Download Planning and National Recovery, 1933 Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Excerpt from Planning and National Recovery, 1933: National Conference on City Planning, New York As with all our other ideas, activities, institutions, the depression produced a challenge to city and regional planning to justify itself and furnished a test of the strength of the movement. Municipal and other local budgets had been carrying modest appropriations for planning commissions and staffs, which offered the proponents of reduced public expenditures a ready target; and the degree to which these appropriations withstood this attack might be treated as one measure of the public consciousness of the importance of and meaning of planning. Those who understand planning realize that the value of a piece of physical development, such as a street or building, turns primarily upon its location and, also, upon its timeliness; for these govern or produce the social utility of the development. A period of depression is a period of challenges of values, demands for justification of that which the communities have built or propose to build. A depression period is, consequently, one which peculiarly needs to nurture and apply the principles and techniques of what we call planning. Furthermore, a period of depression is one of lessened construction. It gives a breathing spell, in which the designs for the future can be prepared free from the boom types of pressures; and therefore ought to be a period in which planning is more rather than less emphasized than theretofore. Where there is understanding of planning, belief in it, consciousness of its significance, theoretically depression should result in the preservation and increase of appropriations for city and regional planning rather than their destruction or decrease. Measured by this test, there is some ground for sadness, self-questioning and anxiety. 1931 was the peak year in planning commission activities. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.