ing unimportant matters entails. This notion has found practical expression in what is known as the City Manager plan of municipal government. This plan provides for a council or commission to elect the manager but devolves upon him most of the duties of government.

In 1908 the governing authorities of the little city of Staunton, Virginia, which requires in its constitution that all cities shall be governed by a mayor and council, decided that their system of administration could be improved by employing a municipal manager a single individual to be continuously employed in looking after the administration of the town's business. Accordingly, under authority of the law permitting a city council to establish such offices as might be necessary properly to conduct the municipal affairs, the office of General Manager was created."

7

In 1912 a charter providing for a city manager was adopted on its first incorporation, by Sumter, South Carolina. The next year the city of Dayton, Ohio, following the devastating spring floods of that year, framed a home-rule charter under which the voters elect five commissioners who serve for four-year terms and have the function of appointing, in addition to a clerk and a civil service commission, a city manager for an indefinite term, but subject to removal by the commission at its pleasure, at an annual salary of $12,500. To this manager is left the control of the city he has absolute power to appoint and remove the Directors of Public Service, Public Welfare, Public Safety and Finance, as well as the city attorney, purchasing agent, health officer, treasurer, accountant and chiefs of the police and fire departments, and is the fountain and head of administrative policy in as true a sense as is the general manager of any private corporation.

This indicates, indeed, the theory upon which rests the City Manager plan. It emphasizes permanent tenure of office, con

410,604 people (1910).

"Va. Code, sec. 1038.

Municipal Government Administered by a General Manager: The Staunton Plan, by Jno. Curley, President of the Common Council. Annals of American Academy of Pol. and Soc. Science, 38, 877 (1911). For an account of the so-called Lockport Proposal, see Toulmin, op. cit., 19, seq.

7116,577 population (1910).

Staunton pays $2,500; Sumter, $3,300; Springfield, $6,000. In Dayton the commissioners receive $1,200; the one of them who is mayor, $1,800.

tinuity of policy and the highest obtainable efficency and economy of administration. It makes them possible, indeed; but of course integrity of character and purpose on the part of the commissioners and manager is sine qua non to their attainment. It breaks completely with American political theory and carries to its climax the idea that a city is to be administered, not gov erned.

At present twenty-five cities have accepted this latest development in American municipal politics. The arguments for and against each of the types of city government mentioned are varied, but beyond the scope of the present treatment. Suffice it to say that the mayor and council plan appears to have reached the culmination of its progress. In certain of the larger cities the council continues to dominate the government, in others the form only is of the old type: the fact is government by administrative departments and the mayor.1 The popular favor with which the city manager has been received marks him a thorough-going rival of the original commission form of gov

ernment.

The fact that the addition of the manager, according to the Dayton plan, separates the policy-determining and policy-executing functions of government is worthy of especial attention. Popular election is confined to the commissioners who shape policies; the expert to execute them is appointed.

The city manager plan .. places the commissioner in a position which his previous business experience has fitted him for, namely. advice on business problems. The execution is left to an expert who is highly trained in that field of endeavor and wholly competent to cope with it. The spheres of action of the adviser and administrator are wholly distinct and separate.2

Oct. 1, 1915. Not including Staunton.

1Philadelphia and New York may be thus contrasted.

Toulmin, op. cit., 53. The model home rule charter of the National Municipal League provides for a city council with full powers except as otherwise provided to exercise all the powers conferred upon the city." The council must appoint a civil service board and the city manager who must be the "chief executive officer of the city" and who must appoint and remove the heads of departments. He must also, among other prescribed duties, "prepare and submit to the council the annual budget after receiving estimates made by the directors of the departments." The initiative, referendum and recall and nominations by petition are provided for. The creation of a city planning board is made mandatory. Appendices give sections for adopting the Hare system of proportional representation and a preferential ballot.-A Model City Charter and Municipal Home Rule as prepared by the Comittee on Municipal Program of the National Municipal League (Final edition, Mar. 15, 1916).

284.

European

ernment.

In marked contrast to the governmental evolution of American cities, with its emphasis upon form of governmental organi- City Govzation, is the continuance in Europe of a system closely resembling the old mayor and council plan, which, however, as is well known, results in better municipal government than America has been able to attain. Notwithstanding the fact that German cities have grown of late with even greater rapidity than has characterized the cities of the United States, and the cities in other countries have been by no means at a standstill, the problem of municipal government appears to be measurably solved through rigid administrative supervision on the part of the central government. In England, especially, municipal good government is assisted through its attraction for high class men furnished by the considerable degree of prestige attaching to municipal office holding. As already noted, centralized administrative control leaves the cities with a greater degree of automony in municipal concerns than is permitted the cities on this side the Atlantic.

TENNESSEE NOTE.-The constitution of Tennessee contains no directions concerning the government of cities or their incorporation. A majority of the incorporated places still retain the types of government in force before the present-day movement for city commissions was started, but all of those having 10.000 people and over3 now have commission government. It may, therefore, be considered the prevailing type in Tennessee. Memphis began the movement in 1907. Its charter contains no provisions for initiative, referendum or recall. All three are, however, provided by the Jackson charter of 1915. For a number of other cities,-Bristol, Chattanooga, Hartsville, La Follette, Knoxville, Lebanon, Lewisburg. Murfreesboro, Nashville, Smyrna, South Pittsburg and Springfield,-the legislature has provided commission government charters. No Tennessee city has adopted the city manager plan.o

Memphis (131,105); Nashville (110,364); Chattanooga (44,604); Knoxville (36,346); and Jackson (15,779).

Acts of 1907, ch. 184. Concerning the first commission government administration, see the News-Scimitar, Jan. 2, 1910; Woodruff, C. R., City Government by Commission, pp. 265, seq. See also, charter of Greeneville, 1903, Acts of 1903, ch. 563.

"Private Acts of 1915, ch. 168.

For brief account of commission government in Knoxville at beginning of 19th century, see Knoxville Sentinel, May 17, 1916.

21

CHAPTER XX.

CITY PLANNING.1

285. Municipal Awakening.

286. Nature

of City Planning.

THE cities of the world have not, as a rule, been brought up "by hand." American cities, especially, have for the most part merely "tumbled up" without guidance and their lusty growth under the stimulus of our era of industrial expansion has brought them into an adolescence of awkward formlessness -of which they are beginning to be acutely and painfully conscious. This embarrassing self-contemplation on the part of cities is bringing about a realization of the need of educational and formative processes that is finding expression, almost too rapidly, perhaps, in legislation establishing city planning commissions. These commissions study the physical features of cities in connection with their social and economic requirements, with a view to recommending-or even enforcing-plans with the object not only of acquiring such property as may be desirable for public purposes, but of so arranging the use of "the public property that the land which is privately owned may be put to the best usefulness." They provide an adequate public authority to think in terms not of individuals but of the city as a whole and to plan accordingly.

City Planning is justified by the assumption that, in the long run, what is best for all is best for each; it is a manifestation of the ever-broadening realization that cities are not farmer's neighborhoods, where individualism may be rampant with injury to no one except the individual, but highly socialized communities where the welfare of everyone is intimately connected with that of everyone else. New standards of coöperation must

General References: Robinson, C. M., City Planning: Nolen, Jno., City Planning: Shurtleff. Flavel (in collaboration with F. L. Olmstead), Carrying Out the City Plan; Handbook of City Planning (National Municipal League); Cushman, R. E., City Planning and the Courts (Proceedings of Second Annual Convention of the Illinois Municipal League, p. 83. 1915) City Planning, published quarterly as the official organ of National Conference on City Planning; also Proceedings of the Annual Conferences of the same and its Bulletins issued from time to time.

2So thinks the editor of City Planning. Foreword of first issue (Mar., 1915). Such legislation is already found in about one-third of the states, ib., I, 4, p. 9. Robinson, op. cit., 299, indirectly quoting Lawson Purdy.

be established to meet its ends and old "rights" discarded when they delay those ends. In short, city planning means that the city is to have an individuality and significance of its own and is to endeavor to regulate its growth and development just as carefully as an individual would plan out and develop his pri vate garden or estate. It involves, according to the secretary of the New York City Plan Committee,*

(1) the creation, adoption and revision of a tentative comprehensive plan for the physical development of the city and (2) the correlation of particular improvements, by whatever authority originated, with the requirements of the comprehensive plan. The comprehensive tentative plan should include at least the following: streets; parks; playgrounds; transit; grouping of public buildings; railroads; waterways; terminals; markets, and the districting of the city for the purpose of regulating the height, area and use of buildings.

"The typical conditions which are to be corrected or forestalled by scientific planning," says Professor Robinson,

include, specifically, those of streets filled with a traffic which they are unable to carry with safety and speed; are the housing of the poor amid surroundings injurious to moral, physical, and civic well-being; are the loss of opportunities for free and healthful recreation, on the part of adults as well as of children; are the lessening of industrial and commercial efficiency; the inconvenient location and undignified crowding of public buildings; the higher cost of corrective as compared with preventive measures, and an economic waste resulting from instability in the character of neighbourhoods. To do away with such conditions as these is the high purpose of the replanning of cities and towns, or of their careful planning at the start, and of a platting of their outlying sections which deals with those sections not as isolated units but as parts of a whole.

Eminent

The fundamental requisite for carrying out a city plan, once 287. it has been undertaken and tentatively adopted, is the control Domain. by the city of the land which constitutes its area. The power of eminent domain, however, is universally restricted by the state constitutions and its exercise is always carefully scruti nized by the courts.

Mr. Robt. H. Whitten.-The Constitution and Powers of a City Planning Authority, City Planning, I, 2.

Robinson, op. cit., 4.

"See, as to the nature of eminent domain, Clack v. White, 2 Swan. (Tenn.),