the crude racialism, the empiric demo- graphy, or the callow eugenics of to-day. Here are large claims, and which cannot be justified adequately here : they must be left to explanation within the exhibition itself.
Of practical issues only a word can here be said, for it is our initial thesis that survey and diagnosis must precede treatment ; and in this exhibition we are still in the stage of suggesting and initiating Surveys : we must not yet make too definite promises for them.
Still, when a visitor cares to come beyond this gallery of Survey, he finds a " Civic Study," with its diagrams ; some clear, others unfinished, and express- ing doctrines and theories under consideration. Opposite this a drawing-office and workshop, with sketches in preparation, drawings to be framed and hung. The final gallery (unfinished beyond all others though it is, and to most visitors least attract- ive) contains, on the side of studies, some diagram- matic expressions of the nascent science of civics, and on the other a few such suggestions towards practice as we dare venture upon. Between the two stands the model of a City Cross of antique type; here renewed as symbol of the return of civic idealism, and
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of unity in social effort. Behind this also a rough model for an "Outlook Tower" — as incipient Civic Observatory and Laboratory together — a type of institution needed (indeed incipient) in every city, with its effort towards correlation of thought and action, science and practice, sociology and morals, with its watchword and endeavour of " Civic Survey for Civic Service." Thus our gallery adumbrates the conception of a " Civic Centre," one at many points nascent ; too often viewed as a mere piling together of monuments, but here with a clearing-house of social science with social action, of vital interaction of thought and deed. Our whole Exhibition of Cities and of Town Planning is now at length becoming seen as leading on into City Design.
From this final (because generalised and unified) outlook, our triple range of galleries — (a) that of classic cities and great capitals, (b) that of race, population, and child- welfare, (c) that of geographic and historic origins, surveys, and developments — may be reviewed in thought. Our initial conception of a needed and possible Science of Cities is so far justified ; in principle undeniably so. Can we similarly review the civic activities of the past, the needs of the present, the possibilities of the future, towards worthy Civic Activities of our own ? May social feeling and reasoned design find expression in some great re- orcliestration of all the industries and arts, recalling, nay surpassing, the Acropolis or the Cathedral of
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old ? How, in short, is Civic Aspiration to be developed, guided, applied to the needed Art of City- making, which has ever been implied in Citizenship ? Of this the past, at its highest moments, reached visions we have again to recover, achievements we have still to rival.
In Ghent there persist civic traditions rarely sur- passed, with a regional and civic life again affirming themselves ; and its exhibition thus peculiarly dis- played in its year of festival the varied productivity, elemental and higher, of a race and region of peasants, craftsmen, and artists. As her " Floralies " periodi- cally affirm, here are the flowers and fruits of her staple industry of horticulture, with the culture- elements which this has ever carried with it, becoming sociologically expressed as well as exuberantly dis- played. In this city and region too, above all others in the world as yet, the survey and interpretation of cities, both past and present, has reached its highest expressions, and these not only in the labours of an admirable school of historians — Fredericq, Pirenne, and others — but in literature of world-wide interest and appeal --as from the historic and individual pathos of Rodenbach's Bruges - la - Morte, to the passion, at once modern and Dantean, of Les Villes Tentaculaires of Emile Verhaeren, whom the world increasingly recognises among the very foremost of its singers.
What wonder, then, if new forecasts of city life and city development should here have been appearing ?
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It has been more than a transient kermesse, this International Exhibition with its many congresses ; and we of the " Exposition des Villes " and its associated " Premier Congres International des Villes " have been not a little encouraged and hopeful of the future through meeting the citizen of Ghent, again city- proud and world-hospitable as of yore, as he rang us a universal welcome from his full- voiced bells, and, after centuries of decline, flung out his city's banner, once more foremost in a world-gathering of her peers, and towards a crusade yet worthier than that her champions led of old.
So much, then, for the general plan of our exhibi- tion, and its perspective within the civic progress of Ghent : yet it is encouraging to add that our incentive to civic survey was immediately successful. From the adoption of our general plan, Ghent antiquaries, architects, and engineers vied with one another in contributions to the worthy presentment of their city, old and new ; the Ghent room was filled ; plans and perspectives overflowed ; and a model of the city's historic and monumental centre, on an imposing scale, adorned our largest hall. Better still, at the close of the exhibition, our continuous appeal towards keeping all this Ghent collection together, as the nucleus for a permanent Civic Museum, was energet- ically taken up by M. Bruggeman, President of the Academy of Fine Arts, who had been our friendly
and helpful civic host throughout the great exhibi-
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tion ; and an excellent location for this was found accordingly.
The next destination considered for our itinerant collection and its propaganda of civics was a visit to New York ; and this was indeed arranged. But our correspondents there took counsel with one or two distinguished fellow-citizens who were visiting Ghent, notably of legal authority on building laws and kindred practical questions. Our exhibition, of course, is far from complete in needed exhibits, and labelling and catalogue are but in progress. It constantly, of course, has its critics, and welcomes them in every gallery, often indeed as a valued help to improvement. But never before had we realised how substantially mean- ingless, to minds of otherwise specialised activities, might be all the endeavours above described towards concrete presentment of civics and city development. Garden Cities and the like apart, our civic history or geography, surveys or ideals, met with no response, or worse than none. Thus, for instance, our gallery of the effects of War, with its series of illustrations, largely contemporary (cf. figs. 45-48), of the develop- ment of fortifications from medieval times, through the Renaissance, and thence to our present contrast of modern slums and boulevards, and with careful tracing of the effect of all these upon their internal economy and population — all these things showed to our inspector, presumably not without some attempt to apprehend the significance we urged for, but so
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many little towns with a round wall : and similarly for other galleries. Little wonder, then, that our exhibition was dropped, as " unpractical," by our New York correspondents ! But now that a Town Plan- ning Exhibit, of essentially contemporary interest, and broadly corresponding to our own Royal Academy Exhibition of 1910 above described, is making its tour through leading American cities, and satisfying the immediate popular and practical interest accord- ingly, much the same criticisms, the same deeper civic questionings as here, must inevitably make themselves felt. With these must arise the sharp alternative, if not to utilise the material endeavours of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition (supposing it then to be available), then all the more to repeat its intel- lectual endeavour, to renew the whole line of inquiries it raises, and to handle these with a yet fuller specialism, a richer elaboration of analytic detail, and with corresponding, and doubtless even more am- bitious, endeavours of comparison and of synthesis. Towards the making of this new science, and this the complexest, implying and involving all others without exception, a Cities Exhibition is thus needed in America to follow up, include, and interpret that of Housing and Planning movements. City Design, in the full and adequate sense, can thus, and thus only, be prepared for.
The next destination discussed involved taking part in the important " Exposition de la Vie Urbaine," held under the auspices of the City of Lyons in
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1914, and which is probably the most comprehensive exhibition of the material appliances and elements of modern city life yet attempted, and that officially participated in by the largest number of cities as contributors. The utilisation of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, as a British national exhibit, was suggested on high authority, but not found financially practicable by the Treasury. As the far more important example of the delays of Rosyth has shown, the question of town planning, despite all its prominence at the Local Government Board, has as yet hardly been realised in other Ministries.
Our next instructive misadventure was in Edin- burgh ; which, as more than planners know, has once and again been a veritable cynosure of town planning —notably of the best in the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries, as of its lapses in the nineteenth ; and which is again showing signs and stirrings, and these in many quarters, towards a new tide of civic advance commensurate with her traditions, situation, and possibilities. An application, widely signed by representative citizens, was made to the corporation to hold the exhibition ; all promised well, and fresh and comprehensive designs of improvement were in preparation for it. But a worthy and patriotic magistrate had meantime projected a small winter- garden, which is obviously much needed and would undeniably be of wide and popular use. The site chosen was, however, open to criticism, and received it. Controversy arose in the council, then in the
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press between rival ediles ; and this soon extended into a general melee engaging all good citizens ; who in Edinburgh, of course, are nothing if not aesthetes. Letters for and against the site, often by whole column-fulls, appeared in every morning's and evening's papers, and this for months. Public interest was excited to a fever-pitch, which no problems of Ireland, no vices or virtues of the present Government can hope to approach : so, if any demonstration be needed of the fascinating interest of points of town planning, and these to a whole community, here it is. As at other crises of history, Lord Rosebery at length intervened ; and with no uncertain sound. The promoters of the scheme were at length compelled to retire, but did so with banners unsurrendered ; while at least two of the innumerable alternative schemes which were proposed are now, it is said, being elaborated, towards arduous and doubt- ful struggle for existence in their turn. But amid all this admirable earnestness over one point, the general questions of civics and city design which had been all but successfully raised by the promoters of the exhibition, and which they at first naturally hoped would be thus brought into prominence, if not even urgency, were practically lost sight of by the public : the not unfriendly, but now more divided, town council did not feel justified in proceeding actively with an exhibition after such a stormy season ; and all concerned turned to different matters with relief. Meantime the moral abides — and this for
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more cities than Edinburgh — that the time, trouble, and expense of preparing for needed or desirable improvements, without first agreeing on the site to place them on, together with the loss of public utility through delays, for years, often even many years, and sometimes indefinitely, would pay not only for civic exhibitions, but for comprehensive town- planning schemes as well ; indeed over and over again.
The return of this exhibition to Dublin was, how- ever, invited by the promoters of its Civic Exhibition for the summer of 1914 ; an undertaking on a scale of magnitude and funds smaller indeed than that of Lyons, but greatly exceeding any kindred exhibition as yet held in the British Empire or the United States. In view of the peculiar urgency of the housing situation in Dublin, and also of the re- stored metropolitan development involved by recent political changes, this repeated recall of the exhi- bition is an encouraging omen for the future of civic studies in cities generally, as these awaken to needs and to possibilities ; and this the more since it in- volves not only the continuance of the Dublin Survey initiated three years before, with its fuller develop- ment and wider diffusion, but correlation with the Dublin Town Planning Competition already referred to (pages 262-3) ; and, with all these, the experi- mental and not unsuccessful beginnings of a School of Civics which has proved suggestive, and even fruitful, both in educational and civic endeavours.
CHAPTER XIII
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING, AND THE NEED OF CIVICS
A general advance of public opinion on these subjects is in progress ; and the technical education of the town planner has correspondingly begun : schools of town planning are being founded. The recent formation of the Town Planning Institute, as an organised profession, must tend to further educational advance. Discussion of the nature and scope of education for town planning is thus on all hands beginning.
If town planning is to meet the needs of the city's life, to aid its growth, and advance its progress, it must surely know and under- stand its city. To mitigate its evils, it needs diagnosis before treatment. To express its highest ambitions, it must appreciate and share them. Hence town planning and civics must be advanced together. Arguments against their separation, general and particu- lar, and from cities ancient and modern.
THE general education of the public as regards better housing and garden suburbs, though slow and difficult until object-lessons were ready, is now going on rapidly, and in the easiest and most natural of ways, of direct observation and experience. Every co-operative tenant, every new garden-city or suburb occupant, is helping in this, and by example. His associations are actively propagandist ; and their exhibitions and conferences are now periodic and successful, alike in great cities and small — witness for
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1914 that of the Victoria League at the Imperial Institute, and that held by the Surveyors' Congress at Cheltenham, as well as that of the Liverpool School of Town Planning, and those initiated at Glasgow and elsewhere by the indefatigable energy of Mr Aldridge and the National Housing and Town Planning Council. Press, and politicians too, are at length becoming fairly aroused. Thus the whole group of associated movements we have been discuss- ing are ending their period of inception and sporadic initiative, and entering a new period, one in which civic reconstruction and reorganisation are claiming to occupy the very foremost place in public attention and policy. This, as already seen, is the case in Dublin, a city which seems ending its long period of super- activity in our national politics, with transition to a new and more harmonious phase, that of compre- hensive endeavour in civics. For here not only immediate city improvement, but fuller city develop- ment are being considered on all levels, elemental and economic, idealistic and cultural ; and these increasingly together, towards architectonic unity.
Now, if such be discernibly the trend of the times, corresponding educational questions arise, and these twofold^^special and general : first, the question of the immediate and technical preparation of the architect and city official in town planning J^ficondly, of their further social education, also that of the citizen and his representatives in government,
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municipal and central alike. In a word, then, what of education in town planning, and of education in civics ?
The technical education of the town planner has Q for. some time been in progress in Germany, but its effective initiative in this country has come from Sir William Lever by his foundation of a chair in the University of Liverpool, and his gift of a spacious building to house it. Here, under the energetic direction of Prof. Adshead, ably supported by Prof. Reilly, Mr Abercrombie, Mr Mawson, and other colleagues, there has been arising a school of town planning in the best sense, that of a school of thought as well as instruction, and with its organ, the Town Planning Review, already widely useful and influential. In Birmingham University Mr Cad bury has founded a lectureship, fitly held by Mr Raymond Unwin ; while in London, beside a growing attention to town planning, as in the excellent extra-mural atelier of architecture, so largely due to the initiative and devotion of Mr Lanchester, and also in the Summer School of Town Planning which has appropriately arisen at Hamp- stead, the University School of Architecture has also acquired the needed department. The recogni- tion of this new subject is thus practically assured, as in every great educational centre, a matter hence- forth but of funds and organisation, as these of the awakening of citizens.
Among town planners themselves the need of
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organisation has been increasingly felt ; and, after a useful year or so of deliberation, this has taken form ; so that the establishment of town planning as a regular and organised profession may be dated with the incorporation in 1914 of the Town Planning Institute. The architectural (and traditional) grades of members and associates are themselves of two kinds, the one directly concerned with town planning as a constructjyje-art, and the other with the adminis- trative and legal regulation of it. The more each class understands of the other's work the better ; without technical comprehension the administrator may easily hinder more than help. Yet for each town - planning education must be protected from falling into that too external and technical discipline which has been the bane of architectural instruction. How may this be assured? In one way only: by accompanying it with a vital initiation also, that into the life and working of the city ; in a word, then, by the study of civics. Architecture has always rightly claimed to be regulative of the arts ; and now town planning makes this claim in turn to be regulative for architecture. If so, there is no avoiding or escaping from a still further claim, that of civics, as regulative and educative for town planning.
The same holds good, and even more directly and obviously, for citizen and councillor, for the con- stituent and for his member, for the minister and for his officials.
So far, then, the preceding argument will hardly
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seriously be disputed, that the educational problem before us is a twofold one ; not of technical town planning only, nor simply to be viewed as a top- dressing for our schools of architecture. Nor is civics a mere vague discourse of edification, for the citizen, for his servants and rulers. We need to establish educational facilities and opportunities in town planning and in civics together, and these as fully as possible for all concerned. Yet at this stage the practical man may, and actually does, say : " All very well, in theory, no doubt : but when we have as yet scarcely the means to establish the needed technical side, that of town planning, why increase our difficulties by dragging in civics as well ? Why not leave it for the present ; it will no doubt come in time."
Very plausible. Yet to this two answers may be given : one long, general, and universal ; the other brief, immediate, and particular. The first of these may seem theoretic, but it is really derived from the oldest and widest recorded experience of the rise and fall of cities without number. This answer is tradi- tionally ascribed to an ancient writer in one of the most historic and deeply influential of all cities ; one near the convergence of three continents, and thus centrally situated for observation of their cities— Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Mediterranean alike. He and his compatriots were thus uniquely familiar wit! i the spectacle of civilisations and empires, each more magnificent and powerful than its predecessor,
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yet each failing and falling in turn. So familiar, in fact, that their social thinkers were often able to diagnose such changes, predict such collapses, and this more clearly and boldly than any since have done ; and are accordingly remembered to this day as "prophets," even to the predominance of the predictive significance of the word over its simpler hortatory meaning. In old-world way our writer's broad-based generalisation has survived, with much other invaluable sociological literature of his people ; and it runs to the effect that unless the ideal build the house — and with it the city also — they labour in vain that build it. So much for housing, and for town planning ; and throughout their history. But our author does not forget the citizens, nor their rulers, their statesmen's strength or weakness after the city has been built, being himself a good deal of a builder, still more of a planner, for his own city, as to this day its most memorable king. Recalling doubtless also his long military experience, both in attack and in defence, as well as of civic and regional rule, he adds the further generalisation, that unless the ideal keep the city, its police, army, dread- noughts, and watchmen generally, watch in vain.
This, it may be said, is all very fine, and even quite appropriate — on Sundays : but we are now in an age of science, and its professors ought hardly to quote such things : surely they are not going over to the old theological camp ? Not indeed, as this has too long been standing. With it each successive science
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has struggled in its youth, and on the whole imposed its terms — astronomy at the Renaissance, geology and biology in the last century. It is now coming to be the turn of civics to raise this discussion ; and no turn over of conventional and static concepts, as from the geocentric astronomy, the non-evolutionist geology and biology, such as our friends, clerical and lay, of all denominations admit as having been effected in the past by these preliminary sciences, has been so serious or so thoroughgoing as that which must soon be insisted on by civics and sociology. This insistence is indeed already begun by our scientific allies the psychologists, and particularly by the social psychologists, who are our very scouts and pioneers. These have already been discovering that many of the spiritual experiences, the moral changes — or, in their terminology, the arousal of ideals in individuals, and the conception and applica- tion of them by groups — which have been considered as unique and sacrosanct in every theological body, and are commemorated, even inculcated, accordingly on one day of the week (with a regrettable, yet apparently unavoidable, relapse to paleotechnic " civilisation," and its practices upon the other six days) are not so simply past or done with. On the contrary, for individuals and for groups alike, these individual experiences are now seen to be in principle still psychologically latent, and those group-enthu- siasms and changes socially practicable; and this throughout all seven days of the week. What the
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psychologists are thus seeing for individuals and groups, we are learning to see also for cities, and for present and future cities as well as for the past ones generalised by King David of old. An all-important thesis of civics therefore appears. With, and in the measure of, such eupsychic change, such idealism, social and personal, and of its expressions and appli- cation in civic development and in individual citizen- ship, our existing paleotechnic city and region are transformable. If so, the ideal of the city and region can so far be progressively realised ; and even to renewing the achievements of past cities, or surpass- ing them. Otherwise not. Without these changes, specialised schools of divinity and philosophy here, specialised laboratories of research and invention there, or newly specialised schools of town planning and architectural design anywhere, must all remain ineffective ; each as but a further enlargement of that dominant university and educational system which has been lately defined by a keen American critic as "the creation of a well-endowed moral vacuum." But with the arousal and upgrowth of the " University Militant," as the same writer states the positive ideal of education, and with that Civic Revivance which it aids and requires, the long-broken civic unity, of social life and industrial energy with constructive thought and vital education, correspond- ingly reappears.
What is it that we most value in our Occidental civilisation ? Recent writers, of the Prussian school
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especially, have insisted upon the importance of racial and barbarian origins, of militant aristocracy and con- quering migrations (or as philosophers, upon all this, more or less thinly disguised from themselves, as the Hegelian " State ") ; and since Le Play we have been learning to do far fuller justice to the significance of occupational and regional elements. But while these are rightly discerned as fundamental, the civilisations which all such races and regions have long ago accepted as supreme are thereby more clearly justified ; how- ever our valuations of these may differ in detail, according to our various indebtedness, individual and regional. First the moral unity of ancient Israel, and then the spiritual intensity and human appeals of the later faiths, of which it has been the prepotent parent, have been justified in their survival, since ex- ceeding our Western uplifts of idealism. And this still holds, as our scientific mythologists revive St Peter's vision of the net, and apply it to lands and peoples of whom he could not dream. So the intel- lectual search and grasp of Hellas, its power and charm of artistic creation, are but the more realised as we renew universities, and recover skill. The solidarity, justice, and peace of Rome at her best have given inspiration to each new endeavour of social organisation ; and this whether imposed by the State from above, or renewed by revolutions from below. There in the past still stand Jerusalem, Athens, Rome: here in the present we progressive Americans, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, carrying on the
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torch as best we may — what are we after all but the old barbarians, with our men of genius ever and anon rekindling our constantly failing lights from these old cities and their morning-lands of our civilisation ? " For 'tis far in the deeps of history the voice that speaketh clear." Those who do not see and feel this indebtedness to the past, are they not for the most part but dulled in the smoke-cloud of paleotechnic industry which overpowers their overgrown working villages ? — hypnotised by the shining pence, the spots of the dice, upon its " city " gambling tables ? — whirl- ing in the eddies, political or militant, of the " Great Capitals " ? — or listening to the echoes from all these ? If not poisoned by luxury, chilled or maddened by misery, are they not too much fixed by comforts into unthinking routine or sullen acquiescence ? With this view, which we take it no one in his moments of reflection seriously differs from, of the paleotechnic city as in the main but neo-barbarian, we have the explanation of the severity with which our social critics have long been judging it. Widely though they may disagree between themselves — as do Carlyle and Arnold, Gobineau and Marx, Ruskin and Kro- potkine, Meredith and Hello, Nietzsche and Tolstoi —they differ but little in their estimates of the paleotechnic city.
To discern, then, the ideals which build cities and which keep them, is thus the supreme problem of civics as history ; and civics as science. To interpret them is civics as philosophy ; and to renew them, city by
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city, is its quest, its task, its coming art — with which our " politics " will recover its ancient and vital civic meaning. These lights that flash from the past upon our paleotechnic gloom are but from crystal faces shaped long ago by ancient group-idealisms. Yet our schemes of instruction — " religious " and " classical " alike — have proved and are still proving futile ; and this must necessarily be while they too simply seek to impose these venerable forms upon us as authoritative from without, or even expect us strictly to reproduce them from within. Only as group-idealisms awaken anew among ourselves, can our modern towns become recivilised into cities worthy of the name. There is no essential disharmony between these past develop- ments, and such as these incite us towards : after all, the flowering of cities has ever gone on like the intercrossing of flowers.
How, then, may this enhancement of social life be effected? — that is the question. The_4*aleo±echnic economists, to do them justice, have^elaborated the conception of the division of labour : and it has long been recognised as the~urgenT~task to promote its better organisation. It is, in fact, in the measure of their endeavours towards this^that tory and whig, liberal and radical, imperialist and socialist, financier and philanthropist, syndicalist and even anarchist, have each byijturns the public ear ; and correspond- ingly it is in the measure of their failures to find the secret of social renewal that they_jose it^_also.
Church and State, town-house and college, business
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and philanthropy, bureaucracy and compulsion, labour and revolution, each is tried, and each fails and goes on failing. Meanwhile everywhere, despite our suburb endeavours, our central replanning, slum and super- slum are still growing on and polarising apart, towards stagnation or catastrophe.
Is it not time, then, for civics to have its hearing ? We cannot here venture into its many possible lines of policy : enough if it be granted that there is some virtue and value in that reconstructive effort especially urged in these pages — with its growing reunion of citizens with planners, builders with gardeners, labourers with craftsmen, and artists with engineers; and all towards the betterment o£— the city's homes, the corresponding future of its children. With this element of group-idealism, others will follow, and find expression, in time even comparable to those of old.
This general argument for civic education has been a long one ; but the second and particular answer to the objection against its urgency may be brief: that demand is arising, and this at many points. Every civic survey involves further civic studies. But a more urgent instance may be given. As we have above seen, here are the town planners constituting themselves into_a_prpfession ; a new Institute, like that of architects and engineers ; like them with aims of education for their successors, and also that frank recognition which responsibilities ever
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awaken, of fuller and wider access to knowledge for themselves. It is unanimously felt, therefore, that they must aim at nothing short of a metropolitan reference collection and bibliography, of adequate professional and studious completeness. What does this need of completeness involve ? Obviously, in the first place, to collect, as fully as knowledge and means admit, all that deals directly and technically with town planning. But the general problem of this renewing art — what is it but the material ex- pression of the growth and lyfe of_nities. and at every level ; from the simplest problems of engineering and housing to architectural ones as great as ever in history.
Economisation of energies and time, improvement of communications, of industrial and domestic condi- tions, all these are plain ; public health and recreation too ; but what less immediately obvious elements of the life and functioning of cities can their planner afford to ignore ? To deal with health one must be something of a hygienist ; must it not be the like with other things ?
Though always working with the best intention, the town planner, in the measure of his lack of fore- sight, has in each age been creating new evils. Medieval city walls have long been seen to have compressed the population they were made but to defend ; but not yet, as our " War " gallery of the Cities Exhibition shows, has even the historian realised that multiplication of civic evils which were
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brought about by the tremendous town-planning movement of fortification, as developed in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, and of which modern boulevard-rings are but superficial mitiga- tions. Haussmann, cutting new interior boulevards through Paris at the expense of gardens and working- quarters, was of course consciously and strategically providing for internal city control by his imperial master's artillery and dragoons ; but to do emperor and edile justice, neither they nor their public had a suspicion of how the new and stately architectural perspectives with which they lined these boulevards, and which evoked such unqualified admiration in their day — and this not only Parisian and provincial, but world-wide and with corresponding imitation accordingly — were soon to be socially and econom- ically operative.
At first all seemed perfect, all was prosperity. Everything that Napoleon and Haussmann had dreamed, planned, and worked for came to fruit, and beyond the brightest anticipation. Unprecedented demand for labour, both skilled and unskilled, with influx and growth of population, yet regularity of employment: rents and values rising for the land- lord's prosperity, and yielding increasing taxes for the city's growing budget ; and this spent in new public works, or in multiplication of steadily salaried func- tionaries ; while in both these classes of expenditure the State was proceeding no less merrily also. Fortunes were quickly made in building and con-
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traeting, still more in land speculation and in fin mce generally : and these gains were as freely spent in increased luxury-expenditures of every kind, in foods and wines, in servants and equipages, in costumes, jewels, and artistries. Hence an ever-increasing attractiveness of Paris for French and foreigners alike, with further growth of shops, hotels and cafes, theatres and music-halls. Never had town planner such success before ; what wonder, then, that other cities have since been following Haussmann's splendid precedent beyond all others?
Yet how all this megalopolitan development was connected with the debacle of 1870-71, how it led up to and through the Commune, and even helped to prepare the tragic disorder and ruthless repression with which it closed, are no less matters of historic reproach, and of lessons still far from exhausted.
Return to more everyday results, say those on public health. The physicians point out how the wholesale substitution of dusty boulevards and airless interior well-courts for gardens and play- ing-nooks told upon the health of children and mothers, and spread drink, tuberculosis, and other evils among men. Economists record how the high and costly new tenements raised house-rents, with depression of the family budgets in other respects, and with increase of social discontent and instability in ways manifold — and how, above all,
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the standardising of small flats with tiny rooms has pressed on the limitation of Parisian families, as in turn their example on that of the strength and growth of France.
Such are but the simplest and most obvious examples of the many indictments which French social critics of all schools have made of Haussmann and his work. Of Berlin too, so dramatically the victor and the imitator of Paris, the kindred criticism has begun. Behind its monumental perspectives the student of town planning must not forget its innumer- able working-class courts, well packed out of sight between the boulevards. Of their perfect internal order a recent town-planning poster (issued, it need hardly be said, by a younger school than the imperial one) gives a glimpse, one so unsettling as to have provoked its prompt destruction by the redoubtable police-president von Jagow. Yet this simply repro- duced the woeful daily spectacle of a group of children standing forlorn under the notice of " Play is forbidden " : and for its revolutionary appeal it gave only the plain statement, "Six hundred thousand children in Berlin!"
Paris and Berlin are assuredly not the only great cities of empire which are stunting their imperial race : but enough if our present point be clear — that in town planning, as in less widely important matters, every error, be it of commission or omission, soon tells upon our city's life.
And what of the arrest or the decline of cities ?
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—arrest, as in Edinburgh or Dundee ; decline, as in Dublin. In what ways may the town planner here usefully intervene ? In many, provided he be willing in each case to consider the respective cases and causes with the civicist before venturing upon treatment. And the many positive evils of cities, may he not more safely design changes towards abating these, with some deeper understanding of them ? At no point of this deeper hygiene of cities dare we limit our studies without yet more limiting our efficiency, or perhaps negating it.
Must not therefore the town planner's reference collection and library, which is plainly needed, and not only in London, but for each and every conurba- tion, embrace the essential literature of civics, as well \ as its wealth of plans and technical reports ? Thus I no one who sits down to consider this problem but 1 will come to aims as comprehensive as those of our I Cities and Town Planning Exhibition — an aim dual yet unified, as its name implies.
Happily, the more responsible the town planner the wider becomes his outlook. Mr Unwinds well* known Town Planning thus devotes a chapter to the survey of cities. The Liverpool School of Town Planning is plainly embarking, by the very pressure of its daily technical problems, upon the fuller study of its own city, and its com- parison with all others. In Germany and America the same deepening studies are pressing; so that if the very words sociology and civics had never
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been heard of, every serious town planner would soon be inventing them.
Before long, then, the School of Civics, with its observatory and museum of survey, its drawing- offices and business office, must become a familiar institution in every city, with its civic library in rapid growth and widening use, and all as a veritable power- house of civic thought and action.
Since this prediction has been in proof, it has been strengthened by the resolute anticipation of the Dublin Civic Exhibition and of its School of Civics
—with the continued help of the active and public- spirited Institute of Civics which has initiated them
—to carry on in future years, if possible, a programme substantially of this kind.
CHAPTER XIV
THE STUDY OF CITIES
How best can we set about the study of cities? Personal endeavours of the writer, as examples of the many approaches to civics ; with an outline of beginnings of the needed civic observatory, museum, study, and laboratory in the Edinburgh Outlook Tower, etc.
WE have seen that many, and in all countries, are awakening to deal with the practical tasks of citizen- ship. Indeed never, since the golden times of classic or medieval cities, has there been so much interest, so much good-will as now. Hence the question returns, and more and more frequently, How best can we set about the study of cities ? How organise speedily in each, in all, and therefore here and there among ourselves to begin with, a common understanding as to the methods required to make observations orderly, comparisons fruitful, and generalisations safe ? It is time for sociologists — that is for all who care for the advance of science into the social world — to be bring- ing order into these growing inquiries, these limitless fields of knowledge.
The writer has no finally formulated answer, since his own inquiries are far from concluded ; and since no bureaucrat, he has not a cut-and-dried method to
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impose meanwhile : nor can he cite this from others : he may best begin with his own experience. The problem of city study has occupied his mind for thirty years and more : indeed his personal life, as above all things a wandering student, has been largely de- termined and spent in restless and renewed endeavours towards searching for the secrets of the evolution of cities, towards making out ways of approach towards their discovery. And his interests and ex- periences are doubtless those of many. The nature- lover's revolt from city life, even though in youth strengthened and reinforced by the protest of the romantics and the moralists, of the painters and the poets, may be sooner or later overpowered by the attractions, both cultural and practical, which city life exerts. Studies of economics and statistics, of history and social philosophy in many schools, though each fascinating for a season, come to be felt in- adequate. An escape — from libraries -and — lecture- rooms, a return to direct observation is needed ; and thus the historic culture-cities — classic, medieval, renaissance — with all their treasures of the past- museums, galleries, buildings, and monuments — come to renew their claim to predominate attention, and to supply the norms of civic thought.
Again the view-points of contemporary science renew their promise — now doctrines of energetics, or theories of evolution, at times the advance of psycho- logy, the struggle towards vital education, the renewal of ethics — each in its turn may seem the safest clue
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with which to penetrate the city's labyrinth. Geog- rapher and historian, economist and aesthete, politician and philosopher have all to be utilised as guides in turn ; and from each of these approaches one learns much, yet never sufficient ; so that at times the optimist, but often also the pessimist, has seemed entitled to prevail.
Again, as the need of co-ordination of all these and more constantly makes itself felt, the magnificent prosynthetic sketch of Comte's sociology or the evolutionary effort of Spencer reasserts its central importance, and with these also the historic Utopias. But all such are too abstract constructions, and have as yet been lacking in concrete applications, either to the interpretation or to the improvement of cities ; they are deficient in appreciation of their complex activities. Hence the fascination of those transient but all the more magnificent museums of contemporary industry which we call International and Local Ex- hibitions, centering round those of Paris in 1878, '89, and 1900, or claiming to culminate at San Francisco in 191.5 ; with their rich presentments of the material and artistic productivity of their present, alike on its paleotechnic and neotechnic levels, and in well-nigh all sub-stages and phases of these.
As we return from these, at one time the roaring forges of industrial activity of Europe and America must seem world -central, beyond even the metro- politan cities which dominate and exploit them. Yet at another time the evolutionary secret seems nearer
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through the return to Nature ; and we seek the synoptic vision of geography with Reclus, or of the elemental occupations with Le Play and Demolins, with their sympathetic study of simple peoples, and of the dawn of industry and society with the anthro- pologists. And thence we return once more, by way of family unit and family budget, to modern life; and even to its statistical treatments, up to Booth and Rowntree for poverty, to Galton and the eugenists, and so on. In such ways and more, ideas accumulate, yet the difficulties of dealing with them also; for to leave out any aspect or element of the community's life must so far lay us open to that reproach of crudely simplified theorising, for which we blame the political economist.
One of the best ways in which a man can work towards this clearing up of his own ideas is through the endeavour of communicating them to others : in fact to this the professoriate largely owe and acknow- ledge such productivity as they possess. Well-nigh every teacher will testify to a similar experience: and the inquirer into sociology and civics may most courageously of all take part in the propaganda of these studies. For here as yet there are no estab- lished authorities to interfere, and no conventions to be broken ; while perhaps nowhere is it more true that " the people perish for lack of knowledge," and that even the little we can give may be of service. Such teaching, moreover, aids observation, even demands it. Thus are gradually rising here and
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there mutually helpful and stimulating groups, which may be again the condition of further pro- gress, as so often in the history of intellectual and social movement.
Another of the questions — one lying at the very outset of our social studies, and constantly reappearing — is this ; What is to be our relation tcL^wFaetieal life ? The looker-on sees most of the game ; a wise detachment must be practised ; our observations cannot be too comprehensive or too many-sided. Our meditations too must be prolonged and impartial ; and how all this if not serene ?
Hence Comte's "cerebral hygiene," and Mr Spencer's long and stoutly maintained defence of his hermitage against the outer world, his abstention from social responsibilities and activities, even those faced by other philosophers. Yet there is another side to all this : we learn by living ; and as the naturalist, beside his detached observations, and even to aid these, cannot too fully identify himself with the life and activities of his fellow-men in the simple natural environments he wishes to investigate, so it may be for the student of societies. From this point of view, "when in Rome let us do as the Romans do " ; let us be at home as far as may be in the characteristic life and activity, the social and cultural movements, of the city which is our home, even for the time being — if we would understand its record
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and its spirit, its qualities and defects, and estimate its place in civilisation.
Still more must we take our share in the life and work of the community if we would make this estimate an active one ; that is, if we would discern the possibilities of place, of work, of people, of actual groupings and institutions or of needed ones, and thus leave the place in some degree the better of our life in it ; the richer, not the poorer, for our presence. Our activity may in some measure in- terrupt our observing and philosophising ; indeed must often do so ; yet with no small compensations in the long run. For here is that experimental social science which the theoretic political economists were wont to proclaim impossible ; but which is none the less on parallel lines and of kindred experimental value to the practice which illuminates theory, criticising it or advancing it, in many simpler fields of action — say, engineering or medicine for choice. It is with civics and sociology as with these. The greatest historians, both ancient and modern, have been those who took their part in affairs. Indeed with all sciences, as with the most ideal quests, the same principle holds good ; we must live the life if we would know the doctrine. Scientific detachment is but one mood, though an often needed one ; our quest cannot be attained without participation in the active life of citizenship.
In each occupation and profession there is a free- masonry, which rapidly and hospitably assimilates
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the reasonably sympathetic new-comer. Here is the advantage of the man of the world, of the artist and art-lover, of the scholar, the specialist of every kind ; and. above all, of the citizen who is alive to the many-sidedness of the social world, and who is willing to help and to work with his fellows.
Moreover, though the woof of each city's life be unique, and this it may be increasingly with each throw of the shuttle, the main jvarp of life is broadljH] similar from city to city. The family types, the fundamental occupations and their levels may thus be more generally understood than are subtler resultants. Yet in practice this is seldom the case, because the educated classes everywhere tend to be specialised away from the life and labour of the people. Yet these make up the bulk of the citizens ; even their ever emergent rulers are but people of a larger growth, for better and for worse. Hence a new demand upon the student of cities, to have shared the environment and, conditions of the people, as far as may be their labour also ; to have sympathised with their difficulties and their pleasures, and not merely with those of the cultured or the governing classes.
H ere the endeavours of the University Settlements have gone far beyond the " slumming " now happily out of fashion ; but the civic student and worker needs fuller experiences than these commonly supply. Of the value of the settlement, alike to its workers and to the individuals and organisations they influence, much might be said, and on grounds philanthropic
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and educational, social and political ; but to increase its civic value and influence a certain advance is needed injts point -of "view, analogous to that made by the medical student when he passes from his dispensary experience of individual patients to that of the public health department.
In all these various ways, the writer's ideas on the study of cities have been slowly clearing up, through- out many years of civic inquiries and endeavours. These have been largely centred at Edinburgh (as for an aggregate of reasons one of the most instructive of the world's cities, alike for survey and for experi- mental action), also at the great manufacturing town and seaport of Dundee, with studies and duties in London and in Dublin, and especial sympathies and ties in Paris, and in other Continental cities and also American ones — and from among all these interests and occupations a method of civic study and research, a jnode of practice and application, have gradually been emerging. Each of these is imperfect, embryonic even, yet a brief indication may be at least suggestive to other students of cities. The general principle is the synoptic one, of seeking as far as may be to recognise and utilise all points of view — and so to be preparing for the Encyclopaedia Civica of the future. For this must include at once the scientific and, as far as may be, the artistic presentment of the city's life : it must base upon these an interpretation of the city's course of evolution in the present : it must increasingly forecast its future possibilities ; and thus
THE STUDY OF CITIES
it may arouse and educate citizenship, by organis- ing endeavours towards realising some of these worthy ends.
Primarily in this way, yet also from the com- plemental side of nature studies and geography, there have been arising for many years past the beginnings of a Civic Observatory and Laboratory in our Edin- burgh Outlook Tower. A tall old building, high upon the ridge of Old Edinburgh, it overlooks the city and even great part of its region ; and of the educative value of this synoptic vision every visitor has thus a fresh experience. Hence, for at least two generations before its present use, it has been a resort of tourists ; and its camera obscura, which harmonises the striking landscape, near and far, and this with no small element of the characteristic qualities of the best modern painting, has therefore been retained; alike for its own sake and as an evidence of what is so often missed by scientific and philosophic minds, that the synthetic vision to which they aspire may be reached more simply from the aesthetic and the emotional side, and thus be visual and concrete. In short, here, as elsewhere, children and artists may see more than the wise. For as there can be no nature study, no geography worth the name apart from the love and the beauty of Nature, so it is with the study of the City.
Next, a storey below this high Outlook of the artist, and its associated open-air gallery for his scientific
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brother the geographer, both at once civic and regional in rare completeness, there comes — upon the
FIG. 49. — Outlook Tower, Edinburgh.
main platform of the level roof, and in the open air — the " Prospect " of the special sciences. Here, on
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occasion, is set forth the analysis of the outlook in its various aspects — astronomic and topographical, geological and meteorological, botanical and zoolo- gical, anthropological and archeeologic, historical and economic, and so on. Each science is thus indicated, in its simple yet specialised problem. This and that element of the whole environment is isolated, by the logical artifice of science, from the totality of our experience. The special examination of it, thus rendered possible, results in what we call a " science," and this with a certainty which increasingly admits of prevision and of action. Yet this science, this body of verifiable and workable truths, is a vast and wholesale suppression of other (and it may be more important) truths, until its reintegration with the results of other studies, into the geographic and social whole, the regional and civic unity before us. Here in brief, then, is our philosophy of civics, and our claim for civics in philosophy. Thus upon our prospect the child often starts his scientific studies, the boy scout his expedition. Yet to this the expert must return, to discuss the relation and applications of his own science with the philosopher as citizen and the citizen as philosopher.
The storey below this prospect is devoted to the City. Its relief-model maps, geological and other, are here shown in relation to its aspects and beauty expressed in paintings, drawings, photographs, etc. ; while within this setting there has been gradually prepared a Survey of Edinburgh, from its prehistoric
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CAMERA.
PROSPECT.
EDINBURGH.1
SCOTLAND.
LANGUAGE.
EUROPE.
WORLD.
FIG 50. — Outlook Tower in diagrammatic elevation, with indications of uses of its storeys — as Observatory, Summer School, etc., of Regional and Civic Surveys ; with their widening relations, and with corresponding practical initiatives.
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origins, and throughout its different phases, up to the photographic details of the present day. In this way the many standpoints usually divided among specialists are here being brought together, and with educative result to all concerned.
The next lower storey is allotted to Scotland, with its towns and cities. The next to Greater Britain, indeed at times to some representation of the whole English-speaking world, the United States no less than Canada, etc., the Language being here taken as a more sociological and social unity than can be even the bond of Empire. The next storey is allotted to European (or rather Occidental) civilisation, with a general introduction to historical studies and their interpretation, and also with the work of a Current Events Club, with its voluminous press-cuttings on many subjects, largely international and general ; and furthermore to the comparison of Occidental cities. Finally the ground floor is allocated to the Oriental civilisations and to the general study of Man, departments naturally as yet least developed. But the general principle — the primacy of the civic and social outlook, intensified into local details with all the scientific outlooks of a complete survey ; yet all in contacts with the larger world, and these suc- cessively in enlarging social zones, from that of the prospect outwards — will now be sufficiently clear ; and of course be seen as applicable to any city. It may be experimented with in any city, in anyone's study, even begun upon the successive shelves of a
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book-case, or still better, in the co-operative activity of a Current Events Club ; and this again, if possible, along with a Regional and Civic Survey Committee. On any and every scale, personal or collective, it will be found to reward a trial.
What now of practical applications? Returning for the present purpose to the City's storey alone, though the main presentment is that of a survey, an exhibition of facts of past and present, a Civic Business-room adjoins this. Here has been for many years in progress the main practical civic work of this Tower — its various endeavours towards city betterment. Largely the improvement of those slums, already referred to as the disgrace and diffi- culty of Old Edinburgh ; a work of housing, of re- pair or renewal, of increase of open spaces and when possible of gardening them ; of preservation of historic buildings, of establishment of halls of colle- giate residence with associated dwellings, and so on. Each piece of work has been undertaken as circum- stances and means allowed ; yet all as part of a comprehensive scheme of long standing, and which at an increasing rate of progress may still be long of accomplishment. Briefly stated, this scheme is of the preservation and renascence of historic Edinburgh, from the standpoints both of town and gown ; that is, at once as City and as University, and each at their best. This demands the renewal —arid within this historic area especially, dilapidated and deteriorated though it at present be — of that
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327
intimate combination of popular culture and of higher education, and of that solidarity of civic and national spirit, with openness and hospitality to the larger world — English, Colonial, American, Con- tinental— which are among the best traditions of
FIG. 51. — Ramsay Garden, University Hall, Edinburgh.
Edinburgh, indeed of Scotland, with her historic universities and schools.
An analogous centre has also long been struggling towards a foothold in London. This includes the germ of a Department of Civics, at first in temporary premises at the University of London, and next more largely housed through the recent reconstruction of Crosby Hall in connection with a University Hall of Residence upon Sir Thomas More's garden at Chelsea ; schemes which have alike been fortunate in
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finding co-operation, both practical and studious. The studious point of view, and civic aim of action, here unite towards the recovery of the best traditions of Chelsea, which are only second to those of the two great cities of London and Westminster themselves, and in some respects surpass them. These traditions are considered not merely as of historic interest and associative charm, but as a vital heritage, capable of influencing and inspiring the townsman as well as the student, and thus of affording a new yet natural line of development to the borough : no less than that of becoming a veritable collegiate city, and correspond- ingly of affording to the too cold individualism and too isolated intellectuality of London University the beginnings of the social advantages and cultural impulse of the associated life.
But all this, it may be said, is too academic, too much the mere record of a wandering student, and of his changing outlooks and view-points, his personal experiments and endeavours. What of other than university cities ? How are civic surveys and en- deavours to be applied more generally? A fair question, to which an answer will be attempted in the next chapter.
CHAPTER XV
THE SURVEY OF CITIES
How are civic inquiries and city surveys to be made more general, thorough, and efficient? An appeal to City Museums and Libraries, with examples of beginnings in small towns and great. School Surveys as educational processes and products ; examples from primary schools, training colleges, and universities. Higher signifi- cance of surveys in education and in philosophy. Their applications, moral and social ; their appeal to all groups and denominations accordingly.
How are city surveys and endeavours to be applied more generally, brought thoroughly before the public, made effective, complete, accessible, intelligible ? That is the question from the last chapter, which we must attempt to answer in this ; and on several convergent lines.
Like other professional bodies, the Museum Curators of Great Britain have their Annual Con- gress : this took place in Dundee in 1907 ; and was appropriately in the gallery of the city's museum devoted to " Old Dundee." Having listened to the natural and proper lamentations of the curators as to the deficient support of their institutions, and to various expressions of their anxiety to increase public interest accordingly, the writer threw his paper into the form
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of a practical proposition, which may be summed up somewhat as follows :—
You lament that you have not sufficient funds adequately to maintain your museums and still less to increase them. Is it not needful to discover some way adequately to advertise your institutions — of course properly and legitimately, in due curatorial fashion - - by making them interesting to a larger proportion of your community ? At present your antiquities attract few save the antiquarians, a dwindling class. Thus we have here our admirable city-history collection, our town in 1800, 1700, 1600, 1500, and yet beyond, to the primitive Celtic hill-fort and its Roman transformation ; and this does naturally attract the antiquarians. But the value of this collec- tion depends upon each of these exhibits having had actuality in its day. It is its authenticity which gives it interest. Why should this collection now lack actuality in our day? Why no adequate exhibit of this city in 1900, in 1907? Why not give it this, and add to our Museum of the Past a corre- sponding exhibit of the Present? How can this be done? Easily. See, for instance, Booth's Life and Labour in London, with its great map ; see the corresponding surveys of other cities, York, Manchester, Dundee, and the like. Do something of the same for each city now. Obtain more pictures and photographs of its present beauty and ugliness ; obtain statistics and other particulars from the town - house, the registrars, and so on, so that
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any and every active citizen shall henceforth find in the museum the most ready and convenient place for getting up all he wants to know about his city. In this way your museum will gain a new set of frequenters, each a future friend, for you will soon find that you can count on their support, and that increasingly. Nor is this all you can do ; besides the few antiquarians and the many more practical men, who are interested in the past and the present respectively, you have a third class, small, yet important and increasing, those who are beginning to dream of the future. These wish to see some progress in their town, some actual better- ment, the cleansing of its slums, the erection of new buildings and institutions, the supply of open spaces, and above all, the planning of its future extensions — its practicable Utopia — Eutopia in fact. Add, therefore, to your galleries of the Past and of the Present a third room, or at least a screen or two for this concrete exhibition of your City's Future, and you will thus bring to the museum a third and new class of supporters. Hence, even if you do not care for your city, if you do not yet feel its impulse to citizenship, consider this pro- posal as at least of a new attraction, a legitimate form of public appeal; and see whether it does not before long reward you to carry it out.
This proposal, almost in so many words, was warmly encouraged by the president of the Con- gress ; and was actively discussed at a special
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meeting, at which a large number of the museum curators of the United Kingdom spoke warmly in its favour, and decided to see what could be done towards carrying this out for their respective cities and in their museums. The preceding pro- posal applies, of course, to public libraries and city librarians, no less than to museums and their curators. How, then, are we as civic sociologists at once to aid in this movement as well as learn from it ? j Is it not time that curators and librarians, geologists and naturalists, local historians and antiquaries, architects and artists, business men and economists, clergymen and social workers of all denominations, politicians of all groups, were uniting their forces, at first no doubt largely as individuals, but also bringing in their respective societies and organisa- tions as far as may be, towards this creation of their Civic Survey and Museum ?
As suggestive examples of the many-sided progress of this movement, we may take one of the small towns and one of the great — Saffron Walden and Newcastle-on-Tyne. In the first was organised an active co-operation between the Museum Curator and the Natural Science Department of the Training College ; thus was initiated a Survey Society open to citizens as members, and to young folks at work, at school, or college as associates (and at the moderate annual subscriptions of Is. and 3d. respectively). In- terest was successfully aroused ; the museum was improved, and not simply in various of its collections,
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or by forming this new regional one, but above all in public sympathy and educational usefulness. A photographic survey was undertaken ; with the help of a town-planning architect the ancient town was more clearly mapped and interpreted, and even re- constructed in vivid perspective at various phases of its past. From this local exhibit has easily been arranged a smaller type-collection, which now circu- lates on loan with the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition and elsewhere, as a very model of the practicability and interest of such a survey. The preservation of the town's monuments and buildings, the planting of trees and shrubs, the encouragement of gardening on every scale — from child's flower-pot and home window-box onwards — has been a natural development, as also an increased interest in public health and housing. Best of all, a new tide of civic feeling has arisen ; pageantry and festivals are more readily undertaken, the atmosphere of citizenship can be more fully breathed, and life at various points is brightened, as community and individuals thus learn anew to interact.
What now of Newcastle ? By good omen, as this chapter is being written, there has been passed in the City Council a motion by Councillor Adams, here well worth citation as a typical one, equally applicable elsewhere :—
" That it is desirable to establish a Civic Museum for the City, wherein may be illustrated among other things the history of the town, and the growth and
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development of the municipal, social, and industrial life of the City ; and that the Public Libraries Committee be requested to consider and report upon the best means of carrying the same into effect."
Of course London has now its Museum in Stafford House; and there are notable beginnings, and still more materials, in many other cities. The movement may therefore be considered as assured in principle ; but the less time now lost the better for advancing it locally and in execution. Even apart from the urgency for civic development, for town planning and housing already emphasised, every curator and librarian knows how increasingly hard it becomes every year to collect the objects and illustrative matter, which not so long ago were cheap and re- latively abundant.
Beside all the agencies just named, there is another, weakest and least specially prepared hitherto, yet fullest of hope and possibility of all — the primary school. Could we but convince a single one of the Education Departments — English, Scots, or Irish, that of an American city or a Continental country — that in this movement of town study we have the comple- ment of the nature study (which these departments have more or less recognised), and a means of cor- relation and vitalisation of studies even more widely potent and easily applicable, as from "school journeys" and boy-scouting onwards — a national survey would soon be in progress with its regional and civic division
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of labour. Meantime there are excellent beginnings, and ut many points : as notably, for instance, by Mr Valentine Bell in a Lambeth primary school, where his boys have effectively aided him in making a borough survey which was at Ghent and Dublin a delight and impulse to teachers from all lands ; and of which the educational value and result at home is also manifest and fruitful. Here, in fact, are begin- nings for a " Know your City " movement which may spread through our towns as of late through A merican ones ; the more since, in the rise and growth of the boy scout movement, we have beginnings of re- gional survey ; and from this to real beginnings of city survey is a natural step.
Coming now to l^niversiijLSchools of Geography, that of Oxford has long been peculiarly effective upon survey lines, and among the many excellent regional theses of Prof. Herbertson's pupils, Miss L. M. Hardy's admirable " Survey of Salisbury " may be cited as a peculiarly instructive and convincing type ; and of vivid significance from many points of view, and instructive to bishops and to town planners alike.
It is peculiarly encouraging to the writer that, after too long interruption, the regional surveys which characterised the Edinburgh Summer Meetings of many years past, should have been actively resumed at Easter 1914, and this independently and success- fully by a fresh and younger group, notably the active spirits of the Saffron Walden Survey aforesaid, Miss Barker, Messrs Maynard and Morris, and others
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mentioned or not above ; and that these further have been preparing a wide appeal to teachers " for the study and practice of regional survey in country and town, and for the consideration of its application in primary and secondary education." The invitation of this nascent association to Dublin has opened a new series of contacts, and thus the method spreads apace. The British Ecological Society is now as definitely com- mitted to the mapping of the British Isles as can be the Geological Survey in its older field ; but few of its members probably even know how its prime initiator, the late Robert Smith, undertook the vege- tation maps which bear his name, and are now classic, as his part of the division of labour of that regional survey of Scotland, and not of the Edinburgh district only, which is a central purpose of the Outlook Tower, and a main justification of its plea for adaptation of its principle in every city and district.
One final word, of education now at its highest, of its very philosophy, and this at university levels ; and why not beyond ? What if the long-dreamed synthesis of knowledge, which thinkers have commonly sought so much in the abstract — and by help of high and recondite specialisms, logical, metaphysical, psycho- logical, mathematical, and the rest, all too apart from this simple world of nature and human life — be really more directly manifest around us, in and along with our surveys of the concrete world ? What if Aristotle, that old master of knowledge, turns out to have been
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literally, and not merely metaphorically, speaking in urg ng " the synoptic vision " ? For surely " general views " may well be helped by — general views. What if philosophic aims may be served, better than in the study alone, in course of an experience again literally peripatetic? And, if it be claimed that beyond the highest speculative education is the active, the ethical, may we not add to our surveys, service? And to our going about, doing good ?
It may well be among the less specialised and least municipally powerful members of the community that the civic enthusiasms and energies of the opening future may be most vitally awakening. And this not only among the workers, and the artists who at their best most truly voice them, but also among women, and among the children of our schools. Hence in two recent volumes of a popular series of the easiest access, Evolution and Sex, the writer and his colleague have not hesitated to state the appeal of civics and city betterment to these, as at once eupsychic, eutechnic, and eutopian ; and upon the most general grounds, of human life, in its con- tinuance and its uplift.
Nor can the churches of all denominations much longer delay that comprehensive dealing with the field of civic renewal which has been promised and urged on all sides, as in papal encyclicals, bishops' charges, and moderators' addresses, and in the Citizen- Sunday discourses which these encourage or inspire. It is but bare justice to recognise that fundamental
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and vital civic endeavours have never been lacking from their remotest past, and that modern develop- ments and adaptations of these are springing every- where. The disunion of the churches and their supersedure by the State are, of course, older than the paleotechnic dispensation, but their long in- effectiveness in dealing with it has proved its potent influences upon them. Yet as their entrance upon social renewal grows clearer in thought and more definite in action, their emancipation must progress accordingly ; and before long they may be dealing more vitally with many civic problems than can the State and its administrators. It is ever a group- emotion, a group-enthusiasm, which makes and re- makes the cities : and the cry, " O Jerusalem ! Jeru- salem ! " will never fail of echo and response through- out the ages.
CHAPTER XVI
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES, OF MUNICIPALITIES AND GOVERNMENT
All these surveys are but preliminary to action upon the municipal and the national scale. Limitations of recent "Land Report" and kindred literature of surveys, now increasingly of political influence and approaching application ; indications of needed fuller develop- ment of such inquiries, to regional surveys.
Recommendations of the Sociological Society (Cities Committee). Dangers of Town Planning before Survey. Methods and uses of this survey ; with outline scheme for a City Survey and Exhibition. Examples already in progress.
HITHERTO we have been occupied with the pre- liminaries of town planning, through regional and civic surveys and civic education generally; yet merely with the occupation of strategic points, like the public museum and library, preparatory to the reduction of the town-house ; and of the primary school and training college towards a march upon Whitehall itself. To make these larger designs perfectly clear, let us first offer a criticism of the limitations of the recent " Land Report " of 1914, which, although unofficial, has been commonly under- stood as preparatory to Government action ; and thereafter offer to the consideration of municipal authorities and their town planners a final and
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reasoned argument for civic survey before town plan- ning, with suggestions in outline for initiating and conducting this.
First, then, the " Land Report," and with special appeal to the distinguished writer to whose methods and suggestions it is understood to be much indebted.
It is no discourtesy, among either scientific or practical men, to recognise that the expert analyst of a given soil, or the skilled valuator of its present crop, may not equally have acquainted himself with the rocks below, nor fully considered the future growths this soil may yet be brought to bear. First, then, we recognise in Mr Seebohm Rowntree the very foremost of social surveyors, who not only from his "Poverty" survey of York has thrown new light upon the question of poverty everywhere, but who also, in his yet more intensive and comprehensive study of rural Belgium, has surpassed the Belgians themselves. We thus cannot fail of appreciation of the " Land Report," which is so plainly indebted to his methods and guidance, and look with correspond- ing hopefulness for a companion Towns Report, soon to be in preparation upon more or less similar lines. Yet in view of the assured and desirable influence which such vast masses of conveniently arranged information, such clear and persuasive summary, such suggestions for future policy, must have upon opinion and even upon approaching legislation, it is needful here to interject a warning word, even an expostulation, as to the limitations of the methods which Mr Rowntree's
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example has been defining for further inquirers, and is establishing for the statesman's practical use.
No modern city, and probably York less than most, is to be adequately understood, as he has treated it, apart from its past history, even as regards the problems of poverty and of irregularity of employ- ment which seem so modern. With fuller space, of a chapter for each city, it would be possible to justify this criticism for city after city in detail. In Edin- burgh or in Dundee, in Belfast or in Dublin, in Bruges or in Ghent, it is easy to see and prove the persistence of historic factors, in each case widely different, which profoundly modify the local situation, and which are, to the contemporary factors upon which Mr Rowntree so ably specialises, as differing warps to similar woofs ; and thus give us different social fabrics accordingly.
Still less are the rural provinces of Belgium, so admirably described in another notable volume of Mr Rowntree's, really to be understood, without the light of other correspondingly careful volumes, dealing with those world-historic city-developments, of many and mingled types, which are the crowded foci of these same provinces : nor are all these together adequately intelligible for study, still less utilisable for comprehensive statesmanship, without correspond- ing surveys of the new industrial town developments and the "black country" associated with them. Rustic and urban relations must thus be restudied, interpreted together, in past and in present, and for
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province by province ; for Bruges and Ghent with West and East Flanders, or Liege with its antique prince-bishopric and its modern industrial valleys alike. Similarly for York, and yet more for Leeds ; they need study along with Yorkshire : for it is not in Belgium only that the modern relations of town and country can be seen together in a single flash- light, as " Les Villes Tentaculaires : Les Campagnes Hallucinees."
Such regional geography has long been familiar in French science, literature, and political discussion, and has been aiding those increasing measures towards decentralisation, of which the renewal of French provincial universities during the last generation was but a beginning. But it is constantly the insular misfortune of England to learn but tardily from France. We remember how her ironclads and screws, her smokeless powder, her submarines and aeroplanes were each well-nigh perfected before our Admiralty could be persuaded to recognise their existence ; but in these days of better mutual under- standing, it is surely not too much to hope of our statesman of peace, our advancing legislators and their expert inquirers, to be acquainting themselves more fully than heretofore with the recent advances, in France especially, of regional geography. As they do this, they cannot but appreciate and adopt its lucid and comprehensive methods, and be aided by its pregnant conclusions.
All this is no mere fault-finding with good and so
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far legitimately specialised work ; it is but pointing how it needs to be complemented in the immediate future. It therefore cannot be dismissed by the practical politician with the customary sneer of " academic," still less as " sentimental," as he is wont (contradictorily) to say in a different mood. It is a definite claim for fuller and more scientific treatment, and this not simply upon historic considerations, but also upon geographic grounds. It is that of yet more comprehensive studies ; not only of countries and of towns separately to-day, in which Mr Rowntree is so far a master, nor even of their past in relation to their present, and conversely: it4s-4he stud^of town in country, and of country in town, and these through past and present alike. It is the appeal of regional unities, yet also of these as regional diversities. It is the protest, not of the academic man against the practical one, but for the more general view which is necessary to thought and action alike, against what is really a too academic over-specialism. It is time, then, to be ending the ancient feud, the artificial separation of town and country, the isolation of town councils and county councils ; and to be seeing that town-mouse and country-mouse have too long been treated as distinct species, and are henceforth, as of old, but one. Land Reports and Urban Reports have thus to be completed and combined, yet also analysed, into^ Regional Reports, and this for vital statement, for effective treatment also. In these we must end the isolation of our present facts from the
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past ones which have so often given them birth. Only thus may be put an end on one hand to our present too dead documentation as history, and to our too hasty journalism and hastier party speechify- ing on the other. Hence before inadequate (though wholesale) national bill-drafting, and its resultant interminable bill- and act-amending, all too in- adequate still, let us advance beyond even rustic and urban reports, and be getting these into the stage of regional surveys. With these social diagnoses, the corresponding local treatment and revivance will also progress ; and our statesmen may then far more clearly see how best to accelerate advance, regionally and throughout.
We come now to the need of City Surveys and Local Exhibitions as preparatory to Town Planning Schemes. It may but bring our whole argument together, and in a way, we trust, practically con- vincing to municipal bodies, and appealing also to the Local Government Boards — which in each of the kingdoms have to supervise their schemes— if we here utilise with slight abbreviation, a memor- andum prepared in the Sociological Society's Cities Committee, and addressed to the authorities con- cerned, local and central alike.
§ I. — SUMMARY OF THE CITIES COMMITTEE'S WORK
We welcomed and highly appreciated the Town Planning Act, and we early decided that it was not
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necessary for this Committee to enter into its dis- cussion in detail, or that of its proposed amendments. We have addressed ourselves essentially to the problem of Town Planning itself, as raised by the study of particular types of towns and districts involved ; and to the nature and method of the City Survey which we are unanimously of opinion is necessary before the preparation of any Town Planning Scheme can be satisfactorily undertaken. Schemes, however, are in incubation, alike by muni- cipal officials, by public utility associations, and by private individuals, expert or otherwise, which, what- ever their particular merits, are not based upon any sufficient surveys of the past development and present conditions of their towns, nor upon adequate know- ledge of good and bad town planning elsewhere. In such cases the natural order, that of town survey before town planning, is being reversed ; and in this way individuals and public bodies are in danger of committing themselves to plans which would have been widely different with fuller knowledge ; yet which, once produced, it will be too late to replace, and even difficult to modify.
We have therefore, during the past few years addressed ourselves towards the initiation of a number of representative and typical City Surveys, leading towards Civic Exhibitions ; and these we hope to see under municipal auspices, in conjunction with public museums and libraries, and with the co-operation of leading citizens representative of
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different interests and points of view. In Leicester and Saffron Walden, Lambeth, Woolwich, and Chelsea, Dundee, Edinburgh, Dublin, and other cities progress has already been made : and with the necessary skilled and clerical assistance, and moderate outlays, we should be able to assist such surveys in many other towns and cities. Our experience already shows that in this inspiring task, of surveying, usually for the first time, the whole situation and life of a community in past and jjresent, and of thus preparing for the planning scheme which is to forecast, indeed largely decide, its material future, we have the beginnings of a new movement — one already characterised by an arousal of civic feeling, and the corresponding awakening of more enlightened and more generous citizenship.
§ II. — RECOMMENDATION BY THE COMMITTEE
The preparation of a local and civic survey previous to the preparation of a Town Planning Scheme, though not actually specified in the Act, is fully within its spirit ; and we are therefore most anxious that at least a strong recommendation to this effect should form part of the regulations for Town Planning Schemes provided for the guidance of local authorities by the Local Government Board. With- out this, municipalities and others interested are in danger of taking the very opposite course, that of planning before survey. Our suggestion towards
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guarding against this is hence of the most definite kind, viz. :—
Before proceeding to the preparation of a Town Planning Scheme, it is desirable to institute a Preliminary Local Survey — to include the collection and public exhibition of maps, plans, models, drawings, documents, statistics, etc., illustrative of Situation, Historic Develop- ment, Communications, Industry and Com- merce, Population, Town Conditions and Requirements, etc.
We desire to bring this practical suggestion before local authorities, and also to ventilate it as far as may be in public opinion and through the press, and in communication to the many bodies whose interest in Town Planning Schemes from various points of view has been recognised in the Third Schedule of the Act, as lately amended by the Government in response to representations from our own and other societies.
§111. — DANGERS OF TOWN PLANNING BEFORE TOWN SURVEY
What will be the procedure of any community of which the local authorities have not as yet adequately recognised the need of the full previous consideration implied by our proposed inquiry, with its Survey and Exhibition? It is that the Town Council, or its Streets and Buildings Committee, may simply remit to its City Architect, if it has one, more usually to its
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Borough Surveyor or Engineer, to draw up the Town Planning Scheme.
This will be done after a fashion. But too few of these officials or of their committees have as yet had time or opportunity to follow the Town Planning movement even in its publications, much less to know it at first hand, from the successes and blunders of other cities. Nor do they always possess the many- sided preparation — geographic, economic, artistic, etc. —which is required for this most complex of archi- tectural problems, one implying, moreover, innumer- able social ones.
If the calling in of expert advice be moved for, the Finance Committee of the Town Council, the rate- payers also, will tend to discourage the employment of an external architect. Moreover, with exceptions, still comparatively rare, even the skilled architect, however distinguished as a designer of buildings, is usually as unfamiliar with town planning as can be the town officials ; often, if possible, yet more so. For they have at least laid down the existing streets ; he has merely had to accept them.
No doubt, if the plan thus individually prepared be so positively bad, in whole or in part, that its defects can be seen by those not specially acquainted with the particular town or with the quarter in question, the L.G.B. can disapprove or modify. But even accepting what can be thus done at the distance of London, or even by the brief visit
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from an L.G.B. advisory officer, the real danger remains. Not that of streets, etc., absurdly wrong perhaps ; but that of the low pass standard — that of the mass of municipal art hitherto; despite excep- tions, usually due to skilled individual initiative.
Town Planning Schemes produced under this too simple and too rapid procedure may thus escape rejection by the L.G.B. rather than fulfil the spirit and aims of its Act ; and they will thus commit their towns for a generation, or irreparably, to designs which the coming generation may deplore. Some individual designs will no doubt be excellent ; but there are not as yet many skilled town planners among us. Even in Germany, still more in America (despite all recent praise, much of which is justified), this new art is still in its infancy.
As a specific example of failures to recognise and utilise all but the most obvious features and opportunities of even the most commanding sites, the most favourable situations, Edinburgh may be chosen. For, despite its exceptional advantages, its admired examples of ancient and modern town planning, its relatively awakened architects, its com- paratively high municipal and public interest in town amenity, Edinburgh notoriously presents many mistakes, disasters, and even vandalisms, of which some are recent ones. If such things happen in cities which largely depend upon their attractive aspect, and whose town council and inhabitants are relatively interested and appreciative, what of towns
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less favourably situated, less generally aroused to architectural interest, to local vigilance and civic pride? Even with real respect to the London County Council and the record of its individual members, past or present, it must be said that this is hardly a matter in which London can expect the provincial cities to look to her for much light and leading as a whole, while her few great and monu- mental improvements are naturally beyond their reach.
In short, passable Town Planning Schemes may be obtained without this preliminary Survey and Exhibition which we desire to see in each town and city ; but the best possible cannot be expected. From the confused growth of the recent industrial past, we tend to be as yet easily contented with any improvement : this, however, will not long satisfy us, and still less our successors. This Act seeks to open a new and better era, and to render possible cities which may again be beautiful : it proceeds from Housing to Town (Extension) Planning, and it thus raises inevitably before each municipality the question of town planning at its best — in fact of city development and city design.
§IV. — METHOD AND USES OF PRELIMINARY SURVEY
The needed preliminary inquiry is readily out-
\ lined. It is that of a City Survey. The whole
topography of the town and its extensions must be
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taken into account, and this more fully than in the past, by the utilisation not only of maps and plans of the usual kind, but of contour maps, and, if possible, even relief models. Of soil and geology,
FIG. 52. — Birmingham in 1832, with its Parliamentary boundary (daik line).
climate, rainfall, winds, etc., maps are also easily obtained, or compiled from existing sources.
For the development of the town in the past, historical material can usually be collected without undue difficulty. For the modern period, since the railway and industrial period have come in, it is easy to start with its map on the invaluable " Reform Bill Atlas of 1832," and compare with this its plans in successive periods up to the present.
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By this study of the actual progress of town developments (which have often followed lines different from those laid down or anticipated at former periods) our present forecasts of future developments may usefully be aided and criticised.
Means of communication in past and present, and in possible future, of course need specially careful mapping.
In this way also appears the need of relating the given town not only to its immediate environs, but to the larger surrounding region. This idea, though as old as geographical science, and though expressed in such a term as " County Town," and implicit in " Port," " Cathedral City," etc., etc., is in our present time only too apt to be forgotten, for town and country interests are commonly treated separately with injury to both. The collaboration of rustic and urban points of view, of county and rural authorities, should thus as far as possible be secured, and will be found of the greatest value. The recent agricultural development in Ireland begins to bring forward the need of a more intelligent and practical co-operation of town and country than has yet been attempted ; and towards this end surveys are beginning, and are being already found of value.
Social surveys of the fulness and detail of Mr Booth's well-known map of London may not be necessary ; but such broader surveys as those of Councillor Marr in his Survey of Manchester, or of Miss Walker for Dundee, and the like, represent
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the very minimum wherever adequate civic better- men; is not to be ignored.
The preparation of this survey of the town's Past and Present may usually be successfully undertaken in association with the town's library and museum, with such help as their curators can readily obtain from the town-house, from fellow-citizens acquainted with special departments, and, when desired, from the Sociological Society's Cities Committee. Experience in various cities shows that such a Civic Exhibition can readily be put in preparation in this way, and without serious expense.
The urgent problem is, however, to secure a similar thoroughness of preparation of the Town Planning Scheme which is so largely to determine the future.
To the Exhibition of the City's Past and Present there therefore needs to be added a corresponding wall-space (a) to display good examples of town planning elsewhere ; (b) to receive designs and suggestions towards the City's Future. These may be received from all quarters ; some, it may be, invited by the municipality, but others independently offered, and from local or other sources, both pro- fessional and lay.
In this threefold Exhibition, then — of their Borough or City, Past, Present, and Possible — the municipality and the public would practically have the main out- lines of the inquiry needful before the preparation of the Town Planning Scheme clearly before them ;
and the education of the public, and of their repre-
23
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sentatives and officials alike, may thus — and so far as yet suggested, thus only — be arranged for. Examples of town plans from other cities, especially those of kindred site or conditions, will here be of peculiarly great value, indeed are almost indispensable.
After this exhibition — with its individual contri- butions, its public and journalistic discussion, its general and expert criticism — the municipal authori- ties, their officials, and the public are naturally in a much more advanced position as regards knowledge and outlook from that which they occupy at present, or can occupy if the short and easy off-hand method above criticised be adopted, obeying only the minimum requirements of the Act. The preparation of a Town Planning Scheme as good as our present (still limited) lights allow, can then be proceeded with. This should utilise the best suggestions on every hand, selecting freely from designs submitted, and paying for so much as may be accepted on ordinary architectural rates.
As the scheme has to be approved by the L.G.B., their inspector will have the benefit of the mass of material collected in this exhibition, with correspond- ing economy of his time and gain to his efficiency. His inspection would essentially be on the spot ; any critic who may be appointed would naturally require to do this. His suggestions and emendations could thus be more easily and fully made, and more cheerfully adopted.
The selection of the best designs would be of
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immense stimulus to individual knowledge and invention in this field, and to a worthy civic rivalry also.
j V. — OUTLINE SCHEME FOR A CITY SUIIVEY AND EXHIBITION
The incipient surveys of towns and cities, above referred to, are already clearly bringing out their local individuality in many respects, in situation and history, in activities and in spirit. No single scheme of survey can therefore be drawn up so as to be equally applicable in detail to all towns alike. Yet unity of method is necessary for clearness, indis- pensable for comparison ; and after the careful study of schemes prepared for particular towns and cities, a general outline has been drafted, applicable to all towns, and easily elaborated and adapted in detail to the individuality of each town or city. It is there- fore appended, as suitable for general purposes, and primarily for that Preliminary Survey previous to the preparation of a Town Planning Scheme, which is the urgent recommendation of this Committee.
The survey necessary for the adequate preparation of a Town Planning Scheme involves the collection of detailed information upon the following heads. Such information should be as far as possible in graphic form, i.e. expressed in maps and plans illustrated by drawings, photographs, engravings, etc., with statistical summaries, and with the necessary descriptive text ; and is thus suitable for exhibition
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in town-house, museum, or library ; or, when possible, in the city's art galleries.
The following general outline of the main head- ings of such an inquiry admits of adaptation and extension to the individuality and special conditions of each town and city.
SITUATION, TOPOGRAPHY, AND NATURAL ADVANTAGES : —
(a) Geology, Climate, Water Supply, etc.
(b) Soils, with Vegetation, Animal Life, etc.
(c) River or Sea Fisheries.
(d) Access to Nature (Sea Coast, etc.).
MEANS OF COMMUNICATION, LAND AND WATER : —
(a) Natural and Historic.
(b) Present State.
(c) Anticipated Developments.
INDUSTRIES, MANUFACTURES, AND COMMERCE : —
(a) Native Industries.
(b) Manufactures.
(c) Commerce, etc.
(d) Anticipated Developments.
POPULATION : —
(a) Movement. (6) Occupations.
(c) Health.
(d) Density.
(e) Distribution of Well-being (Family Conditions, etc.).
(f) Education and Culture Agencies.
(g) Anticipated Requirements.
TOWN CONDITIONS : —
(a) HISTORICAL : Phase by Phase, from Origins onwards. Material Survivals and Associations, etc.
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(b) RECENT : Particularly since 1832 Survey, thus indicating
Areas, Lines of Growth and Expansion, and Local Changes under Modern Conditions, e.g., of Streets, Open Spaces, Amenity, etc.
(c) Local Government Areas (Municipal, Parochial, etc.). (<7) PRESENT : Existing Town Plans, in general and detail.
Streets and Boulevards. Open Spaces, Parks, etc. Internal Communications, etc. Water, Drainage, Lighting, Electricity, etc. Housing and Sanitation (of localities in detail). Existing activities towards Civic Betterment, both Municipal and Private.
Tow N PLANNING ; SUGGESTIONS AND DESIGNS : —
(A) Examples from other Towns and Cities, British and
Foreign.
(B) Contributions and Suggestions towards Town Planning
Scheme, as regards : —
(a) Areas.
(b) Possibilities of Town Expansion (Suburbs, etc.).
(c) Possibilities of City Improvement and Development.
(d) Suggested Treatments of these in detail (alternatives
when possible).
A fuller outline for city activities in detail would exceed our present limits ; moreover, it will be found to arise more naturally in each city as its survey begins, and in course of the varied collaboration which this calls forth. The preparation of such more detailed surveys is in progress in some of the towns above mentioned ; and is well advanced, for instance, in Edinburgh and Dublin : and though these surveys are as yet voluntary and unofficial, there are indica- tions that they may before long be found worthy of
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municipal adoption. The recent example of the corporation of Newcastle-on-Tyne, towards establish- ing a Civic Museum and Survey, may here again be cited as encouraging, and even predicted as likely before long to become typical.
The question is sometimes asked, How can we, in our town or city, more speedily set agoing this survey and exhibition without the delay of depending entirely on private and personal efforts ? Here the services of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition may be utilised, as notably in the case of Dublin (pp. 258-9). In this way the city's survey is initiated in consultation with the local experts of all kinds ; and the broad outline thus prepared is capable of later local development in detail, with economy of time and convenience of comparison with other cities. The Exhibition, with its civic surveys from other places, is also suggestive and encouraging to local workers : while the variety of examples of town planning and design from all sources are of course helpful to all interested in the preparation of the best possible local schemes.
CHAPTER XVII
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES
After our Civic Survey and Exhibition are undertaken, and the prepara- tion of our Town Plan begun, what next ? Each is but a beginning, a preparatory study of the city, a draft towards its improvement and extension. Both in these ameliorations which are more or less needed by all our modern towns at present, and beyond these, we have to realise and keep in view the spirit and individuality of our city, its personality and character, and to enhance and express this, if we would not further efface or repress it.
How may this spirit be brought out and expressed ? Our survey may be helpful to the city's Pageant, beyond this to its more inter- pretative Masque, while beyond this again literature and all the arts combined must utilise our civics and sociology towards its veritable Epic. In every way, then, a School of Civics is needed in every city, and in some this is already arising.
Of the spirit of cities, and the bearing of a perception of this towards the discernment of their respective possibilities, concrete examples are needed. Single example here chosen for brief and partial outline, that of Chelsea — Past and Possible.
may now suppose our Civic Survey has been brought up to date, and prepared for planning beyond it. It is at any rate in progress, and upon all levels of age and responsibility, from primary school and college, museum and library, to the town-house itself in its various departments ; and thus on many lines it is reaching the mass of homes, the body of citizens. May we now leave this hard-pressed subject, and with confidence that all has been done that need be ?
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Yes and no. The exhibition over, the Town Planning Committee (if it has waited so long) may then instruct their borough engineer to make out his town plan ; but he has doubtless been sketching this out already in his own way, well or ill. True, he and his com- mittee may now accept from our T'own Planning Exhibition what ideas of the city's growth and structures and needs their majority permit, or an active minority impose ; and thus our trouble will not have been wholly wasted. Still, this done, the plan, after due correspondence with the L.G.B. and adjustment to its criticisms, will obtain official approval, and the town's future for a generation (and in part for ever) is thus simply settled on ; perhaps even proceeded with.
Yet all we have so far been accumulating are but materials towards our history, studies towards our picture, drafts towards our design. Of this first exhibition it is a main success to have demonstrated its own incompleteness : our present documentation is but a beginning, and our needed comparisons with other cities are little more than broached.
For all this the practical man will now say he cannot wait, and so far rightly ; though he has waited long and without complaint before. So while work begins, research should continue ; and beyond this, the need arises of reconstructive imagination, and this for past, for present, and for future alike.
We visualise and depict our city from its smallest beginnings, in its immediate and wider setting, as of
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valley, river, and routes ; we spread it upon its plain, tower it upon its hills, or throne it more spaciously by the sea. Our synoptic vision of the city, for each and all of its growth-phases, thus ranges through region to homes, and back again, and with pictured completeness as well as plans : first a rough jewel on the breast of Nature, then the wrought clasp upon her rich-embroidered garments of forest, vineyard, or orchard, of green pastures or golden fields.
A s with geography, so with history : we design or renew the city's pageant, scene by scene. No minuteness of local archaeologist and antiquarian can be spared, no contact with the outer world of which the general historian tells ; yet the main task is too commonly missed between these — the problem of history proper — the essential story of the city, the presentment of its characteristic life at each period. We have to see it as it lived in pre-Roman, Roman, and barbarian times, in early and later medieval days, and at the Renaissance, as well as in its modern industrial growth since the steam-engine and the railway. The too purely spectacular pageant of a city — with its loosely strung succession of incidents, themselves too often of external contacts — despite its splendour, has failed to satisfy the public. But here we come in sight of its next development — that of the more interpretative masque of the city's life ; the seven ages, as it were, of its being — though happily not too closely corresponding to Shakespeare's in- dividual ones, themselves sadly degenerate from a
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nobler tradition. And though at many points our masque must still be eked out with pageant, at others it may well rise towards epic. Here, in fact, a new form of epic begins to appear : that of each and every city and region throughout the ages.
We are thus reaching the very portal of literature ; yet, thanks to our outdoor survey and its exhibition, we can look back from it upon life, which everywhere creates it. We realise for ourselves how this dull town has had beauty and youth. We see how it has lived through ages of faith and had its great days of fellowship ; how it has thrilled to victory, wept in defeat, renewed its sacrifices and strifes, and so toiled on, through generation after generation, with ever- changing fortunes, and in mind and spirit more changeful still. But since in the mass of prosperous English and American cities we too readily forget our historic past, and think only of our town in its recent industrial and railway developments, we have come to think of this present type of town as in principle final, instead of itself in change and flux.
It is a blind view of history, as something done elsewhere and recorded in books — instead of being, as it is, the very life-process of our city, its heredity and its momentum alike — which delays the perception of civic change among the intelligent, and still retards comprehension of it among even the progressive. Where even the theologian has too much failed to awaken to the current judgment-day, with its inexorable punishments, its marvellous rewards, we
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cannot wonder that the economist should have been slow to realise the limitation of his paleotechnic age ; to analyse, yet correlate its complex of evils, its poverty- and luxury-diseases, its vices and crimes, its ignorances and follies, its apathy and indolence ; or conversely, to appreciate and to support its neotechnic initiatives and quests.
From past romancers to modern realists — Sir Walter to Zola, Reade to Bennett — the stuff of literature is life ; above all, then, city-life and region-life. Ideas, as Bergson rightly teaches, are but sections of life : move- ment is of its essence. This life-movement proceeds in changing rhythm initiated by the genius of the place, continued by the spirit of the times, and accom- panied by their good and evil influences. How else should we hear in our survey as we go, at one moment the muses' song, at another the shriek of furies !
Our survey, then, is a means towards the realisation of our community's life-history. This life-history is not past and done with ; it is incorporated with its present activities and character. All these again, plus such fresh influences as may arise or intervene, are determining its opening future. From our survey of facts we have to prepare no mere material record, economic or structural, but to evoke the social person- ality, changing indeed so far with every generation, yet ever expressing itself in and through these.
Here, in fact, is the higher problem of our surveys, and to these the everyday purposes of our previous chapters will all be found to converge. He is no true
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town planner, but at best a too simple engineer, who sees only the similarity of cities, their common net- work of roads and communications. He who would be even a sound engineer, doing work to endure, let alone an artist in his work, must know his city indeed, and have entered into its soul — as Scott and Stevenson knew and loved their Edinburgh ; as Pepys and Johnson and Lamb, as Besant and Gomme their London. Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Harvard, have peculiarly inspired their studious sons ; but Birmingham and Glasgow, New York or Chicago, have each no small appeal to observant and active minds. In every city there is much of beauty and more of possibility ; and thus for the town planner as artist, the very worst of cities may be the best.
Hence at the end of this long volume we are but at the beginning of the study of cities in evolution. We should now pass through a representative selection of cities. We need to search out sociological inter- pretations of all these unique developments ; indeed it is for lack of such concrete inquiries that sociology has been so long marking time, between anthropology and metaphysics, and with no sufficient foothold in social life as it is lived to-day in cities. We need to search into the life of city and citizen, and the inter-relation of these, and this as intensively as the biologist inquires into the interaction of individual and race in evolution. Only thus can we adequately handle the problems of social pathology ; and hence again rise to the hope of cities, and with clearer
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beginnings of civic therapeutics, of social hygiene. In such ways, and through such studies, the incipient civic renascence is proven to be no mere utopia ; and its needed policy may be more clearly discerned, even devised. Thus we return, upon a new spiral, to town planning as City Design. City by city our civic ideals emerge and become definite ; and in the revivance of our city we see how to work towards its extrication from its paleotechnic evils, its fuller en- trance upon the better incipient order. Education and industry admit of reorganisation together, towards sound mind and vigorous body once more. This unification of idealistic feeling and of constructive thought with practical endeavour, of civic ethics and group-psychology with art, yet with economics, is indeed the planning of Eutopia — of practical and practicable Eutopias, city by city. Such, then, is the vital purpose of all our surveys : and though their completion must be left to others, fresh chapters for city after city — indeed sometimes a volume for each —might here be added, with their Surveys, of things as they are and as they change, passing into Reports, towards things as they may be.
Every town planner is indeed moving in this direction more or less ; no one will now admit him- self a mere procrustean engineer of parallelograms, or mere draughtsman of perspectives ; but long and arduous toil and quest are still before us ere we can really express, as did the builders of old, the spirit of our cities. Spiritually, artistically we are but in the
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day of small things, however big be our material responsibilities. Hence the justification of the inner rooms of our Outlook Tower, and of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, with their drafts, sketches, and sometimes beginnings towards the realisable Eutopia of cities, as of Edinburgh and Dunfermline, of Chelsea or Dundee, of Dublin or Madras.
Through such large civic endeavours as that of the town planning of Dublin, this correlation of Survey and Eutopia may be made plainer to other cities ; and this as appealing to all parties, classes, occupa- tions, and individuals. In such ways city surveys and exhibitions and plans are actually generating a new movement of education, that towards a School of Civics, as in Dublin, and soon in every city. How this might be helped by school and college, by studio, gallery, and library, has been fully suggested already : but now it may be plainer that it may help these in turn. For what is a Civic Exhibition if not a fresh step towards the Civic University ; and with this towards the City Renewed ?
Without such increasing, deepening, and generally diffusing realisation of the character and spirit of our city, our town planning and improvement schemes are at best but repeating (though no doubt in better form and upon a further spiral) those " bye-law streets " with which the past generation was too easily content, but with which we are now becoming so thoroughly disenchanted, as but slums after all, and in some ways the worse for being standardised.
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At this point more than ever we require concrete illustrations, and these from city after city. But space forbids : for, say, Edinburgh or Dublin alone one would need this whole volume and more : indeed, for the far smaller and necessarily less complex Dun- fermline, the writer has already found a doubly crowded one insufficient.
Still, some example must be given, though of the briefest. As a mere indication of the fields of inquiry and of reflection needed to disengage the spirit of a city, and of the forecasts, initiatives, and endeavours which even a glimpse of this spirit will awaken, as the School of Civics in any city or borough works and grows, may be submitted the following brief and much abridged sketch towards opening a discussion of Chelsea — Past and Possible.
The exploration of Chelsea is crowded with interest, full of significance ; and detailed instructions for setting about this, in ramble after ramble, are to be found in no mere summary as of Baedeker, but in the admirable guide-book of Mr Reginald Blunt.
Chelsea Church and its memorials, Church Street and its associations, are more or less known to every Chelsean, and so with each of our main assets. But it is easy to undervalue the secondary ones ; thus the reverent visitor of the Old Church often passes by the new Parish Church with utter indifference, if not with a remark upon the tameness of its modern Gothic. Yet this is one of the notable buildings not
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only of the borough but of the nineteenth century, since it is the first modern church with a stone- vaulted roof — that is, the first real attempt to con- struct a Gothic edifice since the close of the Middle Ages. No wonder it is not completely satisfactory ; it is rather a wonder it is so good ; and even if we may no longer feel our fathers' enthusiasm for modern Gothic, we see that this edifice has none the less its place, and that an initiative one, in one of the in- fluential movements of recent history.
Even in the nooks of Chelsea, in its retreats from the general stream of local and national life, we find points ranging from individual interest to world sig- nificance, to history in its largest aspects, temporal and spiritual. Thus the Cavalier associations of Chelsea are familiar to all its citizens ; but from Lindsey House, once Count Zinzendorf s chateau, it is but a step in thought to the Thirty Years' War— and from the quiet little Moravian meeting-house with its austere cemetery, to one of the greatest and best of Puritan movements in history. Even their tiny disused schoolhouse, dingy though it be, is more than a mere surviving landmark for progress. It has a tradition of its own, older than that of any of our schools and colleges, than those of South Kensington to boot ; for among the educators of history there are few more significant and perhaps none at this moment more vividly modern, more directly indica- tive of the twofold needs of progress of sciences and humanities together, than the Moravian pedagogue
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and bishop Comenius, author of the Orbis Pictus, yet also of the Pilgrimage of the Soul.
Our historic houses are well known. There Turner spent his last year and died, there Rossetti, there Whistler, and each after revolutionising his generation. Fill in minor names, at least of the thirty mighty men who attain not unto the first three — say, from Cecil Lawson onwards and back — and see what a wealth of artistic associations. Here in our own day are more painters than ever, and though none be a prophet in his own borough, and the old excellences be gone, new excellences are surely appearing. We may regret the vanishing of the old Pottery with its dainty figures ; but we have now in progress, and in more studios than we can number, the expression of a higher idealism, of a more varied realism than that of old, upon a far greater scale and in more enduring forms. It is time to recognise that even now our Chelsea sculptors are initiating an Art movement which may before long be recognised throughout the land as not less vital and significant in its way than those of the great painters we are wont here to recall.
In Chelsea (and in More's garden of all places) our local memories of the Renaissance are not likely to be forgotten, nor how the advent of the New Learning in England would have had a far less easy progress but for the convinced and persuasive ally whom Erasmus found in the hospitable Chancellor. But hardly less significant, though less remembered,
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is the later, yet completer development (since in- cluding also the scientific movement of the later Renaissance), which we owe to More's successor in the same home and neighbourhood, Sir Hans Sloane. Many beyond Chelsea know his Botanic Garden ; but it is sometimes forgotten that to his collection the British Museum itself owes its origin; and more often forgotten still how stately and generous was Sloane's design — for had that been carried out, his historic mansion would even now be in existence ; and this as the centre of the nation's treasure-houses, not crowded out of sight in Bloomsbury, but displayed like the Louvre, perhaps indeed better, in park as well as on river. Hence, perhaps through the inward fitness of things, a vast group of museums has returned to our immediate neighbourhood ; so that we need now no longer refuse morally to incorporate into at least the outer court of our sacred enclosure South Kensington itself, albeit so long the mere hinterland of Chelsea.
This tracing of traditions, as all Chelseans, all historians know, might be continued and amplified. I need not even speak of the local record in literature, in criticism, in affairs ; it is time to draw to our conclusions. First, that we are here well on in the fourth century of a focus of thought, a cloister of meditation, a centre of learning, a creative home of art, and, above all these, a radiant centre of moral and social idealism, arising in the joyous sunburst
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of the Utopia, but never wholly dying away. To recall once more only a few of the greater names of Chelsea, who can doubt but that this local association of imagination and humour since More, and since Erasmus's Encomium Morice, must have stirred in turn the passionate imagination, the fierce humour of Swift, and the heroic visions, the blazing satire of Carlyle. Or, again, after these first three, has not the same Utopian tradition aroused the generous ardour of Kingsley ? — and strengthened the lucid optimism of Thomas Davidson ? — whose whilom Chelsea Brotherhood has grown into what has been one of the most potent groups of Utopians of our day and generation, the Fabian Society ; and whose later teaching is so manifest in that renaissance of educational and civic idealism which withstands the omnipotence of mammon even in New York.
Next, our civic conclusion. Here in Chelsea, albeit one of the minor boroughs of London as regards area, wealth, population, and other crude quantitative measurements, we have a city in its own way second to none, and in general view claiming to be reckoned after the City and Westminster themselves as making up the main triad of Central London. True, the City stood for commerce, for material wealth, financial greatness, and Westminster for sacred traditions and for governing powers, when this was but a country village. Yet when the Reformation closed the story of Westminster as a medieval cloister of thought, the
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history of Chelsea opened ; as in its turn the cloister- city of ideals, those of the Renaissance. Since then it has afforded, once and again, a needed subjective counterpart to the material and political greatness of the two metropolitan cities. This position, in Chelsea but individually and sporadically realised, has been more fully and more consciously taken as well as educationally applied by Oxford ; but while that has been mainly a citadel of the causes and ideals of the past, the record of Chelsea lies essentially in its initiatives, of new ideals, of constructive move- ments. Here in fact has long been established, not indeed More's " Utopia," yet another and practically contemporary one, that "Abbey of Thelema" in which each lives his own life to such purpose as he may.
Our record of local history and achievement is no mere retrospect of sporadic genius, but a perpetual renewal of certain recognisable elements. Though to historians and their readers the past may too often seem dead, a record to be enshrined in libraries for the learned, it is of the very essence of our growing sociological re-interpretation of the past to see its essential life as continuous into the present, and even beyond, and so to maintain the perennation of culture, the immortality of the social soul. The definition of culture in terms of " the best that has been known and done in the world " is but half the truth, that which mourns or meditates among the tombs ; the higher meaning of culture is also nearer its primitive
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sense, which finds in the past not only fruit but seed, and so prepares for a coming spring, a future harvest. History is not ended with our historian's "periods"; the world is ever beginning anew, each community with it, each town and quarter. Why not, then, also this small town of ours, this most productive cloister of thought and art in what is now the vastest of historic cities ?
How, then, shall we continue the past tradition into the opening future ? — that is now the problem of Eutopia. A civic union, a Chelsea Association, has for years past been struggling into existence ; and may yet unite our scattered endeavours and feelings after more active citizenship, and this in no mere limited sense, of gas and drains and taxes. We are surely as capable here of aspiring to more Athenian ideals of Citizenship as to cultural efforts, like our recent pageanting, our arts balls, our marvellous flower-shows. Why not also a more associated yet correspondingly more individual life ? We have the tradition of many culture-activities, the essentials of a University City in the general sense ; for as the community in its religious aspect was the Church, as the community in its political aspect is the State, so also the community in its cultural aspect will be the University. Here and beside us, moreover, in our own day, has been developing a university quarter in the literal sense ; why not now bring these two beginnings together? Might not that be a fresh impulse to ourselves in Chelsea — and why not one of
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value to London by and by — as at once to its University, which has its collegiate growth before it ? Towards all this, the re-erection of Crosby Hall, well- nigh the last surviving relic of Old London, upon
FIG. 53. — Crosby Hall, Chelsea : rebuilt in 1909-10 for University Hall of residence.
More's garden, is no mere act of archaeological piety, still less of mere " restoration," but one of renewal ; it is a purposeful symbol, a renewed initiative, Utopian and local, civic and academic in one. It is first of all a renewed link with the past and its associations ; it is also of daily uses, both public and collegiate ;
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and these above all as preparing the future, not simply dignifying the present and commemorating tl>e past. Here, then, is a new link between Chelsea Past and Chelsea Possible ; a centre at once studious and practical, uniting thought and action, civic retrospect and civic future.
CHAPTER XVIII
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT
Criticism of preceding treatment of Chelsea, and its answer : correspond- ing yet divergent development of other cities with neotechnic progress ; a hopeful augury.
How far can housing and town planning be considered as a business proposition ? Or how far must these depend on political action? Main steps of past progress have not simply been on either line. As so often with other advances, they have involved initial idealism, costly to their promoters, yet in time have become economic, as of course may public action also. Example from Irish Agricultural movement : better housing, better living, better business.
Constructive Consols, and other incipient elements of Social Finance : opening promise of this.
Civics and Eugenics : their necessary association. Cities in Evolution with people in Evolution.
OF the suggestion towards the development of Chelsea with which the previous chapter closed, the criticism may be made that this was but a poor example, since too academic to be of much general interest. To this there are several answers. First, that one may best speak of what one knows, and has worked at : second, that even in our existing order there are cities such as Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, to which the university is a main asset, and more to which it is a not inconsiderable secondary one : third, that as neotechnic culture advances, wealth more and more takes the form of educating
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the younger generation towards skill and efficiency, and this of many kinds ; and that this can and must go on, till higher education and specialised skill become common instead of rare. Again, that the obviously associated and already not inconsider- able higher industries, such as printing, etc., must naturally increase ; and so on. Yet even for Chelsea the suggested collegiate development was but one among several important elements also more or less capable of increase, as notably its eminent horti- cultural tradition and present efficiency, or yet more its two thousand artists. So, for Edinburgh again ; we might readily enter the current discussion of its industrial future, as to which there are two fairly distinct schools — the first simply clamouring to Jove for "new industries," of any or every sort (and not getting them) ; the second more disposed to con- sider the whole situation — the existing place, work, and people, with their existing advantages and aptitudes, limitations and possibilities; and thence thinking out the further development and better correlation of these. The same inquiry seems more urgent for Dundee ; more urgent still for Dublin ; . and so on ; yet the lines of development most promising will be found to be largely different, indeed this increasingly as our surveys and studies of these cities grow more and more clear. Even for purposes of strictly economic development (if strict economic development there be) the paleo- technic view of cities, as nowadays broadly similar,
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and with their differing pasts alike practically negligible, turns out on examination to be deeply unpractical, wasteful, and unproductive; and that the future developments of cities will be again upon lines of divergence and neotechnic differentiation, may be boldly affirmed. Town-plan and " industrial brief " are thus in Dublin progressing simultaneously. Here, in fact, is a great and opening field for civic statesmanship in association with civic sociology ; and it may be fairly hoped that as these advance together their substantial fruit may become as manifest as that of the association of wise practice with sound theory on simpler levels of science, both pure and applied ; while of the superior spiritual fruit there can surely be no question. Hence Edinburgh is not permanently destined to professional fossilisation, legal and other ; Dundee need not accept ruin by Oriental compe- tition at the lowest level of subsistence ; Dublin will not further subside into squalor, nor Belfast into bitterness ; but each and all revive, through fuller appreciation of their respective possibilities and cultivation of their advantages, and towards com- pleter and higher inter-civic co-operation.
But it is time to return to the more simple and immediate problems of the present volume ; and to make at least some beginning of an answer to the questions the reader may once and again have been asking. How far can all these fine things of housing and town planning survive ? — how can they be made
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to pay ? — are they to be considered as a business pro- position, or are they not ? Let us see.
It is not a little significant to note that the various steps of housing progress above indicated (in Chapter VII.) have not arisen automatically, as so many natural and profitable developments one from another on ordinary economic lines ; nor yet as political advances ; though these are the two alternatives between which most modern minds are confined, even of those who desire further housing and city im- provement. The actual development has not been so simple. Each main advance has arisen with outcry or protest against the prevalent state of things ; and has developed from dreams and schemes which have invariably aroused counter-protest and outcry, those of "unpractical" and "Utopian." Yet these "un- practical dreams " have none the less become resolve and effort, and those " Utopian schemes " have de- veloped with the toil and sacrifices of some one or two or more, but at first few individuals. It is time that this history of pioneering were adequately written, for it is still needed to arouse our cities and our fellow-citizens to day. But here can only be set down a few notes and suggestions. Among the first who attempted the arousal and uplift of the paleo- techriic city from its complacent progress into squalid overcrowding, and this appropriately in Glasgow, we must recall Dr Chalmers with his "Christian Economy of Cities " ; as also his practical endeavours,
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from one of which, for instance, what is now known as " the Elberfeld system " was directly derived. Within the same industrial region of the Clyde, Robert Owen's rare union of speculative and practical endeavours for a time exercised a world-influence, as has been recalled in Mr Podmore's recent biography. As among the foremost pioneers of labour betterment through legislation, Lord Shaftesbury's strenuous life story has also been well told. As Owen was Communist, so Godin was a Fourierist. Carlyle was himself for a time half St Simonian, and his vigorous attacks upon the futilitarian economists and paleo- technic order generally, as, for single instance, on " Hudson's Statue," were continued by Kingsley, our English Lamennais, and later by Ruskin, who was also largely aroused by Sismondi ; and all these idealists have aided the growing disillusionment, the still slower reconstruction, long though these have been of coming, and still imperfect though they be. Octavia Hill's work for housing arose too in factor- ship for Ruskin as her first property owner ; and his " St George's Guild," though unsuccessful, was none the less a project whose ideas and ideals are still suggestive.
Return to the early hygienists, Simon, Parkes, and others, whom we have to thank for pure water, public cleansing, domestic sanitation, and the lowered death- and disease-rates which these imply ; and consider what idealism carried them on for their generation of ardent toil, through towns of material filth and
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381
grime unparalleled in history ; and against apathy and opposition even denser. So even the decent dul- ness of our bye-law streets expresses more idealistic efforts against heavy odds than we nowadays re- member ; while of the succession of model tenements and improving suburbs and artisan villages the philan-
FIG. 54. — Small garden village, utilising picturesque situation at Roseburn on Water of Leith, towards outskirts of Edinburgh. An early endeavour, in pi ogress since 1892.
thro pic endeavours have been already mentioned. Ebenezer Howard with his Garden City is thus but a culminating type of this long succession of practical Eutopists ; while his faithful band of Garden Cities Association shareholders, who, like all other true experimentalists, have waited years for the modest dividend only at length beginning, must also not be forgotten.
Yet the torch must ever be kept alight and passed
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on, if we would not lapse anew, as has so often happened already ; as, for instance, after what was in its day the no less world-wide renown and influence of Robert Owen. True, the torch is now in the hands of a hundred architects and town planners ; and, after finding its first statesman in John Burns, it is now and henceforth a matter of practical politics. Yet " all things achieved and chosen pass " ; and in matters of housing and town planning, even more literally than in others, we have no continuing city. What, then, of further ideals and ideas do we still require ?
Are better housing and town planning, then, always to remain enterprises of idealism and sacrifice, or are they settling down to solid business and profitable return ? In short, will they pay ? And how ? As- suredly yes, as there are yearly more dividend-paying concerns to show — Co-operative Tenants doubtless for choice, but many others as well. It is as with Sir Horace Plunkett's Irish Agricultural movement : there are, and always must be, idealists at the front, with little or nothing beyond their trouble for material reward ; but what they have sown, others already reap. Plunkett's watchword, of " better farming, better business, better living," though for a time incredulously sneered at, now appeals to the Irish peasant by tens of thousands : so why should not " better housing, better living, better business " appeal even more widely in its turn, since true for townsfolk everywhere ?
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383
True, there are none of the brilliant inducements of a really popular City prospectus of the familiar paleotechnic type, with its fluent promises of great
EALI71C TE?!A^T5 LDIITLD.
E5TATE. EALI?IC.
- GCocres HOUSES ~10 per acn RENTS -e|0d*>Clj1
owe !<***«$•*
FIG. 55. — Ealing Co-operative Tenants, Ltd.: Example of a progressive develop- ment, from conventional "bye-law streets" in 1901-2 to garden village type at its best in 1911. (The growth has been from right to left.)
and speedy returns to investors, and its promoters' too frequent performance, of division of their spoil. In sound and steady agriculture, no man makes speedy fortune, be he labourer, farmer, or squire ; and but few ;my fortune to speak of: yet each looks to have
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congenial and honourable occupation, with healthy home, and effective family ; each leaves the land better than he found it ; and so in every way helps to make the nation's fortune, and this at its best, place and people together. In short, then, he has a liveli- hood, which is at the same time a life. So precisely it should be with bricklayer and builder, architect and planner : in the past it has been so ; and already it sometimes is (paleotechnic housing - scandals and building-disputes notwithstanding). As country and town are in these ways maintained, renewed, im- proved, real wealth steadily increases, and in ways far more material than those of the " City," with its financial Utopias, its pecuniary notations, so largely of debts and dreams.
The dawning economic practice and theory of the neotechnic city thus recalls that of the old physiocrats, upon its modern spiral ; but this does not delay the working out of new and appropriate forms of finance. Constructive Consols, as we may fairly call such grow- ing schemes as government building-loans, are an obvious beginning of this ; and their development affords no small opportunity for the Treasury, at present and for a generation to come. The principle of organisation and growth of an agricultural bank remains a mystery to the true " City " mind, often too sunk in the cult of personal gain to grasp even the possibility, let alone the rationality and the prosperity of such banks everywhere, with their awakening of social solidarity towards the constructive rural uses
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 385
[HARTOIN • VI L,LA.- ESTATE PROpoSEO HOUSES
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FT-
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PL&N OF MPROVEMENTS ON GROUND BW8TLY DEVELOPED ON OLDER CONVENTIONS LINE3-
i;
•II
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FIG. 56.— Harton Estate, South Shields. Example of changes from conventional plan and lay-out of former years ; type easily adaptable to bye- law streets anywhere.
386 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
of capital. But as the reorganisation of cities becomes seen as an urgent and vital line of policy (as already in Dublin), the banker must either adapt such methods to urban use, devise better ones, or give place to better bankers who can. The Civic Bank is coming, and the Civic Trust might here be enlarged on as by far the brightest inspiration of Mr Carnegie's many philan- thropic endeavours. In fact new forms of socialised finance without number, and all in friendly co- operation and rivalry towards the common weal. All this social finance is of course not simply a matter of sentiment (though that is needed to win battles), but of science also, and with new types of bank directors accordingly — the engineer and physicist with their economy of energies, the hygienist with his economy of life, the planner with his economy of cities. In paleotechnic finance, the financier with his " credit " reigns supreme, and lends where the immediate return is highest and more and more without a thought of social results ; the accountant, that public analyst of industry and commerce, is but the doctor who looks after him, if not, as sometimes, the detective. But as neotechnic activities and experience advance, we constructive workers will increasingly discern that financial resources, and credit too, are essentially of our own making ; and that the banker, whom we accordingly need, is above all the clear and statesman- like accountant of our complex mutual co-operation and division of labour on the creation of the city's wealth as weal.
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 387
After so much sentiment of cities, so much talk of the future, is it still needful to answer the " practical " paleotect who is convinced that " sentiment doesn't pay," that " human nature is fixed " (in his image), and so on ? But the future is already here, as plainly as are next spring's buds ; and though he may prob- ably never have noticed these either, that blindness will not prevent their opening. This eutopian, con- structive, and neotechnic reorganisation of industry, in city and country alike, is shaping, on plan and in place alike ; it is even beginning to survive against the paleotechnic confusion, and this in terms of its own doctrine, that of struggle for existence, and survival of the fitter ; in this case the more socially and vitally organised. To turn wheels for hire as labourer, and to turn pence for profit as a capitalist, has no doubt been going on so long, and in such large crowds, as to hypnotise their members from seeing what better things are now waiting to be done, and how much more life as well as livelihood may be had from doing them. But let those laugh who win : will it not here be those of direct mind who are set on making better homes and surroundings for wife and weans, and thus get them more speedily ? Not those of indirect mind, who at best set out towards these better conditions through money- wages or profits ; and have thus been going on for genera- tions in bad or worse conditions for all their pains.
Along with the coming in of civics we shall have that of social finance, based on the creation of real
388 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
and material securities, but with it individual and family survival, and this in increasing health. Here, then, we have come to eugenics : and this eugenics proper, free from those elements of fatalism, of crude Darwinism, if not reactionary sophistry, which from time to time reappear to discourage the uplift of the people with the improvement of their conditions.
The idea of Civics and Eugenics in association, and no longer studied apart, as separate specialisms, nor advocated as if they were rival panaceas, might well occupy a new chapter. Suffice it, however, to state two or three main points of experience and conviction without here arguing them. First, that many of those whom eugenists are apt to think of and to tabulate as " degenerates " in type and stock are really but deteriorates, and this in correspondence to their depressive environment. Next, that such types and stocks, which our wholesale paleotechnic experiment of slum-culture has proved most sensitive or adaptive to its evils, should correspondingly no less respond to better conditions, and thus rise above average, as they now fall below. These are not, of course, new hypotheses : they are doctrines experimentally con- firmed throughout history, and at least as old as the gospels and prophecies, which (even their exponents seem sometimes to forget) came largely to express them. The only freshness of treatment now possible (apart from the greatness of the scale of endeavour that slum and super-slum provide) is to restate these doctrines, independently of feeling or tradition ; and
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 389
this in the teeth of the crudely Darwinian eugenists above referred to, and on fuller scientific grounds than theirs, biological, psychological, and social, and of observation, experiment, and reasoning alike ; and to appeal for that fuller experiment accordingly, which no scientific antagonist can fairly refuse. Added arguments may appeal to different outlooks ; to some the economy of hospitals and asylums, of board schools, public schools, and barracks, of reformatories, police courts, and prisons, and so on ; and to others that of sport and gambling, of drink-shops and vice- shops ; and to others again of the lower press, of the idling-clubs, of the bureaucratic institutions, and of course of the professions, all, though variously, con- cerned with the preceding. A complemental line of argument is also to be derived from the moral or material values and productivities of individuals and stocks thus transplanted in course of civic and regional renewal.
If further economic considerations be desired, one more may be offered, and with no less confidence and emphasis. Recall for the last time our too largely paleotechnic working-towns with their ominous contrasts of inferior conditions for the labouring majority, with comfort and luxury too uninspiring at best for the few. Contrast again, with these working- towns, the deeper and more deteriorating correlation of the crude and crowded luxury of the great spend- ing-towns, with the yet more deteriorative labour- conditions which such luxury so especially cultivates
390
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
^- ^,- -
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT
391
and increases. In both these predominant types of our modern community the conditions are thus tending towards deterioration — deterioration obviously more comprehensive and complex than that which military recruiting statistics so tragically express. Hence the
FIG. 58. — The contemporary renewal of Dublin : design for seal of Civics Institute (the body promoting Dublin Civic Exhibition of 1914).
Housing and Town Planning movement must at all costs be speedily advanced, our existing cities, towns, and villages improved, with new garden villages and suburbs where need be, and small garden cities as far as possible. This vast national movement of re- construction must be faced, were it but to create the needful sanatoria of our paleotechnic civilisation ; but, happily, it is also superior in productive efficiency and survival value in itself, and thus demonstrable by
392 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
the accountant and banker as he escapes from the city and learns his work. Healthy life is completeness of relation of organism, function, and environment, and all at their best. Stated, then, in social and civic terms, our life and progress involve the interaction and uplift of people with work and place, as well as of place and work with people. Cities in Evolution and People in Evolution must thus progress together.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
WE set out in the first chapter to effect our escape from the current abstractions of economics and politics in which we all more or less alike have been brought up : and we returned to the concrete study, from which politics and social philosophy actually arose in the past, but have too much wandered — that of cities as we find them, or rather as we see them grow. To recognise the present-day growth of our cities, their spreading and their pressure into new and vaster groupings or conurbations, and to realise these as vividly as may be, first upon the map of our island, and then as it is also discernible abroad, was the cont inued endeavour of the next twro chapters. Thus there emerged the conception of the intersocial struggle for existence, as dependent no longer mainly, as so many suppose, upon the issues of international war. nor even as pacifists assume, upon the mainten- ance of the present stage of industry at its present level, by amicable negotiations. Peace and prosperity depend above all upon our degree of civic efficiency, and upon the measure in which a higher phase of industrial civilisation may be attained in different regions and by their civic communities.
394 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
Thus we came, in Chapter IV., to the criticism of the too loosely expressed, too vaguely described " In- dustrial Age " of our historians and economists ; and to its analysis into two main phases, rude and fine, old and new, Paleotechnic and Neotechnic ; with conclusions frankly critical of our modern towns, as still predominantly paleotechnic, though not without the initiatives of the higher phase, nor the means of advancing into it more and more fully.
Yet the conditions which delay our acceptance of the neotechnic order are not to be dealt with too simply. Instead, therefore, of our deducing from these considerations some simple policy, to be debated and adopted forthwith, as is the method of politics, the need was urged of arousing observation and extend- ing it, of knowing our regions and cities in detail, and of making ourselves more competent practically to share in the arousal and development of our own home-city, instead of merely deputing our responsi- bilities to others through the political or municipal voting apparatus.
There conveniently follows here a chapter (VIII.) on Housing ; and this especially as culminating in the Garden Cities and Garden Suburbs, which have been the best contribution of London and of England generally to the advance of civilisation and well-being during the present century, indeed within the memory or life-time of the generation now maturing, and passing on its impulse.
Towards meeting this need of civic knowledge and
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 395
comparison, travel is far more interesting and in- structive to begin with than can be any more abstract discussion. Hence the chapters ( I X.-XI. ) summaris- ing notes of a recent and typical Town Planning Tour in Germany ; Germany being selected not as the country of late years popularly7 viewed as the most alarming of business competitors, or of naval rivals, but as the region of Europe whose civic progress and development have been most instructive to her neighbours, and from which impulses to the British and American Town Planning movement have been as yet most largely derived.
[n the accumulation of experience, from foreign travel or from observation at home, all may share ; notes and impressions may be accumulated ; pictures, plans, models, and other graphic records may be pooled together. Thus there gradually arise Town Planning Collections, and from these again Town Planning Exhibitions. These were first initiated in Germany ; but are now also being held in this and other countries, witness the " Cities and Town Plan- ning Exhibition" now upon its rounds through various cities. In its growing mass, orderly depart- ments differentiate, and sections of these arise ; so that the various contributors and organisers are fairly on the road towards thoroughness for each division of the field. In short, increase of expert knowledge, accumulation of its necessary material for comparison, reference, and illustration, are going on ; and these together with a wide and growing appeal to the
396 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
public. In city after city there is being aroused a new interest in its historic and social past, a fresh criticism of the advantages and defects of its present state, and a discussion of the possibilities of its im- provement and development.
At this stage City Improvement and Town Plan- ning comprehensively appear ; yet in face of so much tradition of the past, so many suggestions from the contemporary world, a new danger arises, that of imitating what we admire, too irrespective of its differences from our own place, time, or manner of life. We are satiated with the existing medley our cities show of pseudo-classical or feebly romantic buildings, supposed to revive the past, and of the mean streets or conventional villa suburbs, which repre- sent the limitations of their builders. Yet the piercing of characterless perspectives and boulevards through this past confusion or beyond it, which would seem to satisfy too many town planners, or the endeavours of too many schemes to repeat here, there, and everywhere bits of Letchworth or Hampstead Suburb (excellent as these are in their own place and way) are but poor examples of Town Planning ; in fact, they are becoming fresh delays and new obstacles to City Design.
True Rustic Development, true Town Planning, true City Design, have little in common with these too cheap adaptations or copies. On pain of economic waste, of practical failure no less than of artistic futility, and even worse, each true design, each valid
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 397
scheme should and must embody the full utilisation of its local and regional conditions, and be the ex- pression of local and of regional personality. " Local character" is thus no mere accidental old-world quaintness, as its mimics think and say. It is attained only in course of adequate grasp and treat- ment of the whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned. Each place has a true personality ; and with this shows some unique elements — a personality too much asleep it may be, but which it is the task of the planner, as master- artist, to awaken. And only he can do this who is in love and at home with his subject — truly in love and fully at home — the love in which high intuition supplements knowledge, and arouses his own fullest intensity of expression, to call forth the latent but not less vital possibilities before him. Hence our plea for a full and thorough survey of country and town, village and city, as preparatory to all town planning and city design ; and thus as being for the opening neotechnic order (see our initial population- map) all that the geological survey has been for paleotechnic cities ; indeed far more.
Indications towards orderly methods of preliminary survey are therefore offered ; for museum and library, school and college, city and its authorities, which the reader may find helpful, at least suggestive, in his own town. The essential matter for all of us is to become more and more of surveyors ourselves ; it is
398 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
to vivify and rationalise our own experience, which is always so far unique ; as well as to compare and co-ordinate our observations and ideas with those of others. Such growing knowledge is the true and needed preparation towards the needed uplift of Country and Town.
As this ever fresh and fascinating interest in our immediate surroundings gains upon our too common apathy, the citizen upon his daily walk and in his long familiar streets may gradually or suddenly awaken to a veritable revelation — that of the past and present interest, and the unexhausted possibilities of the everyday social scenes around him, as of their actual or latent beauty also. The business and industrial toiler, the mechanical voter and member, the administrative mandarin and routinist — who all, to do them bare justice, have been vaguely striving, however sunless and indoor their lights, to make something a little better of our paleotechnic disorder — may thus be rejuvenated, one and all, aroused, enlivened by a fresh vision, the literal " fresh eye " of art, the open eye of science also. The vital union and co-ordination of these two eyes is the characteristic of the neotchnic order, the fuller event of which only our sluggishness or hopelessness delays. The discourage- ment and cynicism, so common in the past and passing generation, and still affected by the rising one, are not normal attitudes of mind, but are easily explained— even cured. Why the insufficiency of nineteenth- century science ? Mostly too static and analytic
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 399
to come in touch with art. Why that of artistic and other romantic movements ? Too retrospective to come in touch with science. Each involved the failures of both in social and civic application, hence their too general lapse into personal preoccupations, or into mechanical and commercial ones. But now the sciences are becoming evolutionary in their views and presentments, more co-ordinated and social in their applications. The artist is escaping from the mere futile endeavour to reconstruct the shell and semblance of the vanished past : he sees that as its artistic virtues lay in its expression of the vital emotions, ideals, and ideas of its day, so it must be his task to express the best of his own age, and with its fresh resources, its new constructive methods. As scientist and artist make these advances, they begin also to understand and trust each other ; a true co- operation begins. And as this incipient union of science and art becomes realised, our discouragement and our cynicism abate ; before long our inhibitions and paralysis will pass away. Thus a new age, a new enthusiasm, a new enlightenment are already dawning ; and with these the Civic Revivance is at hand.
Regional Survey and their applications — Rural Development, Town Planning, City Design — these are destined to become master-thoughts and practical ambitions for the opening generation, not less fully than have been Business, Politics, and War to the past, and to our passing one. In and through these
400 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
constructive activities, all the legitimate and effective elements which underlie business, politics, and even war in its best aspects, yet in which these so sadly corne short, can be realised, and each increasingly. Already, for thinking geographers here and there, for artists and engineers, for town planners also, the neotechnic order is not only becoming conscious, but generalised, as comprehensively geotechnic ; and its arts and sciences are coming to be valued less as intellectual pleasures, attainments, distinctions, and more in the measure in which they can be organised into the geographical service, the regional regenera- tion of Country and Town.
In all these ways we are learning to realise more fully the spirit of our city or town ; and we thus are able to distinguish, beyond the general improvements more or less common to all cities of our day, those characteristic developments of which our opening future may be best capable, and by which the spirit we have learned to value may be yet more fully and worthily expressed.
Such regeneration is not merely nor ultimately geographic alone : it is human and social also. It is eugenic, and, educational — eupsychic, therefore, above all. Eutopia is thus every whit as realisable an ideal for the opening Neotechnic phase of the Industrial Age as has been that of " material progress," that of " industrial development " — of the existing black and squalid Kakotopias amid which the Paleotechnic
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 401
disorder is now approaching its close. Upon its ashes the planting of future forests is already here and the re beginning ; among its worst slums, upon their buried filth and decay, our children are already rearing roses. As this material and intellectual re- construction, this social and civic transition, becomes rea ised by the rising generation, it will proceed more and more rapidly ; and this whether the cynic relax or harden, whether he come with us or bide. His owji recovery from the blight of disappointments above reviewed, his revival from their prolonged chill, is rot to be despaired of. Contemptuous as he may be in this day of small things, his tone will change wherever this better civic and social order can show, beyond its first weedings and sowings, some earnest of flower or fruit.
So too with the politician, and of each and every colour. For the ideals of each school, the aims of each party — each richer than its rivals admit in men of insight and good-will — could not have arisen with- out some foundations on the past or present life of our communities, some outlook towards their con- tinuance. In that fuller vision and interpretation of the past and present life of cities, towards which we are searching as students — in civics, that last-born of the sciences, yet before long to be the most fruit- ful— and in the clearer forecasts and preparations of the possible future lying before each community, which the corresponding art of civics will also bring
within reach — the prevalent discords of parties and
26
402 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
occupations may be increasingly resolved. Competi- tion may be mitigated, often transformed into co- operation. Even hostilities and egoisms may be raised into rivalries towards the promotion of the common weal ; and thus find their victory and success and self-realisation — through service. In civic science the task of each acquires a directness of responsibility exceeding that of politics, with a signifi- cance and a value which monetary economics missed. Though in an age of science we no longer expect that abstract level of perfection which has been dreamed and phrased by the age of politics, as it waxed and waned, we are compensated by a more concrete vision —that of opening possibilities, of social betterment and uplift — day by day, year by year, generation by generation — of folk, work, and place together.
Within these actual conditions, social harmonies may now and increasingly be composed ; harmonious endeavours recalling, even exceeding, the aspirations of the past, and carried up to and beyond its historic heights of achievement.
Such are the Eutopias already dawning — here, there, everywhere. Despite the present set-back, of European war, with its more than materially destruc- tive consequences, the generation thus coming into activity must henceforward all the more apply its best minds to re-synthetic problems, to reconstructive tasks. Hence the tangled Evolution of Cities will be more clearly unravelled and interpreted, the Revivance of Cities more effectively begun.
SUGGESTIONS AS TO BOOKS
PERSONAL COLLECTION
THE reader should begin (1) with his own city or borough, and with any others familiar to him in youth, in holiday or in travel; (2) with historic and modern cities which for other reasons, historic, economic, cultural, may interest him. For each, its guide-books and other literature, old and new, should be sought for. Old plans, engravings, photographs, etc., should be col- lected. Teachers will find their pupils profit, and even help beyond their anticipations.
GENERAL READING
The Public Libraries now collect civic literature. General and special works of travel and architecture, of exploration and excavation, rich in illustrations of ancient and classic, medieval and Renaissance cities, are needed to form one's mental gallery of the cities of different periods. For the spirit of cities, Ruskin on Venice, Florence and Amiens, and R. L. Stevenson on Edinburgh, etc., have furnished examples and impulse to many later writers.
The Magazines, especially the American, now increasingly deal with civic questions, and such articles are often well illustrated.
The publications of the Fabian Society contain papers and suggestions of value. Their "New Heptarchy Series" (No. 1, Muiiicipalisation by Provinces) partly anticipates the sugges- tion of Chapter II.
403 26*
404 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
HISTORICAL STUDY
As a good introduction to the study of towns and cities may be recommended Town Study, by Miss Penstone (National Society, Westminster). The " Historic Cities " Series (Mac- millan) contains many excellent volumes. For medieval cities Camillo Sitters Die Stddtebau (French translation as IS Art de Bdtir des Villes) is specially recommended. Here, too, the romancer is of service : Readers Cloister and the Hearth is a standard example.
TOWN SURVEYS
Survey of the Life and Labour of the People of London, by the Right Hon. Charles Booth, etc. (12 vols., maps. Macmillan). Its observant study of streets and quarters, and of the con- ditions and life of their inhabitants, may be supplemented by fiction, indeed, since Dickens — as notably Whiteing's No. 6 John Street.
French Literature is here rich ; e.g. Zola's Les Trois Villes : Paris, Rome, Lourdes, for the interaction of city and citizen. Charpen tier's opera of Louise is also noteworthy in this regard.
Returning to surveys, the smallest example, compact and suggestive, is Marr's Survey of Manchester, with map (Sheratt & Hughes, Is.). Rowntree's Poverty and Unemployment (Mac- millan) are of great importance. The relation of economic to civic studies is unusually grasped in an excellent introductory manual, Economics, Descriptive and Theoretical, by Margaret M'Killop and Mabel Atkinson (London, Allman, 3s. 6d.). American Surveys are, however, most abundant. See list of Russell Sage Institute.
HOUSING
Thompson's Housing Handbooks (King & Son) are invaluable for reference.
GARDEN CITIES
Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities (Garden City Association, Is.) has given great impulse to this movement; a fruitful
SUGGESTIONS AS TO BOOKS 405
" Eutopia," now actively continued by the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, with its excellent monthly journal of that name. Mr Culpin's Garden Cities Up to Date may here be recommended.
TOWN PLANNING
HorsfalPs Example of Germany (Sheratt & Hughes, Is.). Of notable stimulus to opinion and municipal action and legislation, Nettleford's Report (on German cities) to the Town Council of Birmingham (Is.) is a good example of municipal inquiry. As also advancing municipal awakening, the work and publications of the " National Housing and Town Planning Association " (Leicester: Henry D. Aldridge, Sec.) must be mentioned, as notably Aldridge's Case for Town Planning. Their town- planning congresses in city after city, as also their town-planning tours to Continental cities, are warmly recommended.
Report of Town Planning Conference (R.I.B.A., 1910) is well worth consulting. The Introductory Address of its President, the Right Hon. John Burns, should be read, its sections noted, and papers consulted. The writer may mention his Civic Survey of Edinburgh, with ample illustrations by F. C. Mears See also City Surveys before Town Planning (Sociological Society), and for its application, e.g. 'Saffron Walden Regional Survey, by F. C. Maynard and Mabel Barker (The Museum, Saffron Walden, 1912).
The Catalogue of the Cities and Town Planning Exhibition (Outlook Tower, Edinburgh, 6d.) affords aid to the further study of civics, with materials as yet available. Besides the architectural and municipal journals, which increasingly con- tain town-planning articles, may be recommended the Town Planning Review, edited by Prof. Adshead and R. Abercrombie (Liverpool : School of Civic Design). Town Planning, by Raymond Unwin (Batsford, Holborn, 21s.), is of technical mastery, wide knowledge and appreciation. Its treatment of architecture and town planning, as no separate arts for art's sake but as the expression of a worthy civic life in the past,
406 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
and of the civic renascence in the present, make this as yet the central work of the civic movement. Of foreign manuals Dr Werner Hegernann's Der Stddtebau (two vols. published), Berlin, 1911 and 1913, may be especially recommended. Ray and KimbalPs bibliography, City Planning, Harvard University Press, i 1918, may be useful.
American town planning literature is also increasingly rich in the qualities above commended ; as notably the general works of C. Mulford Robinson, the special reports on cities such as those of John Nolan, the designs of the Olmsteds and of younger men rapidly coming on.
For a comprehensive discussion of a city, from the standpoint of its parks, gardens and cultural institutes especially, may be mentioned the writer's City Development (Outlook Tower, Edinburgh, 21s.). Later outlines of the writer's teaching may be found in Sociological Papers, and The Sociological Review (Sociological Society), also in University Extension Syllabuses of Lectures on Cities and Civics (University of London), and in various reprints (Outlook Tower, Edinburgh).
INDEX
Abstract and concrete views, neces- sity of latter, 13-16, 21-24. politics v. concrete civics, 132-4. Adam, Robert, architect, 120-1, "124. Esthetic factor as symptom of, and aid to efficiency and health, 89-94. American cities, improvements in,
232-6.
lown designing, 172-3. Anstotle,founder of civic studies, 1 3.
synoptic vision of city, 336-7. Australia, town planning in,
Bartholomew's Atlas of England
and Wales, 21-2. Budgets, Vital, as opposed to
money wages, 71.
Burnham, Mr, plan for Chicago, 48. Bye-law Streets, 151.
Canadian cities and land specula- tion, 256-8.
Cardiff as regional metropolis, 275. Chelsea — Past and Possible, 367-
375-
Crosby Hall, 374.
Ciiiderella, the modern, 125-9, 142. Cries, Evolution of, as a study in
contemporary social evolution,
i-5-
Science of, 267-70.
Spirit of, 359-75-
Study of, 313-28.
Survey of, 329-38.
is preparatory to town-planning
schemes, 344-58.
Cities and Town Planning Exhibi- tion, 12.
it Ghent, 263-90.
scheme and aims of, 259-63.
ases of as exemplified by Edin- burgh, 290-4.
Citizen, Woman as, 83, 143. Citizenship and Travel, 161-75. City regions, see Conurbations. City Survey for Town Planning,
339-58: and Exhibition, Outline Scheme
of, 355-8. City-groups and Regional Survey,
25-45.
Civic Exhibition, uses of, 210. Exhibitions and Town Planning,
246-94.
Observatory and Laboratory, Outlook Tower, Edinburgh, 321-7. Studies, difficulties of approach
to, 3-9.
Survey of Edinburgh, 255-8. v. political attitude in London
affairs, 21-4. Volunteering, 101-2. Civics, absence of interest in, 18-
19.
and Eugenics, 388-92. Laboratory, 258. plea for education in, 296-312. School of, 312, 366-75. as synthetic Social Study, 266-7. and Town Planning, 298-312. Cologne, town-planning visit to,
180-7. Conservation of Nature, arguments
for, 94-101. " Constructive Consols," Social
Finance, 384-8.
Conurbations, or City groups of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Mid- lands, S. Wales, Tyne Valley, Clyde-Forth, France, Germany, United States, 43-49. Co-partnership Tenants, Ltd., 138-
9, 156. Crosby Hall, Chelsea, 374.
407
408
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
Docks, Frankfort, 196-8.
London, 216-8. Dublin, Cities and Town Planning
Exhibition at, 258. Civic Exhibitions, 294. Town - Planning Competition,
262-3, 294.
Durham, as example of change from medieval to modern in- dustrial conditions, 64-5. Diisseldorf, town-planning visit to, 188-91.
Edinburgh, Civic Survey of, 13,
137, 255-7.
Eighteenth-century Town Plan- ning in, 1 20.
and Glasgow contrasted, 40-1. Industrial future of, 377-8. Outlook Tower Committee for
Open Spaces, 102. School of Sociology, 15. Encyclopaedia Civica, 320-1. Exhibitions in general, 246-8.
Civic, 248-50.
Exhibition, Cities and Town Plan- ning, London, 250-7. Crosby Hall, 257. Dublin, 258-9. Edinburgh, 258. Ghent, 259.
Frankfort, new docks as master- piece of town planning, 196-8.
Garden Cities Association, recent
report, 225.
Garden Cities movement, 154-6. Garden Suburbs and Garden Cities,
recent developments, 223-7. Geographical Control, illustrated
in Cities and Town Planning
Exhibition, 280-1. German city, lessons to bejearned
from it, 213-21. organisation and its lessons, 192-
221. Germany, town-planning tour in,
176-91.
Civic Exhibitions in, 249-50. Ghent, Cities and Town Planning
Exhibition at, 263. Gibbon, historian, 120,
Haussmann and Paris lay-out, Health Congresses, 32-3, 43. Heptarchy and modern city-groi
41-2. High dwellings to be discoura^
206-7. Hors" fall's Example of Germi
1.75- Housing, indifference of people to,
132-8
movement, 144-60. Housing 'and Town Planning as
a business proposition, 378-92. in recent progress, 222-45. Howard, Mr Ebenezer, and Garden
City Association, 154-6. Hygiene, Municipal, and its results
for property owners, 150-1.
Ideal conceptions necessary for
every science, 86-8. India, City Planning and imperial
policy, 240. Industrial Age, Paleotechnic and
Neotechnic, 60-83. International Exhibitions, 246-94.
" Lancaston " as name for Urban
Lancashire, 35. London, government of, 21.
Docks extension as example of
bad planning, 216-18. Greater, 25-29, 32, 45. and the Provinces as Spending-
town and Earning-towns, 44. Town Planning Exhibition, 1910,
251-6.
Lyons, Exposition de la Vie Ur- baine, 291-2.
Metropolitan improvements in
Athens, Dublin, England
generally, 227-32. Mews, needed abolition of, 105. Middle Ages, Town Planning in,
10-13.
Model tenements, 151-2. Money Wages and Vital Budget,
71, uo-i.
Nature Study and Town Study
334-6. Neotechnic and Paleotechnic phases
of Industrial Age, 60-83.
INDEX
409
Nolen, Dr John, American town planner, 173.
Norway, significance of in Neo- technic industry, 51-5? 81.
"Nothing Gained by Overcrowd- ; ing," Mr Raymond Unwin's admirable tract, 160.
O:tavia Hill, Miss, housing im- provements, 149-50. Olmsted, American town planner,
173- Oatlook Tower, Edinburgh, as Civic
Observatory and Laboratory, j
321-7.
and Regional Survey, 336. and Spirit of City, 366.
Pjileotechnicand Neotechnic phases of Industrial Age, 60-83.
Paris, Exposition de la Ville de | (Pavilion of the City of), 248-9, 263.
" Parish Pump," and water supply,
42-3-
Piranesi, etcher, 120.
Politicians, as concerned with ab- stractions, 20-2.
Population-map and its uses, 25-45.
" Practical man," his philosophy futilitarian, 89.
" Reform Bill Atlases" of 1832 and
expansion of towns, 208. Regional Survey, 340-58.
needed for City-groups, 25-45. Regnier, Henri de, on great cities,
167. Rey, M. Augustin, architect and
town planner, 179. Robinson, Mulford, American town
planner, 173. Rowntree, F. Seebohm, as social
surveyor, 74, iio-i, 340-1.
Science of Cities, 267-70.
Sitte, Camillo, appreciation of
medieval city as a whole, 200-2. Slums, 116-141. Social Finance, 384-8. Sociological Society and Civic
Exhibitions, 251.
Spirit of Cities, 359-75.
Stuebben, Dr, German authority on town planning, 200.
Suburban communications and suburban development as les- sening congestion in centre, 158.
Survey of Cities, 266.
of Edinburgh, 13, 137,255-7.
Surveys of Cities as reinterpreting Place, Work, and People, 282-6
Regional and Civic, uses of, 32-5.
Tenements in Scotland, 132-141. Town Planning Act, Mr Burns's,
207-8.
Town Planning and Civic Exhibi- tions, 246-94.
and Civics, 298-312.
Education for, 295-312.
Extensions and Open Spaces, 96-101
and Housing as a business pro- position, 378-92.
Institute, 298.
in Middle Ages, 10-13.
and Public Health, 32-4, 50.
Tour in Germany, 176-91.
Ulm, example of wise town plan- ning, 204.
Umvin, Mr Raymond, architect and town planner, 156, 160.
Utopias, indispensable to social
thought, 72-3.
paleotechnic and neotechnic, 74- 6.
Veblen, Thorstein, American econo- mist, 117-8. Vital Budget v. Money Wages, 71,
IIO-I.
Vivian, Mr Henry, M.P., leader of Co-partnership Housing move- ment, 139.
War and struggle for existence
interpreted, 82-3. Woman as citizen, 83, 143.
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Cities in evolution.