Home Town Helps — "The City Beautiful"

1913

Does Not Mean Prettiness

Term "City Beautiful" Has Been Much Misunderstood — Real Ends to Be Attained.

That term "the City Beautiful" sounds like tying pink ribbons around lamp posts. Even as applied to civic art, as distinct from city planning, the name is sufficiently misleading. It is the idea indicated by that unfortunate, falsifying phrase that Raymond Unwin, in his admirable "Town Planning in Practice," lampoons.

"Civic art is too often understood to consist of filling our streets with marble fountains, dotting our squares with groups of statuary, twining our lampposts with wriggling acanthus leaves or dolphins' tails, and our buildings with meaningless bunches of fruit and flowers tied up with impossible stone ribbons."

It is not the prettifying of cities that is the object of city planners. The building of intraurban, intercity and interstate transit facilities, the construction of sewers, of gutters, of garbage disposal plants, the destruction of unsanitary areas to be replaced by decent housing, the development of port facilities, the upbuilding of the health of the city through the creation of playgrounds and parks — parks primarily as health agents, not prettification measures — all of these and others are the chief aims of city planning. There will, of course, be a necessary improvement in the appearance of the city as the natural result of skill in city building, and that improvement is an entirely proper object, but it ought not to be permitted to paralyze the whole movement through the creation of an entirely incorrect understanding of the ends to be attained.

Other phrases have been suggested, which are useful as antitoxins to that "City Beautiful" phrase, but they generally accent some one phase of city planning at the expense of the others. "The City Practical," "The City Useful," "The City Scientific" are examples. One of the best is negative. It was coined by Robert W. De Forest and represents the movement as aiming to exterminate the "Unregulated City Hideous."

But no phrase yet suggested epitomizes the wide range of city planning, and least of all can it be said that the "City Beautiful" is the central thought of its exponents.