Our Future Homes
The Land and Planning. By F. J. Osborn. (Faber. rs.)
THESE four ,booklets, so modest and slender in appearance, expose with shocking clarity the obstructions and conflicts which still make the field of physical reconstruction look more like a battle ground than a building site. The first pamphlet lays bare the particularly baffling obstacles represented by the words "compensation betterment." Proper control of the land is, of course, a first essential without which all extensive planning schemes are likely to be wrecked. Unfortunately, the host of private individuals who in on way or another control a large proportion of our acres are not all thoroughly deserving of retribution as in- our most black-and-whit .moods we like to picture them, nor can their claims to compensati when their igossession is threatened be wholly ignored without ill effects on the community at large. The -hope that individuals wh holdings were bettered by public development could be made to hel compensate those who suffered from it has proved largely illusory It is so easy for one man to show that he has been unjustly rob of his fair profits, so difficult to convince another that he has more than he deserves. It seems, in fact, that the collection "betterment " dues will never meet more than a small fraction of th claims for compensation. Yet the ill-used private owner must hay some recompense, even though it might well be rather less generou than Mr. Osborn suggests, and the best ways and means must decided in advance.
It is perhaps still more disquieting to recognise that even wet- these technical obstructions removed tomorrow and the land mad free for national planning, it would be found that there is no agre master-scheme to inspire it. What kind of mould do we wish construct for the reception of the molten mass of a demobili, population? The remaining three books well represent two, gr factions opposed on this all-important issue. Mr. Osborn is w known as a seasoned leader of the Garden City movement, whi for Mr. Tubbs such places are only "little patches of suburb' The conflict between them is whether the main effort of natio reconstruction is to be directed towards a revolutionary reconsti non of existing great cities or towards a large-scale dispersal of population from these old centres into new small towns, and, grant that at least a few new towns are desirable, whether they should sister Welwyns or small cities truly urban in design. There is no question that Mr. Osborn burkes the problem of Yi to do with the existing wens, those obtrusive memorials of an of laissez-faire. If, as he suggests; five million people are decan into new centres there will hardly be resources left. for essen
renovations to the towns that have already spread concrete over so many square miles of our country. There is a strong case for con- centrating effort on these areas : on reclaiming wasted spaces within the cities, on raising lofty commercial premises, rationalising the siting of factories and laying out residential areas in a true urban pattern. Terraces, squares and crescents for those who want houses, imaginatively planned blocks for those whose needs are. better served by flats.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries we had a distinguished tradition of urban architecture, aesthetically delightful, admirably suited to the national needs and temperament. What Nash and his predecessors could do in their manner and with their materials we can translate into modern terms. Many believe that this conception is as sound for the planning of small towns as for great cities. If it is harsh to refer to Garden Cities as "patches of suburbia" when they are in fact decently laid out and provided with amenities, it is equally wrong to try to damn flats by referring to them as tenements, to encourage individualistic houses at the expense of street design and to think always of the number of heads per acre rather than of the open spaces which modern planning can provide even where population is dense. If we are to be obsessed with the "everyman his house and potting-shed" view of life, it is likely that we shall waste more of our limited countryside, neglect existing cities, and fail to provide the proper mould to give form and
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