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 individual
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, stimulate,
and develop its highest possibility, and so deal
all the more effectively with its material and fundamental
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 condition
of the people kept clearly in view, the interior
circulation and the larger communications from without
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 townplanners,
to whom this book might have been dedicated
;
and if among these an individual name had to
be selected, it should be Raymond Unwin'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 statesmen
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 illustrations
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 Emden, 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 MEANING
. . .
'
. .. .
.
. 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 CITIZENSHIP
. 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 RECENT
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 PURPOSES,
OF MUNICIPALITIES AND GOVERNMENT
.
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-Forth
"
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 workingclass
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 Cowgate . . . .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 correction
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 increasingly
calling for interpretation and for treatment.
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 appearing
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 outlooks
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 taxpayers,
will be sharply awakened to to-morrow.
Berlin and Boston, London and New York, Manchester
and Chicago, Dublin, smaller cities as wellall
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-consciousness
? 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 something
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 inquiries,
but indispensable ones for every student of
civics whether he would visit and interpret worldcities,
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 sounding
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 unthinking,
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 booksellers'
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 twocolumned
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 unmistakably
(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 Edinburgh,
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 sunless
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 arrangement
; 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 employment,
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 enoughhas
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, understand
print better than pictures, and pictures better
than reality. Thus, even for the few surviving
beautiful cities of the British Isles, their few marvellous
streets for choice the High Street of Oxford
and the High Street of Edinburgh a few wellchosen
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 halfblind,
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
1
&
bfl
5
CU
0,
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 anything
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 Cornwall
; 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 unobservant,
that is ignorant, of this concrete geographical
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 symposium,
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 remembered
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 explained
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 distribution
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 comprehensive
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 conferences
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 exceedingly,
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 themselves
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 constituent
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 railways,
which are the throbbing arteries, the roaring
pulses of the intensely living whole ; or, again, suggesting
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 growthprocess
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 Westminster,
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 developments,
and not maintained unduly upon the lines of
history ;
otherwise we shall continue to have local
friction, overlapping and wastage, arrests and encystments,
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 collectively,
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 housegroups,
swiftly spreading into one, and already connected
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 starting,
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 consolidated
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 incomparably
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 enlarged
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 streetquarters
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 transformations,
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 ;
conglomerations
is, alas ! nearer the mark at present, but
it may sound unappreciative ;
what of "
Conurbations
?
"
That perhaps may serve as the necessary
word, as an expression of this new form of population-grouping,
which is
already, as it were subconsciously,
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 conurbation
of the Lancashire millions as "Lancaston."
It is this ''Survey of Lancaston" which its constituent
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 remaining
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
Pemlines to see along the foot of their eastward slope
another dark galaxy of towns. Huddersfield, Bradford,
and their neighbours constitute the worldmetropolis
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 centring
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 extensions
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, especially
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 pioneering,
a noteworthy example of an incipient urban regrouping.
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
38 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 wellpainted
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 nowadays
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 integration,
a higher unity of the body politic. The great
maps of railway systems, which are at once a convenience
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 outnumbering
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 adjacent
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 construction
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 biregional
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 geographical
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 growthprocess
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 ClydeForth
to Scotland, we have in England (1) TyneWear-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 without
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 sanitation
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
44 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
existence by the sheer pressure of their common
interests. Such meetings will gradually increase
in number, in usefulness, in co-operation, and byand-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 Spending-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 rearrangements
: 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 approaching
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 cooperation
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 interpretation
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 evolution,
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 northeasterly
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 competition
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
48 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
almost as Leeds has done York. Yet the organisation
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 Pittsburgh
region is but a conspicuous example of a Black
Country, in which increase and pressure, if not foresight,
must soon involve some conurban survey and
reorganisation. How vigorously the problem of
linking up a great regional metropolis to its surrounding
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 intensive
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 Population
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
50 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 worid-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
WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 51
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 utilisation
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
52 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 development,
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 products
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 population."
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 innumerable
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
WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 53
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 unending
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-phenomenon
and world-impulse a Norseman aristodemocracy
of peace which may yet eclipse all past
achievements, whether of his ancient democracy at
home or even (who knows ?) his aristocracy of conquest
and colonisation abroad among older discouraged
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
54 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 metallurgy.
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 continuous
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 increase
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 Norwegian
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 hopelessly
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 foresighted
citizens already realise, for the loss of her
56 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 Carpathians.
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 process
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
WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 57
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 philosophy
and the faith of Islam. The reason for referring
to such apparently far-away matters will become
clear if they help us to reflect how far our own particular
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 contact,
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
58 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 completely
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 agricultural
order, Mr Gladstone and Mr Asquith, with,
say, Mr Lloyd George and Mr Keir Hardie, have
all been representing the Industrial and Mechanical
WORLD-CITIES AND OPENING COMPETITION 59
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 corresponding
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 personalil
ies we know. But while their discussion concentrates
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, corresponding
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 "Neotechnic.''
Illustration from synoptic view of Durham. Interpretation
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 paleotechnic
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
60
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 61
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 products,
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 psychologists
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
62 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 63
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 -lithie,
we may distinguish the earlier and ruder elements
of the Industrial Age as Paleotechnic, the newer
and still often incipient elements disengaging them-
64 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
selves from these as Neotechnic : while the people
belonging to these two dispensations we shall take
the liberty of calling Paleotects and Neotects respectively.
To the former order belong the collieries, in
the main as yet worked ; together with the steamengine,
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
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 65
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 beautyspot
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 conurbations
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
66 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 expressed
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 without
that elementary physical knowledge which should
underlie every statement of the industrial processsave
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
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 67
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 "
development
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 improvement
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 Workers
1
Unions,
here matters little has been too much interested in
increasing or in sharing these commercial proceeds,
68 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 schoolboy
to millionaire, from education-minister to economist
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 specialised
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
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 69
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 sentiment
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
70 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 71
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.
72 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
PALEOTECHNIC AND NEOTECHNIC 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 rivalling
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
74 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
Eutopia 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, explained
later), relieved by a stratum of moderate
well-being, and enlivened by a few prizes, and comparatively
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 essentially,
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 deterioration
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 constructive
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 wholesome
and delightful, contribution to the sustenance
of their inhabitants which gardens, properly under-
76 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 " Whatsoever
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 paleotechnic
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 paleotechnic
philosophy is thus complete ;
and trade
competition, Nature competition, and war competition,
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 accumulation,
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 employment,
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-
78 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
practically
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 corresponding
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, submissively
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
80 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
such modern life, are yet absorbed and enrolled by it,
and become guardians and functionaries within, or
enter the military caste for external service. Paleotechnic
" 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 wardances
;
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 warcanoes,
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 ripening.
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 correspondingly
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 favourable
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
82 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 Paleotechnic_and Neotechnic
order. And this not merely as regards our manufacturing
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 conversely,
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 completeness
of the bureaucratic and academic organisation
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 moorland
water-supply area, and proceeding inwards to meet townplanning
extensions. These extend naturally star-wise along main
thoroughfares, leaving unbuilt rustic areas between. These kept
from growing together by here placing schools, playgrounds, allotments,
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 workshops
may be grouped into their place, and sites thus left clear for
open spacing. Needed concentration of garages ;
demolition of unnecessary
mews ;
formation of garden-courts, etc. Such minor
changes prepare for greater. Poseidon at Dunfermline.
IN Chapter II. we viewed our immense coalfield citygroups,
our conurbations, as in the process of indefinite
growth ;
while in the next chapter we presented
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 development
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 removable
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
86 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 misemployment,
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 concepts,
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 journeyings, 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 ourselves,
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 presentments
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 meaning,
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 indispensable
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 presentments
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 disappointment
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 townplanner'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 prettification,
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 competition
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
90 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 economists
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 selfsacrificing
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 arrogate
to themselves is but a sophism, self-deceptive
though it be ;
for where they really find their arguments
and take their refuge is in the utilitarian philosophy.
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-
92 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
lation
"
are too obviously in deterioration rather than
in progressive evolution. Nor are these criticisms of
physics or of public health the sternest. The sociologist
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 revolutionary
and radical politician fossilising into doctrinaire.
It cannot be too often repeated, too frequently presented
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 sentiments
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 beginnings,
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
94 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 moorlands
between the rapidly growing cities and conurbations
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 monetary
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
96 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 (henceforth,
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,
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 97
have to see to it that these growing suburbs no longer
grow together, as past ones have too much done.
Towas must now cease to spread like expanding inkstains
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 monuments
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 football
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
98 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 99
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 constructive
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 firsthand
rustic experience that we have forced young
energy into hooliganism ; or, even worse, depressed
it below that level. Whereas the boy-scout movement
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 schoolsystem,
hitherto so bookish and enfeebling, there is
coming on naturally the building of better schoolsopen
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
100 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 101
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 undertaken
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 Government,
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 leadership
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
102 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 industrialists
and town planners have next their far
larger opportunity. The innumerable and complicated
muddle of workshops, large and small, which
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 103
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
104 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 workingclass
dwellings in Edinburgh.
happiness, and therefore to civic economy and productivity,
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 wellknown
case of the West Princes Street Gardens of
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 105
Edinburgh. These as yet retain the bounds of their
former private ownership ; but the map of the aforesaid
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 demolitions
of them would also be possible, with not inconsiderable
gain to the needed open spaces.
Again, the throwing together of innumerable yards
WAYS TO THE NEOTECHNIC CITY 107
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 beginnings
are in actual progress. Such modest initiatives,
moreover, gently break down prejudices, and prepare
the way for that large measure of municipal reorganisation
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
108 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
powers for the suppression of sky-signs, of winking
abominations, and regulation of advertisements generally,
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 rewarded
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 subsequent
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 achievement
of "Industrial (i.e. Paleotechnic) Age" here defined as slum.
Slums commonly so called, their origin and their varieties. Application
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
109
110 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 acceptance,
its repetition everywhere. But taking it biologically,
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 illhoused
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 neoeconomist,
Mr Seebohm Rowntree.1
His achievement
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.
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 111
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
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 : explanations,
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 tumbledown
cottages of the English labourer, the squalid
and super-crowded tenement of the Scot (a prison-
8
114 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 soupkitchens
and mission-halls with which philanthropy so
long relieved itself by sprinkling the abyss ; hence even
the dispensaries, gardens, and other sounder beginnings
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
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 115
116 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 generalisation
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 wr
omen-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
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 117
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 decadence
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-marking,
for a first sociological survey-excursion to contemporary
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 seemingabstruse
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
118 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 119
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
120 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
such fine New Towns, if not a species, are at best a
hybrid of the same slum-formation, no doubt therefore
deserving its special name. This, then, we propose
to call Super-slum.
Does this harsh epithet need explanation, justification
?
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 Edinburgh,
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 convergence
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 wr
ork 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 independent
reinvestigation of that great palace of
122 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 Edinburgh
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 wr
ay 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
&
C
s
'2
I
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 breedinggrounds
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 concentrated
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 settlements
in the West End no less than in the East.
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 125
When the proud sisters set about making Cinderella
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
withdrawing-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
126 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 contracted
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-comradeship
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
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 127
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 godmother,
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
128 CITIES IN7
EVOLUTION
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, Superslum
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 womanfolk,
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, cheerless
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 selfsatisfying,
so positively (and literally) "enchanting."
So, meantime, Cinderella goes on in the cellar-kitchen
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 129
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 henceforth
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
130 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 lifeadventure
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,
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 131
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 expressions
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
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 everywhere
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 completion
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
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 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 Opposition
will afterwards do. Measures of national, imperial
magnitude are not less shrewdly discussed ;
for
among such groups of workmen one used to heardoubtless
may still hear talk as good and clear, as
134 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
shrewd and trenchant, as one gets in club or committee,
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 oldfashioned
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 citiesHistoric
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 concreteness
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,
136 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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, especially
after the Revolution of 1688, as they have
now become of New York and with analogous
effect on land-values, and consequent difficulty of
THE ffOMES OF THE PEOPLE 137
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 contemporary
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-
138 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 shipbuilders
and engineers of Glasgow, all admittedly
second to none in their production, are to be in their
economic consumption second to all, and that permanently
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 elsewhere
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-andby
another, and another, and all on co-operative
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 139
principles, carried a degree further than older Cooperators
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 discouraged,
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 ? Outside
Glasgow one sees Singer's great new Machine
Works surrounded by new tenements, yet almost
140 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 sometimes
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 discontent
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
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 141
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 become
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 individualism
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
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 concreteness.
The old-world rustic order with its working
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.
THE HOMES OF THE PEOPLE 143
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. Individuals
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. Summarising,
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.
144
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 145
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 discouraged
from building, especially in view of the far
higher returns promised by industrial investment, or
10
146 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
* -1 :3$ittt pv** -
*
I
B!&
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 147
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 conditions
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 thenceforward
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 population
had by this time become inured from childhood,
as well as in the main provided by builders
who had themselves been accustomed to such conditions
as if normal ones. Thus arose, unchecked
by sanitary knowledge or regulation and largely upon
the sites furnished by the old gardens and spacious
148 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 amelioration,
and even cure, by any and every method, save
reconstructive ones. First, of course, an overcrowding
of prisons ;
whence appalling consequences, arousing
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, involving
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
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 149
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 abundantly
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 ungrateful
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, represented,
and still represent, the traditional political
economy at its best. Had the like of her but begun
150 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
practice a couple of generations earlier along with
this economic system and theory, far fewer philanthropists
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 clearances,
by rise of adjacent values, by increased competition
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
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 151
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 "Byelaw
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 everreturning
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 responsibilities,
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
152 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 construction
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 accomplish
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
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 153
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-
154 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
mission has lately brought out, a disgrace to civilisation,
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 Association
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 accessible.
We shall return in a later chapter to their
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 155
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
viev r
-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 Letchworth and its making,
but of the movement which it has so predominantly
156 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 Hampstead
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 becoming
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 practicability
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
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 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 CUt* 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-parnrKlp 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,
158 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 Birmingham,
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?
THE HOUSING MOVEMENT 159
I
1a-
"o
160 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
In this connection, as in that of several preceding
paragraphs (pp. 151-7), attention may be called to Mr
Raymond Unwin'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 developments
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
162 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 steamerlines
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 oliveterraces
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 medieval
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
TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 163
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-conserved
instance of what went on in every country,
and to all its great national shrines. The magnificence
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
164 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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-operation
;
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
TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 165
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 explanation
: 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 universitytransforming
and history-making journeyings of
Erasmus are but the highest expression of the teaching
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
166 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 corresponding
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 fundamental
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
TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 167
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 !"
168 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 schoolrooms
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 contractors,
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
TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP ]69
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 intercourse,
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
170 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 continuous
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 industries
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
TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 171
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 neotechnic
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 individualistic
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
172 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 reorganisation
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 corresponding
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 worldexhibition
returned to stay. The rebuilding of San
Francisco at least records its lost opportunities.
Each of these American designs, beyond its impressive
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
TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 173
monotonous ? From ancient Egypt to eighteenthcentury
London, to nineteenth-century Paris, twentieth-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 architects
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 conspicuous
expressions, are no doubt on the way
towards reconciling the claims of civic greatness with
those of domestic and neighbourhood life.
174 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 unparalleled
energy and vital endeavour, the evolutionary
promise of America, it is to German cities that we
must now conduct the reader. For the vast development
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 preoccupation,
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 abbreviated
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
TRAVEL AND ITS LESSONS FOR CITIZENSHIP 175
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 fertilisation
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 representative
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, concerned
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
176
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 177
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 inaugurated
for Britain, must thus be accelerated and
influenced at many points and in innumerable individual
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 something
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 learnings
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
178 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 Alderman
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
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 179
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 Committees
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 Professor
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 extraordinarily
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 therefore
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 representative
variety of our members, the German cities
have taken us most seriously, and we find that their
splendid hospitality at once elaborate and dignified,
180 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 illustrated
and documented, and quaintly but intelligibly
translated, which set before us first the small beginnings
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
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 181
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 circulation
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-
182 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
mobile Club had turned out to do us the honours of
their city ;
and so in long procession, with his Worship
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 " Ehrentrank,"
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
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 183
little of Germany save what the passing day might
tell them, and that not previously at first handshould
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 disadvantages
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-
184 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 applications
to industry and commerce, have been foremost
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 politicallyminded,
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 therefore
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
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 185
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 perambulation
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 overload
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 performance,
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,
186 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 something
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
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 187
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 everywhere
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
188 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 perhaps
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 faades upon three streets
and to dominate them all, and stands out conspicuously
against the grey or white buildings of its neighbourhood
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 portraiture
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,
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 189
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 individualisation.
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 speculation,
by exploitation or taxation, by conquest and
indemnity. Spiritual powers are for practical purposes
considered as extinct ; save, indeed, that the
190 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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,
A TOWN-PLANNING TOUR IN GERMANY 191
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 rehabilitation
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
192
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 193
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 correspondingly
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
13
194 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 timeand
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 advertisements
on every wall, obstacles on every side, noises
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 195
in either ear, that we can but muddle through, arriving
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 overlooked
and therefore destroyed, but which we are
106 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
now recognising when almost too late as an indispensable
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
198 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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-
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 199
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 progress,
and of imperial greatness. But do these professional
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
200 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
plans and projects for the future, we are impressed
by their high average of skill, intelligence, and foresight,
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 contemporary
expansion, is, despite all his unquestionable
merits, too much of a Haussmann redivivus ; and he
also, in his restrained way, loses that touch of lightness
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
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 201
appreciation of the medieval city as a whole what
the romantic revival did for its cathedral or townhouse.
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 buildings,
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 clearances,
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,
202 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 memorable
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 architectural
criticism, it is time to be coming to the
economic one that this comprehensive town planning,
with all its merits, has brought with it not
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 203
only municipal outlays which the town must pay
for, but an unforeseen and not easily prevented development
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 comprehensiveness*
of the German conception of town planning,
we also learn here in Germany to think of the loosespread
English towns with increasing respect. That
Battersea is in many ways but a poor little place
beside Berlin is obvious enough ; but for its population
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 wellto-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 transformation
more and more if not indeed to the type
204 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 enhanced
by free speculation, how can the German city
practically hope to reduce these, to admit of loosening
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 eastwards
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-
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 205
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 improvement
and development in many ways, of profiting
too by the example and criticism of others,
yet always in its own way and upon its own foundations.
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 correspondingly
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.
206 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
Learn from Germany ?
Certainly yes ! Imitate
Germany ?
Certainly no. With all her plannings,
with all her commanding foresight, her public enterprise,
it is still from Letchworth 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 tradition
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' tenements
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 gynecologists
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
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 207
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 wellbeing,
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 middleclass
flats in high dwellings as these become vacated
for separate houses, or garden-suburb cottages more
readily within their means. Thus also a too disastrously
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
208 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
to be praised. We are not ripe for such magnificent
schemes ;
we are not to be trusted with such sweeping
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 meanwhile
? 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 ;
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 209
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 cottagerows,
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
14
210 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
also, than is the vast mass of nineteenth-century
growth.
Practically, then, our immediate need is educational
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 Exhibitionshowing
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 preserves
in literal word, that not only
"
politics
"
but
"civilisation" itself are essentially products, not of
the individual, but of the city. Of such civic exhibitions
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 comparison
has reached a widely comprehensive international
level in Lyons with 1914.
Too many of our German hosts, and still more, I
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS
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 dwellings
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 psychology
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 development.
But where is this movement to be adequately
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
initiated ? Well, why not in Liverpool ? in Birmingham
? 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 statesmanship
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 manufacturing
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
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS
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 painting
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 statesmanship
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 initiatives,
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 individuality
and legitimate civic pride, their vigorous grappling
with present-day problems, and, above all, the
breadth and boldness of their preparations for an
i
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 burgomaster
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,
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 215
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 easychair
;
and of naval alarms we have surely had enough
and to spare also. But there remains a real and useful
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,
216 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS 217
(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 engineering
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 dockland,
and this to a degree unprecedented in paleotechnic
civilisation, are becoming realised ; presumably
also the corresponding exacerbation of those recurrent
labour troubles of which London Docks afford so
218 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 forecasts,
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 bythe DockAuthorities?
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
GERMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS
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 wateringplaces
to improve their attractiveness, where shall we
find any serious or sustained example of the collaboration
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 ?
220 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 opportunity.
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 improvement
of towns and cities on their administrative
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
GEllMAN ORGANISATION AND ITS LESSONS
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 development
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 hydrahended
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 situation
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 movements,
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 comprehensive
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 developments,
along with more adequate education technical,
222
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 223
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 unhappily
also, as well as towards amending the paleotechnic
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
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 225
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.
15
226 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 halfgeneration
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 outwards
in well-nigh every direction through surviving
medieval and renaissance beauty, and thence pass
onwards into the growing area of modern town planning,
without finding those zones of more or less paleotechnic
character with which we are so familiar. Such
a city must thus rapidly overtake those of earlier and
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 227
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
228 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
elsewhere for this highest of town-planning opportunities.
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 something
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 accordingly
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 become
acutely felt ;
yet the memories of her metropolitan
past have long been renewing into an approaching
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 undergone
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
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 229
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, throughout
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 AngloCeltic
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-
230 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 administration
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 TownPlanning
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
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING
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 coordination
of the increasing labyrinth and evercomplicating
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
London. Railway development is of course necessary ;
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 concrete
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 contemporaries
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
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 233
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
234 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 outline
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 optimistic
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 parkways
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,
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING
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 progressso
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 disastrous
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
236 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 237
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 homestead
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 wellbeing
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 willingness
of the new colonist to "
rough it a bit," so training
him to accept (and to maintain) conditions of toil
and even imperfections of sanitation he and his womenfolk
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,
238 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 substantially
coincide with that to which we came for
our own cities (Chapter VI.), in their characteristic
product, tendency, and line of paleotechnic evolution
as in too many points attaining positive slumdom,
at others too largely on the way thither ?
Australia, with its remoteness, its dreaded desertinterior,
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 congestion
is more continuous and more severe. Yet
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 239
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 exponent,
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 generation
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,
240 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 populationgrowth
to plan for : the authorities of Calcutta are
at present studying the best utilisation of a substantial
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, Improvement
and Town Planning of the City oj Calcutta
and contiguous Area, a report by request of the
Calcutta Improvement Trust. Interest in city conditions
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 constructive
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
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING
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
rustic alike, with bettered agriculture and civil
engineering ;
and further, an urban civilisation far
more hygienic and more finely skilled, better organised
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 correspondingly
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-
16
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 pseudoutilitarian,
of which the supremacy in India, as at
home, is
happily at length abating. With all these
constructive changes must naturally come an increasing
well-being, both rustic and urban ;
and its expression
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,
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING
greater and stronger because more constructive than
any preceding expressions of regional and civic wellbeing,
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. Encouraging
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 successful
examples, as of rural housing in Ireland, and by
bitterness of need, as in the recently realised condition
244 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 agreement
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 treatment,
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
HOUSING AND TOWN PLANNING 245
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 sympathy
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. Initiative
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 journeymen,
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 implements
and remains in the caverns of Dordogne which
246
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 247
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 progressive
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
248 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
classification and comparison, as museums of industry,
introduced by their organiser in 1856 and '67, the
social economist Frederic Le Play, whose various influences
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 surpassed,
that of Germany after 1809. General exhibitions
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 249
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 Exhibition
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 wellbeing
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
250 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 improvement
also awakened and above all, until the
wide discussion of Mr Burns's Town Planning Bill,
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 251
and its successful passage as an Act, gave concreteness
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, geographical,
statistical, etc. Its representations to the Guildhall
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
252 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 readable
and well-illustrated volume, but thanks to the
real merit of the exhibition and the value of its discussions,
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,
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 253
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 expression
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
254 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
various designs for the development and reorganisation
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 Acropolis.
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 townhall
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 255
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.
256 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 presenting
the problems of the city's opening future,
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 257
and as conditioning their treatment also. This
exhibit was therefore felt to present a needed suggestion,
and even nucleus for a further exhibition of
smaller but more typical and systematic character.
Hence, with the help of a small committee, representative
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
17
258 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 University
of London.
The exhibition was next invited by the Corporation
of Edinburgh, to whom the extensive galleries
of the Royal Scottish Academy were granted for the
purpose. The exhibition was opened by Lord Pentland,
then Minister for Scotland, and by the Lord
Provost, each delivering an address. Success far exceeded
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 exhibition
organised by the Women's Health Association
of Ireland, from which it went to Belfast to cooperate
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 constituted,
and has since entered upon an active career ;
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 259
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
260 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 sociologists
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 consciousness
of the immense importance and growing significance
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 261
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 fellowcitizens,
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,
262 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 inventive
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 impulse
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 263
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 thoughtout
and most vitally executed International Exhibitions
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 generation
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
264 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 opening
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 correspondingly
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 265
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
266 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 investigate
it more clearly. Still, in medicine and public
health, it is found best to let diagnosis precede treatment,
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 267
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 metropolis
to dominate the State. So far we see to-day ;
hence our civic observations, speculations, and controversies,
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.
268 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
Education likewise, and at all its levels, from Kindergarten
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 townplan
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 269
four Civic Palaces above referred to. Local consciousness
diffuses and intensifies ;
it also widens into comparison
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. Ofits practical bearings and applications
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.
270 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 illustrative
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, architectural
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 271
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 conspicuously
derived from them, at this or that period
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS
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 preeminence
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 concentrations
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 Kingsway 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 completely
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
18
274 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 concentrated
; 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 increasingly
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 275
the Glasgow School" has become a better recommendation
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 exhibited
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 expressed
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
276 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 277
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 worldmasterpieces.
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 provincial,
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
278 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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-
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 279
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 ChildWelfare
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-
280 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS
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 considered,
but then too independently of their essential
origin and history. This proposition, of course not
unknown to historians, yet never sufficiently emphasised,
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
282 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 outlying
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 283
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 townssay,
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
284 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
HoN-xthcCa
l.ik.nln vimKiiM-.if
-All
Mill'.,)
* 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 mentioned,
and with due appreciation. As regards
civic theory and sociological interpretation, however,
with all their intensiveness, these seem scarcely as
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 285
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 intermiriglings
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 unravelling
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 preserved,
whose types are less protean, and whose
286 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 demography,
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 expressing
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 attractive)
contains, on the side of studies, some diagrammatic
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 287
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 reorcliestration
of all the industries and arts, recalling,
nay surpassing, the Acropolis or the Cathedral of
288 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
old ? How, in short, is Civic Aspiration to be
developed, guided, applied to the needed Art of Citymaking,
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 surpassed,
with a regional and civic life again affirming
themselves ;
and its exhibition thus peculiarly displayed
in its year of festival the varied productivity,
elemental and higher, of a race and region of peasants,
craftsmen, and artists. As her " Floralies
"
periodically
affirm, here are the flowers and fruits of her
staple industry of horticulture, with the cultureelements
which this has ever carried with it, becoming
sociologically expressed as well as exuberantly displayed.
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 ?
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 289
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 exhibition,
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 energetically
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-
19
290 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 meaningless,
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 development
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS
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 Planning
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 accordingly,
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 intellectual
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 ambitious,
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
292 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 Edinburgh
; 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 wintergarden,
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
TOWN PLANNING AND CIVIC EXHIBITIONS 293
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 doubtful
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
294 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 townplanning
schemes as well ;
indeed over and over
again.
The return of this exhibition to Dublin was, however,
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 restored
metropolitan development involved by recent
political changes, this repeated recall of the exhibition
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 involves
not only the continuance of the Dublin Survey
initiated three years before, with its fuller development
and wider diffusion, but correlation with the
Dublin Town Planning Competition already referred
to (pages 262-3) ; and, with all these, the experimental
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 understand
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 particular,
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
295
296 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 discussing
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 superactivity
in our national politics, with transition to a
new and more harmonious phase, that of comprehensive
endeavour in civics. For here not only
immediate city improvement, but fuller city development
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,
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 297
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 Hampstead,
the University School of Architecture has
also acquired the needed department. The recognition
of this new subject is thus practically assured,
as in every great educational centre, a matter henceforth
but of funds and organisation, as these of the
awakening of citizens.
Among town planners themselves the need of
298 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 administrative
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 constituent
and for his member, for the minister and for
his officials.
So far, then, the preceding argument will hardly
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 299
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 topdressing
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 traditionally
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,
300 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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, dreadnoughts,
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
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 301
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 application
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-enthusiasms
and changes socially practicable; and this
throughout all seven days of the week. What the
302 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 application
in civic development and in individual citizenship,
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 surpassing
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, correspondingly
reappears.
What is it that we most value in our Occidental
civilisation ? Recent writers, of the Prussian school
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 303
especially, have insisted upon the importance of racial
and barbarian origins, of militant aristocracy and conquering
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 ; however
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 exceeding
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 intellectual
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
304 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 ? whirling
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 Kropotkine,
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
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 305
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 developments,
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*aleoechnic
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 correspondingly
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
20
306 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 superslum
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
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 307
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 expression
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 conditions,
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 foresight,
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
308 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
brought about by the tremendous town-planning
movement of fortification, as developed in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and of which
modern boulevard-rings are but superficial mitigations.
Haussmann, cutting new interior boulevards
through Paris at the expense of gardens and workingquarters,
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 economically
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 landlord'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 functionaries
; while in both these classes of expenditure
the State was proceeding no less merrily also.
Fortunes were quickly made in building and con-
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 309
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 playing-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,
310 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 innumerable
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 reproduced
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 ?
EDUCATION FOR TOWN PLANNING 311
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 conurbation,
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 comparison
with all others. In Germany and America
the same deepening studies are pressing; so that
if the very words sociology and civics had never
312 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 drawingoffices
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 powerhouse
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 publicspirited
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 citizenship.
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 bringing
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
313
314 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 determined
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 experiences
are doubtless those of many. The naturelover'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 inadequate.
An escape from libraries -and lecturerooms,
a return to direct observation is needed ;
and
thus the historic culture-cities classic, medieval,
renaissance with all their treasures of the pastmuseums,
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 psychology,
the struggle towards vital education, the renewal
of ethics each in its turn may seem the safest clue
THE STUDY OF CITIES 315
with which to penetrate the city's labyrinth. Geographer
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 Exhibitions,
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 metropolitan
cities which dominate and exploit them. Yet
at another time the evolutionary secret seems nearer
316 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 anthropologists.
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 acknowledge
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 established
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
THE STUDY OF CITIES 317
there mutually helpful and stimulating groups,
which may be again the condition of further progress,
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
318 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 interrupt
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 freemasonry,
which rapidly and hospitably assimilates
THE STUDY OF CITIES 319
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 mainjvarp 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
320 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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, throughout
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 experimental
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 organising
endeavours towards realising some of these
worthy ends.
Primarily in this way, yet also from the complemental
side of nature studies and geography, there
have been arising for many years past the beginnings
of a Civic Observatory and Laboratory in our Edinburgh
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
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
THE STUDY OF CITIES 323
occasion, is set forth the analysis of the outlook in
its various aspects astronomic and topographical,
geological and meteorological, botanical and zoological,
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
324 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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.
THE STUDY OF CITIES 325
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 successively
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
CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 difficulty
of Old Edinburgh ; a work of housing, of repair
or renewal, of increase of open spaces and
when possible of gardening them ; of preservation of
historic buildings, of establishment of halls of collegiate
residence with associated dwellings, and so on.
Each piece of work has been undertaken as circumstances
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
THE STUDY OF CITIES 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, Continental
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
328 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 correspondingly
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 endeavours
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 significance
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 Congress
: 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
329
330 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 collection
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 corresponding
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
THE SURVEY OF CITIES 831
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 betterment,
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 proposal
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 Congress
; and was actively discussed at a special
332 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 proposal
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 organisations
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). Interest
was successfully aroused ; the museum was
improved, and not simply in various of its collections,
THE SURVEY OF CITIES 333
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 reconstructed
in vivid perspective at various phases of
its past. From this local exhibit has easily been
arranged a smaller type-collection, which now circulates
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
334 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 relatively
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 complement
of the nature study (which these departments
have more or less recognised), and a means of correlation
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
THE SURVEY OF CITIES 335
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 beginnings
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 regional
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 successfully
by a fresh and younger group, notably the
active spirits of the Saffron Walden Survey aforesaid,
Miss Barker, Messrs Maynard and Morris, and others
336 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 committed
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 vegetation
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, psychological,
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
THE SURVEY OF CITIES 837
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 continuance
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 CitizenSunday
discourses which these encourage or inspire.
It is but bare justice to recognise that fundamental
338 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
and vital civic endeavours have never been lacking
from their remotest past, and that modern developments
and adaptations of these are springing everywhere.
The disunion of the churches and their
supersedure by the State are, of course, older than
the paleotechnic dispensation, but their long ineffectiveness
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 groupemotion,
a group-enthusiasm, which makes and remakes
the cities : and the cry,
" O Jerusalem ! Jerusalem
!
"
will never fail of echo and response throughout
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 development
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 preliminaries
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 understood
as preparatory to Government action ;
and
thereafter offer to the consideration of municipal
authorities and their town planners a final and
339
340 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
reasoned argument for civic survey before town planning,
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 corresponding
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
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 341
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 employment
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 Edinburgh
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 corresponding
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
342 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 flashlight,
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 understanding,
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
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 343
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
344 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 speechifying
on the other. Hence before inadequate (though
wholesale) national bill-drafting, and its resultant
interminable bill- and act-amending, all too inadequate
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 convincing
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 memorandum
prepared in the Sociological Society's Cities
Committee, and addressed to the authorities concerned,
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
CITV SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 345
necessary for this Committee to enter into its discussion
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 municipal
officials, by public utility associations, and by
private individuals, expert or otherwise, which, whatever
their particular merits, are not based upon any
sufficient surveys of the past development and present
conditions of their towns, nor upon adequate knowledge
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
346 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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. Without
this, municipalities and others interested are in
danger of taking the very opposite course, that of
planning before survey. Our suggestion towards
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 347
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 Development,
Communications, Industry and Commerce,
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
348 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 manysided
preparation geographic, economic, artistic, etc.
which is required for this most complex of architectural
problems, one implying, moreover, innumerable
social ones.
If the calling in of expert advice be moved for, the
Finance Committee of the Town Council, the ratepayers
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
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 349
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 exceptions,
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 comparatively
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
350 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 monumental
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
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 351
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.
352 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 353
the very minimum wherever adequate civic bettermen;
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 professional
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 outlines
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
354 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 contributions,
its public and journalistic discussion, its
general and expert criticism the municipal authorities,
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 corresponding
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
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 355
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, indispensable
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 therefore
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
356 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
in town-house, museum, or library ; or, when possible,
in the city's art galleries.
The following general outline of the main headings
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.
CITY SURVEY FOR TOWN PLANNING PURPOSES 357
(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 indications
that they may before long be found worthy of
358 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
municipal adoption. The recent example of the
corporation of Newcastle-on-Tyne, towards establishing
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 preparation
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 interpretative
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 ?
359
360 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 committee
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
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 361
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.
As 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 individual
ones, themselves sadly degenerate from a
362 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 everchanging
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
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES
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 : movement
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 accompanied
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 personality,
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
364 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
town planner, but at best a too simple engineer, who
sees only the similarity of cities, their common network
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 interpretations
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
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 365
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 entrance
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 himself
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
366 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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, occupations,
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.
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 367
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 Dunfermline,
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
368 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
only of the borough but of the nineteenth century,
since it is the first modern church with a stonevaulted
roof that is, the first real attempt to construct
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 influential
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 significance,
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 Zinzendorfs 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 indicative
of the twofold needs of progress of sciences and
humanities together, than the Moravian pedagogue
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 369
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,
370 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
is the later, yet completer development (since including
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
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 371
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
372 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
history of Chelsea opened ;
as in its turn the cloistercity
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 movements.
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
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 373
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
374 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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, wellnigh
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 ;
THE SPIRIT OF CITIES 375
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 :
corresponding
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
376
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 377
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 inconsiderable
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 horticultural
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 consider
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 paleotechnic
view of cities, as nowadays broadly similar,
378 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 competition
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 completer
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
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 379
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 improvement.
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 "unpractical
dreams
"
have none the less become resolve
and effort, and those "
Utopian schemes
"
have developed
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 paleotechriic
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,
380 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 paleotechnic
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 factorship
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 deathand
disease-rates which these imply ;
and consider
what idealism carried them on for their generation of
ardent toil, through towns of material filth and
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 381
grime unparalleled in history ; and against apathy
and opposition even denser. So even the decent dulness
of our bye-law streets expresses more idealistic
efforts against heavy odds than we nowadays remember
;
while of the succession of model tenements
and improving suburbs and artisan villages the philanFIG.
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
382 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 ? Assuredly
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 ?
ECONOMICS OF CITY BETTERMENT 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 development,
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
384 CITIES IN EVOLUTION
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 livelihood,
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, improved,
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 growing
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 '""" ? J
FT-
U^-ESTATE
PL&N OF MPROVEMENTS ON
GROUND BW8TLY DEVELOPED ON
OLDER CONVENTIONS LINE3-
i;
II
My
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 philanthropic
endeavours. In fact new forms of socialised
finance without number, and all in friendly cooperation
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 statesmanlike
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 probably
never have noticed these either, that blindness
will not prevent their opening. This eutopian, constructive,
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 generations
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 confirmed
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 viceshops
; 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, concerned
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 workingtowns,
the deeper and more deteriorating correlation
of the crude and crowded luxury of the great spending-towns,
with the yet more deteriorative labourconditions
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 reconstruction
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 twr
o 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 maintenance
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 " Industrial
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 extending
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 responsibilities
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 instructive
to begin with than can be any more abstract
discussion. Hence the chapters (
I X.-XI. ) summarising
notes of a recent and typical Town Planning Tour
in Germany ; Germany being selected not as the
country of late years popularly
7
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 Planning
Exhibition" now upon its rounds through
various cities. In its growing mass, orderly departments
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 improvement
and development.
At this stage City Improvement and Town Planning
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 represent
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 expression
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 treatment
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 masterartist,
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 populationmap)
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 discouragement
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 nineteenthcentury
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 cooperation
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 regeneration
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
there beginning ;
among its worst slums, upon their
buried filth and decay, our children are already
rearing roses. As this material and intellectual reconstruction,
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 without
some foundations on the past or present life of
our communities, some outlook towards their continuance.
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 fruitful
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. Competition
may be mitigated, often transformed into cooperation.
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 significance
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 destructive
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 collected.
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 suggestion
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 (Macmillan)
contains many excellent volumes. For medieval cities
Camillo Sitters Die Stddtebau (French translation as ISArt 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 conditions
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.
Charpentier'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 (Macmillan)
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 townplanning
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 contain
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, necessity
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 speculation,
256-8.
Cardiff as regional metropolis, 275.
Chelsea Past and Possible, 367-
375Crosby
Hall, 374.
Ciiiderella, the modern, 125-9, 142.
Cries, Evolution of, as a study in
contemporary social evolution,
i-5Science
of, 267-70.
Spirit of, 359-75Study
of, 313-28.
Survey of, 329-38.
is preparatory to town-planning
schemes, 344-58.
Cities and Town Planning Exhibition,
12.
it Ghent, 263-90.
scheme and aims of, 259-63.
ases of as exemplified by Edinburgh,
290-4.
Citizen, Woman as, 83, 143.
Citizenship and Travel, 161-75.
City regions, see Conurbations.
City Survey for Town Planning,
339-5 8
:
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, Midlands,
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 industrial
conditions, 64-5.
Diisseldorf, town-planning visit to,
188-91.
Edinburgh, Civic Survey of, 13,
137, 255-7.
Eighteenth-century Town Planning
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 Planning,
London, 250-7.
Crosby Hall, 257.
Dublin, 258-9.
Edinburgh, 258.
Ghent, 259.
Frankfort, new docks as masterpiece
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
1.75Housing,
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 Spendingtown
and Earning-towns, 44.
Town Planning Exhibition, 1910,
251-6.
Lyons, Exposition de la Vie Urbaine,
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 Neotechnic
industry, 51-5? 81.
"Nothing Gained by Overcrowd- ;
ing," Mr Raymond Unwin's
admirable tract, 160.
O:tavia Hill, Miss, housing improvements,
149-50.
Olmsted, American town planner,
173Oatlook
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,
42-3Piranesi,
etcher, 120.
Politicians, as concerned with abstractions,
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 lessening
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 Exhibitions,
246-94.
and Civics, 298-312.
Education for, 295-312.
Extensions and Open Spaces,
96-101
and Housing as a business proposition,
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 planning,
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 economist,
117-8.
Vital Budget v. Money Wages, 71,
IIO-I.
Vivian, Mr Henry, M.P., leader of
Co-partnership Housing movement,
139.
War and struggle for existence
interpreted, 82-3.
Woman as citizen, 83, 143.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
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LONDONBY
SIR LAURENCE L. GOMME, F.S.A.
This important work is written with all the historical
conviction of this prominent authority. As late Chief
C.erk of the L.C.C., Sir Laurence Gomme had ample
scope to gratify his interest in the antiquities of the
Metropolis, and the present work is a statement of what
he deduces. His aim is to show the continuity of
London history from the Roman times, and the effect
ol that continuity on the capital itself to-day. One
original aspect of the historical question is the way in
which he shows that the Roman idea continued through
the centuries when London was under English kings.
This he endorses with much new evidence and new
reading of old evidence. Apart from this point, there
is much to stimulate enthusiasm for London, and much
valuable metropolitan lore set forth in historical detail.
The volume is abundantly illustrated in a special
photogravure reproduction with twenty-four full-page
views of old London and portraits of those connected
with it, whilst it has over a hundred other pictures.
"This able and learned book." Truth.
"
Londoners who love their city will be grateful to Sir Laurence
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