Saving open space is only part of the job, but it is as good a way as any to come to grips with the basic problems of shaping metropolitan growth. For all the host of methods, the essential technical question boils down to this: To what degree can we use the police power to order better land use—and to what degree do we have to use eminent domain, that is, pay for it? We have to use both, of course, and other tools besides, such as tax power and the power to provide services or to withhold them. But...

The best way to save land is to buy it outright—or in legal parlance, buy the fee simple. There are a lot of other ways to save land short of outright purchase, and later I am going to go into them in some detail—in particular the ancient device of the easement. It is obvious, however, that if there is to be any permanent open-space plan, the public, through its agencies, must have the money and the power to buy land. The existence of this power has a very great bearing on all of the other devices. If a...

In discussing gifts and purchases of land, we have been talking largely of the fee-simple acquisition. This is the clearest and surest way to save land, but it can take us just so far. The number of landowners who can afford to give away their land is limited, and though more should be walked up the mountain, only so many will go along. Nor can we buy up the land. There is not enough money. Even were public acquisition funds tripled, they would fetch only a fraction of the landscape. If we did have the money, furthermore, what would we...

Many people believe that the real key to open-space preservation is not to be found in zoning or in buying land or rights in land. The best way to save open space, they believe, is to take some of the tax pressures off the people who own it. The approach they recommend is “preferential assessment” and it is simplicity itself; while the wording of the statutes gets extraordinarily verbose and complicated, the guts are contained in one sentence: Assessors shall assess open space only at its open-space value.

Through this small change in the law, it is believed, great expanses...

Once land is secured, how can it be kept secured? Thanks to new federal and state programs, we are saving open space at a greater rate than ever before. Unfortunately, thanks to other state and federal programs, at an equally growing rate we are losing open space we already saved—to highways, cloverleafs, dams, sewage plants, post offices, commercial parking lots, and public projects of one kind or another. On balance, we are still adding more open space than we are losing, but not by so very much and there is a qualitative loss that can be immeasurable. Most of...

I have been talking about ways and means of saving open space. Now let me turn to the question of what open spaces should be saved and how the choosing of them should be done. One would think this would be the easy part. It is not. Planners now see open space as a key to the design of regions and the process of selection has become a technically formidable task. Therein lie some of our difficulties.

Open-space planning used to be simple. In the archives of every city are series of plans, many dating back to the City Beautiful...

The most ambitious effort that has been made to apply the containment principle is the London Green Belt. How it has worked out is a matter of considerable relevance for us. Most of the regional designs now being worked up for our metropolitan areas borrow heavily from English theory. The New Town and green belt concepts were not only pioneered in England but also have been applied there on a large scale, and it has been widely assumed in this country that the application has been quite successful.

It has not been, but the assumption is important nonetheless. It buttresses...

To point out the dangers in the broad-brush approach to open space is not to argue for small spaces instead of big spaces. Both kinds are needed, and we certainly should try to get as many big open spaces as we can. I do not know of any local government that has acquired too much open space, and the danger that any will acquire too much seems rather remote.

The danger is that we will not get the smaller spaces that we ought to get now. Time is not on the side of the broad-brush approach. There is just so...

Instead of laying down an arbitrary design for a region, I have been arguing, it might be in order to find the plan that nature has already laid down. One way would be to chart all of the physical resources of the region—especially its drainage network—and see what kind of picture emerges. The approach sounds ridiculously simple, but in the few instances where it has been tried, it has seemed an almost revolutionary concept. City and regional planning commissions have been staffed primarily by people concerned with physical design and development. The people who think mostly about nature,...

We have been considering ways of saving open space. Now let us turn to the question of how to develop it There is a conflict, to be sure, but you cannot grapple with one problem and not the other. People have to live somewhere, as it is so often said, and if there is to be any hope of having open space in the future, there is going to have to be a more efficient pattern of building. The mathematics is inexorable. The only way to house more people is either to extend the present pattern of sprawl and cover...

The next step, many people believe, should be the building of whole new towns. Better big subdivisions are not enough, they say; what we should do is carry the cluster concept to the ultimate; group not only homes, but industrial plants, hospitals, cultural centers, and create entirely new communities. These would not only be excellent places in their own right; together, they would be the last best chance of the metropolis.

It is a hope that at last seems nearer the threshold of reality. Developers have been moving in this direction and across the country a dozen large-scale communities have...

I have been arguing that the building of self-contained new towns is not a very good way to expand the metropolis. This is not to argue against building more and better large-scale developments and “planned communities.” We are going to get them in any event. The trend is unmistakably toward the large-scale approach in land assembly and development, and it is a good trend. It is a much more efficient way of using land than the usual miscellany of small subdivisions, and a far more efficient way of providing housing and community services. Dollar for dollar, the planned communities that...

In visiting various housing developments, I have been puzzled by a curious fact about children’s play areas. The children seem to play somewhere else. Developers and architects have repeatedly assured me that this could not be so. Often they have pointed to awards given for the excellence of the design; they have shown me stacks of house photos of the play areas, invariably jammed with children. Surely I must have visited at the wrong time of day.

Maybe some happenstance was involved, but I am persuaded by what I have seen, and in the majority of developments that I have...

In the preceding chapters I have discussed two parts of the landscape—open space and developed space. Now I want to turn to the effect of the two together—the landscape as people perceive it. This is not to be comprehended by maps or models or tables of acreage figures. Open space, for example, and the effect of open space are not quite the same, and while the former is helpful for the latter, effect is more important. The landscape is a mass of perceptions, and it is this reality—the image in the retina of the eye—that we...

Since the landscape, for all practical purposes, is what we see from the road, it would seem to be good that the government has been considering a multibillion dollar program for a vast new system of scenic roads and parkways. Whether or not it will be passed is highly conjectural at the moment, and other programs that have recently passed are of more immediate consequence. Before taking these up, however, a hard look at the scenic-roads proposal is in order. Something is wrong with it, and in trying to figure out what it is, we may gain a better idea...

The first thing is to get rid of billboards. There is no need to take up the various subsidiary arguments against them. They are a desecration to the landscape and that is reason to be done with them. What is of moment is that Americans have been coming around to this elemental view, and so have the courts. For years the courts used to advance all sorts of reasons but the basic one to uphold billboard regulations. Now the courts are frank. In the wake of several key decisions they have been holding that billboards are not primarily a use...

By now we should be approaching the entrance of the city. But where is it? The most frustrating part of U.S. cities is getting into them, or knowing when we have. Suburbia is behind us but the scene continues as before; used car lots, diners, borax furniture stores, gas stations, and gas stations, and gas stations. It is not just the blight but the interminability of it that is deadening, and this seems to be especially true of smaller cities, the approaches of which seem to stretch out in inverse ratio to the worth of what is being approached. Mile...

The net of what I have been saying about landscape action is that we are going to have to work with a much tighter pattern of spaces and development, and that our environment may be the better for it. This somewhat optimistic view rests on the premise that densities are going to increase and that it is not altogether a bad thing that they do. It is a premise many would dispute. Our official land policy is dead set against higher densities. It is decentralist, like official policies in most other countries. The primary thrust of it is to move...

In putting the case for higher density, there is one argument I have not made: that by putting more people on developed land, more land will be left undeveloped, i.e., that we can have more people and more open space. It is a tempting proposition, and in theory it could be true. In practice the prospect seems quite unlikely. Let me be consistent: If we are to seek a much more intensive and efficient use of land for development, we should apply an equally rigorous standard to open space.

We are going to have to. Even if the drop in...