Washington and its environs have always been a cynosure for American
eyes, a place people have wanted to be proud of and have fought to keep
"right." Many of its defenders have been powers in the land, and for a
long time in the past the battle was generally a winning one. Even aside
from the city's planned monumental Federal center with its government
buildings, memorials, formal parks, malls and avenues--largely traceable
to the ideas of Pierre L'Enfant and the sporadic respect paid them by
the founding fathers--it has amenities undreamed of in and around most
American cities: things like the Potomac Great Falls and gorge with the
C. & O. Canal alongside, Arlington Cemetery, Mount Vernon, the
Georgetown neighborhood where private taste and determination have
brought a near-slum back to 18th-century grace and function, Roosevelt
Island, several fine local and regional parks, the George Washington
Memorial Parkway along the Potomac, and incredible Rock Creek winding
down its natural valley through the Maryland suburbs and the District to
the river.
[Illustration]
Yet the rampaging growth to which the metropolis, in common with other
American centers of population, has been subject during the past two or
three decades means not only that these pleasant places are being
pressed upon by many more people than anyone thought they would ever
have to serve, but also that some of them are in danger of destruction
or irreparable damage, and the tone of the city as a whole has been
changing for the worse. The once magnificent upper estuary, as we have
seen, is afflicted with complex and ugly pollution that shuts it off
from the pleasant use it might otherwise sustain, and makes it a
detraction from the Federal splendor along its northern shore rather
than the enhancement it used to be. In places like the Alexandria and
Georgetown waterfronts, industrial dilapidation on the shorelines more
appropriately matches that pollution in mood, and on the Virginia side
here and there undistinguished, often jerrybuilt highrise clutter has
taken the place of the calm and wooded hills toward which the capital
city once could look.
Parks and open areas within the metropolis and out from it are often
crowded, trampled, and belittered during most times when people can get
away from making a living to visit them, and thus can furnish only a
little of the quiet and elbow room that might be their main contribution
to urban peace of mind. They are also subject to pressure and often
damage from outside, stemming from the economics, the politics, the
governing mood of restless growth. The blowtorch roar and black oily
exhaust of jet airliners coming and going at National Airport, for
instance, diminish and cheapen all the green space and monumental beauty
so purposefully arranged along the Potomac shore. And only the
bitterest kind of fight can occasionally save a park or a stream valley
or the river itself from a projected addition to the spaghetti network
of freeways and beltways and bridges and other high-use traffic channels
along which flow swirling, never-ending currents of cars. Or from
standard suburban development.
Rock Creek is a complex example of how the city threatens its own
amenities. We have glanced at it already--polluted by casual spurts and
dribbles of waste from hundreds of thousands of people, its basic
hydrology and therefore its very existence as a stream dependent on the
proper use of the rural upper third of its watershed. For it has already
suffered the loss of many tributary runs and branches in the lower
two-thirds during the process of solid development.
In 1966, the critical upper third of the Rock Creek basin was very
nearly turned over to suburban developers as a playground for bulldozers
by a lame-duck Montgomery County Council on a rezoning spree. When
protests against these actions, as well as against the general
degradation of the stream, culminated in the issuance of our report The
Creek and the City and then in a public meeting under INCOPOT auspices,
people who had long been fighting the Creek's battle became the nucleus
of a revived public effort. It now appears that under a new Council the
upper watershed may be developed in some accordance with the
Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission's protective plan
for the area, so as to keep much of its surface covered with the grasses
and humus through which rainwater percolates underground into aquifers
that feed the creek through dry periods, and with some safeguards
against the customary terrific siltation that careless development
produces. And pressure has been generated to deal with the creek's other
pollution, which is certain to be a long and laborious job.
[Illustration]
Suburbanization itself is based in social forces, and this is not a
sociological report. The knotted, often bitter, sometimes violent tone
of contemporary American cities does not come within our province, but
some consideration of it is inevitable. Not only must any planning for a
decent environment--like planning for water use--take into account the
needs and interest of the majority of the Basin's citizens who live in
and around Washington, but it needs to be based in some understanding of
the way they are. For in part the way they are is what determines the
pattern of urban growth and much of the restless shifting and wandering
that makes the city's people a strong influence to the limits of the
Basin and beyond. In part also, however, the pattern of urban growth
makes the people the way they are--it has been observed, for instance,
that if suburban Americans were better satisfied with their manner of
life, they probably would not spend so much of their time in automobiles
getting away from it.
[Illustration]
Within Washington itself, children may be born to erstwhile rural
parents and may come to adult years with only a scant sense of the
peace and beauty that can be found a few miles away, and often with
little sense of anything else but the crumbling, teeming, stifling,
noisy, sooty slums where they live--the other side of the monumental
splendor along the Federal riverfront. Not all urban frustration is an
outgrowth of the physical environment by any means, but much is. And
this frustration, plus the pattern of exodus for some and sour jammed
imprisonment for the rest, has within the past few years been killing
off one by one all the special satisfactions and delights that cities
from time immemorial have furnished their inhabitants.
[Illustration:
This 26 square-mile section of the Rock Creek watershed, just above the
District line in Maryland, was rural in 1913, with many small
tributaries fed by springs and seeps. Ensuing development based on
little knowledge of natural processes covered most of the old aquifer
recharge areas with pavements and rooftops, so that more precipitation
ran rapidly off the land instead of soaking in and flowing out gradually
into streams. Flooding during storms and loss of flow at other times
caused most of the tributaries to be covered over as storm sewers, so
that out of 64 miles of natural flowing stream channels that existed in
1913 in this section, only 27 miles can be found above ground today.]
Fleeing the dissonant center--or avoiding it from the start when they
move to the metropolis from elsewhere--citizens who can afford it move
into suburbs carved in the outlying countryside by gargantuan machinery,
sometimes in compliance with a plan that preserves some trees and airy
open space and a sense of the things that were, but more usually not.
Here the fugitives place themselves one against the other in the
hugeness of their numbers so that very quickly in many places the
countryside hardly exists except in leapfrogged forlorn patches or
farther out, where its ownership in speculatively held blocks--the old
farm houses gone to pot, their fields in weeds or casually tilled or
grazed to merit agricultural taxation--avouches the certainty of
continuing sprawl. It is a much-documented process with two decades of
history behind it now. It is cancerlike in its effect on the region, and
disillusioning in its effect on many of those who participate, for
often it forces them into the position of being mass destroyers of the
very things they seek--air and wild greenery, quietness and the elbow
room to be themselves.
[Illustration]
A growing body of knowledge as to what kind of terrain can stand dense
development, and what kind cannot, and how streams and woods and
wildlife and even farms can be physically retained among urban
populations, and why they ought to be, is becoming available. Its
principles are more or less ecological, which simply means that they
seek to maintain right uses of different elements of the landscape under
urban conditions, in order that these elements may function with a
reasonable degree of naturalness, remain compatible with one another and
with human purposes, and be available for people's enjoyment. Flood
plains make good hay fields or parks, for instance, but poor sites for
homes or shopping centers. Porous areas that recharge aquifers ought to
be kept as much as possible under vegetation rather than pavements or
buildings, if people are to have streams later and not capricious drains
that are better off covered over. Steep slopes, if carved severely,
usually exact a later revenge. House clusters and townhouses and
apartments rightly spaced and located can let the country function even
while settling on it numbers of people equivalent to those who would be
there if it were hacked into a solid expanse of tiny lots. And so on.
Much remains to be learned if the application of these principles is to
be ideal. For example, urban hydrology--precisely what happens to the
water cycle during various kinds of development, and how it might be
adjusted--is a relatively new branch of study and still needs much
research. But even with present knowledge, great improvement over
present patterns is possible. In the hands of a few emerging experts,
planning which pays attention to soils and topography and climate and
special landscape features and values can be a subtle art, prescribing
villages and farms and factories in the right places, making the most of
native vegetation and views and places where George Washington slept and
the breezes of July. Its form on a map tends toward curved lines rather
than the orderly straight ones abhorred by nature.
Yet in one simple form, this kind of land use planning has been
practiced for many years in rural America by millions of farmers, who
have cooperated with one another to their own mutual benefit in soil
conservation programs to reduce erosion and to slow down the wasteful
and destructive runoff of precipitation. We noted earlier a pilot urban
adaptation of such programs on Pohick Creek on the metropolitan fringe
in Virginia, where an effort is being made to develop a whole stream
basin in accord with soil conservation principles, not only to avoid
future flood damages and sedimentation and pollution but to retain
natural areas, living streams, and many of the other features the land
had before the city engulfed it. Even with the gaps in present knowledge
and the probability that developers and builders are not going to
cooperate as fully and eagerly as farmers, it offers much hope. For it
may well betide a time when urban planners in general will have the
vision and authority, together with the reinforced knowledge, to subject
all new development to its basic guiding precept--a respect for the way
the landscape works. It is getting to be far more possible now than it
was in the past to say, in relation to a given place: "This is how
development ought to proceed."
In the ring of counties nearest Washington, all of them much lacerated
by sprawl that has been gobbling up some 24,000 acres of peripheral
countryside each year, respect for the way the vanishing landscape works
has been growing by leaps and bounds. The authority to translate it into
good practices, however, is much hampered by the complexities of
metropolitan reality. Officially endorsed plans exist for these
counties, or for parts of them, which show quite a lot of regard for
soils and topography and their appropriate use. But frequently these
plans are of necessity a mass of compromises. They have had to be
adjusted drastically to fit in with existing development, road networks,
sewage lines, and such things, which seldom are located in accordance
with an ecological ideal. They are encrusted with concepts from older
plans not based in landscape principles. Differing views or interests on
opposite sides of municipal or county boundary lines may gut them. Money
to buy needed open space--the only way to ensure its protection--is
usually short. And legal institutions that ought to be on the side of
good planning sometimes get in its way.
Zoning, for example, is an indispensable tool for implementing planning,
but too weak for some metropolitan situations and often too inflexible
to meet certain needs. If essential open space has been protected only
by zoning, astronomical increases in its speculative value may generate
enough pressure on zoning boards to change the category, as happened
last year on upper Rock Creek. This is particularly true in view of
metropolitan plans' inevitably hodgepodge nature, which makes them
somewhat arbitrary and vulnerable to attack. Bribery and
personal-interest scandals often are rooted in zoning matters.
Furthermore, residential zoning of the standard minimum-lot-size sort,
not adapted to cluster housing and such sophistications, may actually
encourage sprawl and rectilinear violation of the landscape by
restricting the density of people in a place where the density of
buildings and pavements is what really matters.
[Illustration: THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE]
Tax systems can be troublesome in various ways--discouraging public
purchase of needed parks or conservation areas because officials don't
want the land to go off the tax rolls, preventing renewal of blighted
areas by penalizing improvements, running farms out of business by
taxing their fields as subdivision land, promoting leapfrogging and
sprawl (in the case of Federal capital gains taxation) by rewarding
speculative retention of tracts. And other government programs and
policies at various levels work against good planning or have done so in
the past, either by failing to encourage good types of land use or by
actively promoting bad types. Traditional Federal mortgage insurance and
home loan practices oriented toward standard suburban development are an
example, and so are many highways and roads subsidized and routed by
experts in higher realms of government.
With so much economic and legal muscle arrayed on the side of chaos and
a whole army of enterprising folk dedicated to its perpetuation--some
holding seats on planning and zoning bodies--the wonder is that the
metropolitan counties have been making any headway at all with improving
their planning process. And they have been, especially since they have
begun to work together in such organizations as the Metropolitan
Washington Council of Government. But, as elsewhere throughout America,
the progress is somewhat dwarfed by the population pressures and
untrammeled expansionism planning must deal with. Radical measures may
be needed; there has been sober talk of counties' issuing bonds,
condemning all vacant land within a wide radius of the city, and buying
it up for gradual resale and development in an orderly and sensible way,
thus eliminating at one stroke the speculative pressures and torsions
that are the root cause of much of the trouble.
For under metropolitan conditions fee ownership, either of land or of
its development rights, seems to give the only certainty of control over
land's use. Obviously its potential employment by government is limited
in a free economy, and such things as zoning and subdivision
controls--strengthened and made rational--are going to have to continue
as main tools, together with devices like scenic easements, which
usually, however, again involve a form of purchase.
Fee ownership is the kind of control that is being exercised--by private
interests rather than by government--in the promising "new towns," where
certain individuals and groups are attempting to use industrial-type,
long-term financing in the purchase and development of large tracts on
which strong and careful planning, involving everything from industry to
fish ponds, can be enforced from scratch. Perhaps the most famous single
example of this kind of thing is Reston, Virginia, which is being built
on over 7000 acres of pleasant Piedmont countryside in northwestern
Fairfax County. It has aroused hope across the nation in people
concerned with such things, for if private capital can go to work in
this enlightened fashion and still come out with a profit, the
implications for the future are enormous. Like any pioneering venture,
it has run into some troubles, and it lately suffered a shift in
management. But it is still being steered toward the same goal of
environmental grace and decency and seems likely to arrive there.
The attractiveness of such places to people disillusioned with standard
sprawl is attested by the fact that other developers, having
incorporated some of the Reston techniques--some recreational water,
some clustering of dwellings with communal open space between, some
amenities like underground wiring--are tending to call their latest
subdivisions "new towns" too. Many of them want to do things right, and
if it can be proved that doing things right will pay off as well as
doing them wrong, a certain amount of automatic improvement in the
quality of suburbanization can be expected. However, it must be noted
that the scale on which most developers can afford to operate, and the
market scarcity of suitable large tracts of land even when major capital
is available and the aims are noble ones, do not often give them control
of adequate natural units of territory in which whole planning can mean
what it should. Most such planning is going to have to continue to come
from governmental bodies, and the main hope must be that it will keep
improving, find stronger tools, and be reinforced and stimulated by laws
and programs from higher up.