Rational land use planning can stop at no property line or jurisdictional boundary. Streams flow, trafficways must interconnect, and polluted air, for example, is wafted wherever the winds may blow it.
Every land or water holding abuts other properties and should respect the relationship. Every downstream property is influenced by all that transpires in the watershed above. Each habitation, community, and municipality affects and is affected by conditions within its surrounding social, economic, political, and physical region. Since these are not synonymous, what should the regional boundaries be? They will vary, depending upon the nature of the study.
For too long the city has been considered a circumscribed entity. By tradition we have thought of the city versus the farmland, the city versus the suburbs, the city versus the townships or counties in which the city lies. Many serious and often needless conflicts have resulted from a lack of coordinated planning. There have been costly duplications of administration and facilities. Animosities have been generated that will for years preclude intelligent cooperation on even the simplest of interarea issues. There is, however, a wise and growing tendency to plan for the development of the city and its surrounding matrix as a unified region.
Concurrent with the trend to broaden the scope of planning from an urban to a regional basis is the drive to structure or restructure residential districts into more self-sufficient neighborhoods. These, surrounded by greenbelts and connected by freeways to the manufacturing complexes, the urban cores, and the outlying hinterlands, give promise of a more humanized living environment.
Our homes, neighborhoods, and cities are telltale physical expressions of the way we think and live. Their plan layout and form are in a state of continuous evolution to reflect our changing ideas about living, as we constantly seek a better fit with our natural and built environment. With this in mind, it might be well to study the broad outlines of our present patterns of social and land use organization. Perhaps with better understanding we can improve the relationships and our way of life.
I would beg my fellow conservationists, as I would beg my fellow farmers, to realize that we must quit thinking of our countryside piecemeal, in terms of separate products or enterprises: tobacco, timber, livestock, vegetables, feed grains, recreation, and so on. We must begin to think of the human use of each of our regions or localities as one economy, both rural and urban, involving all the local products.
Wendell Berry
The Family
In our democratic society, as in most cultures of the past, the family is the smallest and yet most significant social unit.
Family lifestyles as we know them today are far different from those of the log cabin, the working farm, or the plantation. The free and rigorous life of the pioneer has given way to the more ordered routine of the farmers on their acreage or the conformity of confined city dwellers. Parental attitudes have changed. The discipline of once paternal- or maternal-dominated family living has become more relaxed and casual. Salons, grand balls, and great dinners are almost a thing of the past, as are the chambermaid, the cook, and the well-trained staff of servants.
The problem of the landscape architect—even as of the architect, the town planner, the engineer, and indeed all men of good will—is now, and will be more acutely every day, the development of ways and means for bridging the gap between town and country, the antithesis between urban and rural life—more specifically between the masonry, the asphalt, and the dingbat construction of the town and the quiet greenery of meadow, forest, and shore. How to open up the town to the country, how to bring the town culturally to the country—that is our primary problem.…
Garrett Eckbo
Life has become so automobile-oriented that many families have taken their cars into their homes or parked them at the front door. Homes and gardens are less pretentious, less ornate. They are mechanized, less cluttered, more open. Front and rear porches have disappeared along with the stable and alley. The wide front lawn has been replaced by the walled garden courts of patio homes and town houses. Exterior house walls have been opened up to let in more air and sunlight and to enframe the views of garden, sky, and landscape—to provide more contact with nature and with the stone, water, and plants of the earth. As concepts of family living have changed, the forms of our dwellings have changed to reflect them.
The Cluster
It has been learned that from 3 to 12 families constitute the optimum interfamily social group. If their dwellings are clustered in a convenient plan arrangement, kaffeeklatsches, parties, children’s play and games, and “get-togetherness” on a first-name basis are natural and spontaneous. Neighbors borrow cups of butter or sugar and exchange views and form friendships at the parking compound; children share toys and turf. Ideally, the families in such a cluster would have the same general goals and standards but a diversity of individual status and interests.
To see the interdependence of city and country, … to appreciate that there is a just and a harmonious balance between the two—this capacity we have lacked. Before we can build well in any scale we shall, it seems to me, have to develop an art of regional planning, an art which will relate city and countryside.…
Lewis Mumford
As long as man’s activities are in sympathy with nature, or are on so small a scale that they do not interfere with nature’s self-renewing cycle, the landscape survives, either in a predominantly natural form or as a balanced product of human partnership with nature. But as soon as the growth of the population or its urban activities are sufficient to upset nature’s balance, the landscape suffers, and the only remedy is for man to take a conscious part in the landscape’s evolution.
Sylvia Crowe
As a group exceeds 12 to 16 households in number, it becomes unwieldy, tends to lose its cohesion, and automatically breaks up into smaller social alliances.
Any architect worth his salt knows that a building is not designed by putting together a series of rooms. Any building that is good has an underlying design concept that binds all the parts together into a whole. Without this it is not architecture. Nor does a designed neighborhood consist of a series of “projects” that are strung together. There must be an underlying design plan that binds together the pieces and makes the neighborhood an entity.
Edmund N. Bacon
The most desirable plan arrangements for the cluster will afford an off-street parking compound, freedom from the noise and danger of passing traffic, pedestrian interaccess, and a focal place or feature such as a central lawn panel or a children’s play court. The grouping will have a harmonious site and architectural character and physical separation from adjacent clusters or structures. Compactness and the sharing of party walls are the mark of many successful clusters, where the normally unusable side-yard space is squeezed out and aggregated for group use and enjoyment.
The physical plan can seldom if ever, create a “neighborhood” except in the most abstract use of the word. It can, however, very materially assist other forces in fostering a true neighborhood feeling.
Henry S. Churchill
The Neighborhood
A neighborhood is at best a grouping of residential clusters around shared open space. It should be small enough to encourage participation of all families in group activities and large enough to contain a convenience-shopping center, playfields, and buffering. An enduring neighborhood plan and one that has accommodated changing concepts of social behavior and education is one formed around and providing safe walkway access to an elementary school. In size and population it is shaped to yield or contribute to the approximate number of students required for a balanced school facility. It is not essential, however, that either the school, shopping, or other shared amenities be centered within the single neighborhood confines. It is often more desirable that they be placed outside or between subneighborhood enclaves of varying character and size and be laced together with interconnecting greenways, walks, and bicycle trails.
In the well-conceived neighborhood, peripheral roads will provide access and vehicular connection to free-flowing regional parkways. Through traffic will be precluded. Ideally, the neighborhood will be composed of planned tracts grouped around and between lobes of semiprivate park that open into the larger community school-park system. Each such tract, developed as an entity, would be freed of all arbitrary lot restrictions. On the PUD model its proposed layout would be subject to review by the planning agencies solely on the basis of livability. Land use patterns and densities, as approved, would then be fixed by covenants between the landowners and the municipality.
Five cul-de-sac arrangements that provide a cluster of family dwellings.
The Community
A planned community, as differentiated from the neighborhood, would at best comprise two or more neighborhoods separated by greenbelt spaces. It will be interconnected with controlled-access parkways and oriented to the more important communal features and nodes. It need not be contained within the limits of a city. Satellite communities, or the larger new towns, spaced out in the open countryside and served by freeways and rapid transit, have many advantages.
Planned communities with regional character. © D. A. Horchner/Design Workshop; © D. A. Horchner/Design Workshop; Robinson Fisher Associates; © D. A. Horchner/Design Workshop
Neighborhood plan diagram number 1: approximately 1200 families (one-third in multifamily units).
Neighborhood plan diagram number 2: approximately 1200 families (one-third in multifamily units).
Neighborhood plan diagram number 3: approximately 1200 families (one-third in multifamily units).
Being more self-sufficient, they reduce the number of external vehicular trips required and thereby conserve fuel and energy. They are less disruptive of neighboring trafficways, land uses, and established systems than if developed within or immediately contiguous to other residential areas. All planned communities, whether perforce impacted or formed more freely as satellites, have the great advantage of being brought on area by area and stage by stage in accordance with a balanced overall conceptual diagram. The ultimate capacities of roadways, schools, parks, and freshwater supply mains, for example, can be predetermined and facilities phased in without the need for costly periodic enlargement or reconstruction.
Planned community with conservation as the organizing element. Barry W. Starke, EDA
The land use patterns, traffic-flow diagrams, and population cap will be determined initially. There will be defined flexibility zones (the more extensive the better) within which the approved uses and number of dwellings may be freely arranged on the basis of subsequent and more detailed study and changing long-range needs. Environmental protection covenants, performance standards, and design guidelines are to be formulated and enforced from the start. Such planned communities, having clearly demonstrated their many benefits, are the promise of the future. There can be no better answer to regional growth and resource management.
A neighborhood of apartment dwellings, each related to an exterior approach and an interior social court and to a large central park area. The relatively high density of the apartment groups yields large open space where it counts.
Theoretically, the ideal community will be composed of several to many interrelated neighborhoods of diverse social, architectural, and landscape character. Each neighborhood, while separate and unique, will share common pathways, amenities, and open space. When fully built out, in a process which may take several decades, a community will usually include and support a high school and one or more junior high schools, each within a school-park campus and community center, with game courts, sports fields, meeting rooms, auditorium, and library. There will be a community shopping and business office mall as well as the deployed neighborhood convenience centers. A transit station and light manufacturing or business campus are normally planned, and a wide range of cultural, recreational, and employment opportunities afforded.
Every community needs a symbol of its existence. Much of modern community frustration has come into being because a symbol of the visual meaning for its life is missing. Because no symbol is found, there is no center on which to focus life.
Ralph Walker
Since we are creatures of our environment, better communities will follow as new and better concepts of community living, land ownership, and land use evolve. The superior community, as we envision it today, will be distinguished by the following features:
- A natural periphery demarcated by highway, greenbelt, river, ridge, cliff, ravine, or other physical barrier.
- Community identity. Orientation to a symbol, such as a high school, church, shopping center, or park that gives it focus and meaning.
- Provision for outdoor communal activities in clean, sunlit, and shaded spaces uninterrupted by vehicular traffic flow.
- Minimum friction and danger in use of the automobile, coupled with maximum convenience. Free-flowing trafficways, with no on-grade crossings.
- A community open-space framework, around which the buildings are grouped.
The City
A city is a large and densely populated center of economic, social, and political activity, having a relatively fixed geographic position and specific governmental powers granted to it in charter form by the state. It is the center of an urban culture.
Our cities can be only as good as enlightened public opinion permits or demands them to be. This education and persuasion toward civic action and progress is an often neglected phase in contemporary urban planning.
The city in its regional context: Waikiki. Camera Hawaii, Belt Collins
The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theatre of social action—and an esthetic symbol of collective unity. On the one hand it is a physical frame for the commonplace domestic and economic activities; on the other, it is a consciously dramatic setting for the more significant actions and the more sublimated urges of human culture.
Lewis Mumford
The form of a city will be, at best, the three-dimensional expression of its varied functions working well together. A good city is expressive of our times, our technology, and our ideals. It is an evolving organic entity, with its roots in the past and its orientation to the future.
In the city …
People go where people are,
sit where there is place to sit,
look when there are things to see,
and like face-to-face encounters.
The thriving city must be a growing, functioning organism, requiring and capable of providing light, air, water, food, circulation, elimination of waste, and regeneration, or else it will wither and die. Desirable city features include:
- The most of those high qualities that civilization has attributed to urbanity; the least of those evils that the ages have condemned
- A harmonious fit with the natural landscape setting and surroundings
- A cohesive and comprehensible metropolitan diagram
- A well-designed, compact, and intensive central business district (CBD) with outlying satellite subcenters—all interconnected with rapid transit
- A differentiation of zones—the center city, inner city, outer city, and suburbs—each with its own development codes and regulations
- A circumferential freeway and parkway system with radial boulevards to the CBD bypass ring road
- Separation, by alignment and level, of vehicular accessways and transportation routes
- Traffic and parking accommodated but made incidental to the higher aspects of city life
- An expression of the city dweller’s gregarious nature—congregating places where people can meet to exchange goods, services, and ideas—the marketplace, the shopping mall, the park, the square, and the plaza
- Human scale, so that city dwellers, workers, and visitors feel themselves in agreeable proportion to what they see and hear and so that they share a sense of being pleasantly related to the city and thus to the ambient world
- Handsome architecture and landscape architecture enriched with sculpture, murals, and fountains
- Order, efficiency, beauty, and a milieu conducive to the development of the full human powers
- Clean and healthful surroundings
- A free-flowing and easy transition between urban, suburban, and rural areas
In every historical epoch except our own, the cultivated and influential person, the civilized, polite and urbane citizen, inevitably lived within the city.… Indeed the classical names for the city express these very virtues: civis—city; civilized, civilization; urbs—urbane; polis—polite and elegant.
Ian L. McHarg
Freeways should surround rather than penetrate the center city, with collector-distributor highways providing interarea movement. The construction of freeways through an urban center where traffic is already at a saturation point can only result in chaos.
The Region
A region is a large and generally unified, but loosely defined, geographical area that provides the supporting base for one or more centers of population concentration. To simplify the complex problems of regional planning almost to the point of naïveté, it might be proposed that each region should be analyzed and planned for its highest and best use in relation to the land and its resources.
Regional planning is the conscious direction and collective integration of all those activities which rest upon the use of earth as site, as resource, as structure.…
Lewis Mumford
Planning on a regional basis, whether in terms of geographic, political, social, or economic regions, provides a more comprehensive and effective frame of reference than the consideration of any community, town, city, or county alone.
The new regional pattern will be determined by the character of the landscape: its geographical and topographical features, its natural resources, by the use of land, the methods of agriculture and industry, their decentralization and integration; and by human activities, individual and social in all their diversity.
Ludwig K. Hilberseimer
A regional plan that pieces together the disparate plans of the various member jurisdictions and blankets the whole with a layer of further restrictions does more harm than good.
Worthy regional planning starts with an understanding of human needs and the landscape.
Regional planning agencies are at best nonpolitical and service-oriented. They provide planning coordination, regional information, and technical assistance to the member jurisdictions. Their primary functions are:
- Data gathering, analysis, storage, and distribution
- The preparation and updating of a comprehensive regional plan
- The conduct of studies for various planning elements such as housing, transportation, and open space
- The provision of liaison with state, federal, and local jurisdictions
- The processing of state and federal grants-in-aid to local governments
- The recording and coordination of all proposals relating to the protection, alteration, or development of salient land and water areas
- Recommendations as to the significance of regional environmental impacts
The gridlocked metropolis (hypothetical), still all too common in urbanizing America. Negative features:
• Building frontage on trafficways
• Central business district (CBD) transected
• Traffic friction and congestion
• Commercial strip coagulation
• Sprawl and scatteration
• Resulting vacancies and obsolescence
• Lack of facile interconnection between activity centers
• Disorganization and inefficiency
• Unconsolidated land use districts
• No open-space system or preserves
• Lack of coastal and waterway protection
• Little response to topography
N/A
Urban service lines. As a device to ensure infill and protect open-space lands, some municipalities are including as an element of their comprehensive plans a map of urban service lines showing by year the limit to which public services are to be extended. Within the period noted, development will not be permitted beyond the designated line.
A city for the twenty-first century (hypothetical). A prototype conceptual plan for phased long-range development, redevelopment, and renewal. Shown is a conceptual plan, or model, for a typical urbanizing region. As can be seen, it preserves and conserves (protects) the best of the dominant topographic features. Development areas and routes of interconnection are fitted compatibly with the natural landscape enframement. N/A
The land use and trafficway patterns of each region, if well considered, will respond to the “want to be” of the land. They will preserve the scenic superlatives, protect areas of ecological sensitivity, and ensure the integrity of the natural systems. They will recognize and adjust to the natural land and water forms. They will avoid the delays and hazards of on-grade trafficway crossings. They will provide economies in travel time and distance and in construction, operation, and maintenance costs. They will provide a setting within which and around which development may take place freely and creatively as the direct expression of human needs.
The goal of regional planning is to develop through intergovernmental cooperation the best possible diagrammatic framework of land uses and trafficways, to provide the evolving performance standards required to ensure environmental integrity, and then to encourage the free and creative expression of private enterprise.
The highway and adjacent uses. A highway almost anywhere in almost any state: fifty driveway entrances per mile; unplanned, unzoned, unintelligent—a study in friction, confusion, inefficiency, and chaos.
Planned, zoned, intelligent: highway traffic flows freely; functions are grouped; homes orient to park; school, church, and shopping areas have access.
Desirable features of the region will include:
- Compact and thriving, off-highway neighborhoods, communities, and cities within an open-space surrounding
- Phased development contours precluding the uncontrolled growth and sprawl of urbanizing areas
- The “land banking,” in public or tax-adjusted private ownership, of all holdings not foreseeably needed or desirably suited for development
- Wide, free, uninterrupted preserves allocated for farmsteads, forest, recreation, wildlife management, and conservation
- The location of all new activity centers in optimum relationship to land and water resources, topographical features, and other planned uses
- Nonfrontage expressways and circumferential and radial roadways with parkway characteristics providing free-flowing regional access to urban centers and satellites
- Direct rapid transit interconnection of the regional hubs with subsurface or overhead approaches to the station plazas
- Separate, consolidated transmission-truckway corridors linking major production, processing, and distribution centers
- The programmed provision and strategic allocation of all basic service centers and amenities needed for living the good, full life
- A unified park, recreation, and open-space system
- Arterial parkways, with scenic-historic byway loops traversing areas of natural and historic significance
- A long-range land and water management program based upon ongoing ecological studies and a regional resource inventory
- Development based on the highest and best use of the land and performance standards, rather than blindsided conventional zoning
Regional development should respond to the “want to be” of the land. EDSA
Regional planning agencies can be effective only if
- The state officially prescribes the boundaries of each region.
- Regions are defined along county lines, since socioeconomic data are normally acquired on a countywide basis.
- County membership in, and support of, the regional agency is mandated by the state.
Most municipalities and regions have zoned development land far in excess of foreseeable needs. Not only does this encourage scattered parcel-by-parcel construction, it results in tax assessments disproportionate to productivity and drives homeowners from their properties and farmers from their farms.
Wildlife habitat preserved: Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. Randolph T Hester Jr. and Marcia J. McNally, Community Development by Design
New construction would be better accommodated by the infill of existing centers until they were built out and unified. When additional land might then be needed for development, new cohesive communities could be defined through the process of comprehensive planning.
The regional open-space frame will embrace and separate the various land uses and activity nodes. It will provide background, base, and breathing room, and when so arranged as to preserve the best of the landscape features, it will give each region its unique landscape character.
The limited access concept of freeway development should be extended where feasible to all through or distributor roads within the metropolitan region. While building frontage would not be permitted on these thoroughfares, connections to local streets would be encouraged and facilitated.
Perhaps the most important task of regional planners is to define and help to bring into being a spacious, interconnecting, and permanent open-space preserve as the framework for ongoing development.
Greenways are paths of movement for vehicles, pedestrians, and migrant wildlife. Ways because they are paths; green because they are enveloped in foliage. They may vary in scale from a woodland trail to a national parkway through mountainous terrain.
The open-space preserves of a region should be so designated and landbanked. Only those agricultural and recreational uses that would cause them no significant harm should be permitted, and land should be taxed accordingly.
Blueways trace the flow of surface runoff—from rivulets to streams, to broad and sometimes raging rivers. Like the veins and arteries of the human body, they tend to serve as an interconnecting system. They transport nutrients from the uplands, and feed and drain the bottoms. Within the flow ways are to be found the most verdant foliage and abundant bird and wildlife populations of each region. In all seasons they ameliorate the climate and add interest to the landscape. They are best preserved in their natural state.
When and only when adequate public services can be assured through the economic extension of existing trafficways or mains (or by a centralized installation, in the case of satellite communities) should “preserve” land be rezoned and development be allowed to proceed.
Greenways and blueways. Tom Fox, SWA Group; Adam Jones, Courtesy of Jones & Jones Architects & Landscape Architects, Ltd.; Adam Jones, Courtesy of Jones & Jones Architects & Landscape Architects, Ltd.; Michael Parker, Courtesy of Jones & Jones Architects & Landscape Architects, Ltd.
As a counteraction to urban sprawl with its destruction of wildlife habitat—many landowners are establishing their own on-site habitats and wildlife preserves.
It is foolish to permit satellite shopping malls to be built if they reduce the vitality of existing commercial centers.
New regional shopping nodes should be permitted only as their need can be demonstrated.
By a single regulation, and without cost, the most rational of all open-space diagrams could be established by and for each region. To wit:
From this date neither unauthorized construction of any type, nor the destruction of natural vegetation shall be permitted within the 50 year flood limits of a stream or waterbody.
The result would be a protected flow way of privately and/or publicly owned lands that would reduce the surface runoff of precipitation, reduce erosion and siltation, conserve water, moderate the extremes of climate, and enhance the landscape. As a border to tillable or buildable lands it would provide windscreen and flood control.
When by reason of public ownership, or by easement, a greenway can be aligned through or contiguous to a blueway corridor, the benefits are manifold.
A complete regional recreation system provides insofar as feasible the whole range of opportunities, from the child’s play lot within the residential cluster to the state or national park.
On the ascending order of social groupings—i.e., home, cluster, neighborhoods, community, etc.—each may be expected to provide for its own particular recreation needs. Beyond these, two or more groups or jurisdictions may jointly provide additional facilities such as public swimming pools, tennis centers, or golfing that perhaps neither could provide alone.
Larger installations such as zoos, botanical gardens, or major marinas require areawide support, as do expansive regional parks and forest preserves.
On an even grander scale, state and national parks provide for recreation within the context of scenic or historic superlatives.
It is believed that the evaluation of sound regional development can be reduced to four simple tests:
- Does it belong? Is the use of the land or water area consistent with federal, state, and regional plans and with community goals?
- Is it sustainable? Can it be built without exceeding the carrying capacity of the land? The use should not be permitted if it would impose significant long-term stress on the natural ecological systems. Should there be question, the filing of an environmental impact assessment might well be required.
- Would it be a good neighbor? Is the proposed use complementary and complimentary to the existing and proposed uses in the neighborhood? Or would it have harmful physical or visual effects? Would it reduce property values? Would it destroy, or preserve, cherished landmarks? A well-conceived, well-designed project should enhance, not harm, its environs.
- Are adequate levels of public service in place? At all stages of project construction and use, the proposed improvement should have available all public services required, without overloading of trafficways, power or water supply systems, storm sewers, waste treatment plants, fire and police facilities, and (in the case of residential development) schools and recreation areas. Not only should all such facilities be online when needed, but the local government should also be assured that the developers and users will bear their fair share of the cost.
If these four conditions can be satisfied, there should be no cause to oppose the project, for it should become a welcome regional asset.
Zoning as commonly practiced is not workable.
There are three approaches to regional planning—four, really. The fourth is the do-nothing course of just letting things drift—to watch the landscape disintegrate area by area, until it comes apart at the seams. Scatteration, traffic glut, and loss to the many for the gain of the few are the inevitable consequences.
In the creation of healthy environment nature’s collaboration is not only important, but also indispensable.
Eliel Saarinen
In a more rational approach, the regional jurisdictions form a voluntary association comprising selected local officials as representatives. With a small paid staff, they undertake studies and make recommendations to the various responsible agencies. Such an association has the advantage of political clout, but the disadvantage of political jousting.
A more effective advisory group is civic in nature. In form it may well be a citizen’s committee or council initiated by one or more public-spirited individuals who assemble a team of nonpolitical but highly respected leaders in various aspects of regional life. Representatives of business, educational, financial, scientific, social, labor, and agricultural interests are among the potential participants. Again, with a small but well-trained staff they define the goals and objectives and set about on a comprehensive course of phased studies. The council may meet as a body no more than once a year, but their consensus recommendations, when adopted, carry impressive weight with the officials and agencies concerned.
A third means of addressing regional issues is the formulation of an official regional planning commission with responsibility for certain metropolitan programs. Such a metro commission receives its charter from the state, with well-defined powers and provisions. The commission members are elected by the regionwide constituency. A professional director and staff are appointed. In the areas of assignment, the focus is on coordinated planning, and construction and operation in the best interest of the entire metropolitan region and all of its citizens.
The carrying capacity of a land-water area or a natural ecological system is the limit of its ability to support a population without significant degradation or breakdown.
The citizens of each locality and jurisdiction like to handle their own affairs—and should, within reason. It is reasonable that they have their own school boards, committees, councils, and elected officials to keep an eye on things and respond to local needs and aspirations.
It is unreasonable, however, that within a cohesive metropolitan region such common and overriding concerns as transportation, transit and transmission, regional land use planning, resource management, law enforcement, and recycling should be handled in such a fragmented and inefficient manner as is usually the case. Most cities, towns, and boroughs now do their own independent thing—in disregard and often defiance of what goes on just across their borders. Those responsible for essential regional services are thus confounded by the need to patch together a host of disparate local programs rather than put into operation coherent, regionwide plans. It can be seen that the multitudinous duplications of staff, administrative overhead, and equipment—let alone the resolution of conflicts—is costly and wasteful in the extreme.
By all reason, most (though not all) regional planning, construction, and implementation procedures should be systematized and centrally controlled. This calls for a metro form of government. Where this has been most successful, several basics have applied:
- The metro government concept was voted into being by all citizens affected, after an educational campaign and series of public forums.
- The enabling legislation and charter delegate broad powers, but limit the initial responsibilities to a few well-defined programs that are clearly of regionwide scope. Responsibilities can be expanded from time to time on the basis of proven performance.
- Certain powers and tasks are reserved to the local jurisdictions and officials to ensure their independent authority and support.
- The metro council membership is composed of elected leaders representing the various interests of the region.
Generally it can be stated as observable fact that whatever is good for the region as a whole is good for the whole of its people.
Town and country must be married and out of the union will spring a new life, a new hope, a new civilization.
Ebenezer Howard