Page:Lectures on Housing.djvu/54

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42
SOME ASPECTS OF THE HOUSING PROBLEM

children. Make your town sufficiently hideous, sufficiently congested, sufficiently void of open space and grass for children's play, and you go far to write, for character and for life, over the gate of it: "All hope abandon ye who enter here." "Le parc," says a French writer, "rend à nos citès industrielles surpeuplées un service spirituel comparable à celui que la cathédrale, dans la grandeur et la beauté de son architecture offrait à la population rurale du moyen âge. Le pare est la cathedrale de la ville moderne."[1] The recognition of this third element in satisfactory housing conditions leads inevitably to the granting of powers to some authority to limit the quantity of building permitted on a given area, and to control the building activities of individuals. It is as idle to expect a well-planned town to result from the independent activities of isolated speculators, as it would be to expect a satisfactory picture to result if each separate square inch were painted by an independent

  1. Benoit-Levy, La Ville et son Image, p, 11.