Erosion of cities by automobiles entails so familiar a series of events that these hardly need describing. The erosion proceeds as a kind of nibbling, small nibbles at first, but eventually hefty bites. Because of vehicular congestion, a street is widened here, another is straightened there, a wide avenue is converted to one-way flow,

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And here we come to the third kind of city neighborhood that is useful for self-government: the district. This, I think, is where we are typically most weak and fail most disastrously. We have plenty of city districts in name. We have few that function. The chief function of a successful district is to mediate between the indispensable, but

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Public housing is not properly an end in itself. It can only be justified as a means to an end of making our cities fit places in which to live. What kind of public housing should it be?…The tenant’s rent should be increased with his increase in income and he should not be evicted as an over-income tenant. When his increasing rent reaches the point

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If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. These high costs of occupying new buildings may be levied in the form of rent, or they may be levied in the form of an owner’s interest and amortization payments on the capital costs of

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The answer we long ago accepted went like this: The reason we need dwelling subsidies is to provide for that part of the population which cannot be housed by private enterprise. And, the answer went on, so long as this is necessary anyway, the subsidized dwellings should embody and demonstrate the principles of good housing and planning. This is a

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When sufficient people begin to stay in a slum by choice, several other important things also begin to happen. The community itself gains competence and strength, partly from practice and growth of trust, and finally (this takes much longer) from becoming less provincial. These matters were gone into in Chapter Six, the discussion of neighborhoods.

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His remarks sum up, in an oblique way, virtually the intellectual history of city planning. Dr. Weaver lists three stages of development in the history of scientific thought: (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity.

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The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city

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The way to raise the tax base of a city is not at all to exploit to the limit the short-term tax potential of every site. This undermines the long-term tax potential of whole neighborhoods. The way to raise a city’s tax base is to expand the city’s territorial quantity of successful areas. A strong city tax base is a by-product of strong city

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