CIVILIZATION growing up in a separate and disjoined fashion has resulted in a certain arrangement of the population upon the face of the earth. At first savage men roamed the plains and forests seeking food. The advent of civilization, industrial and social co?peration, taught men the advantage of gathering themselves into cities. At first these cities were provisioned from the country by means of humans or animal beasts of burden, then water transportation caused the development of greater cities on rivers and harbors. With the advent of the railroad, together with the transportation agencies already mentioned, the provisioning of cities became limited only by the ability of the country district to support its own population and that of the city.
32 The occupation of the city people was chiefly that of manufacturing, trading and grafting on the farmer and on each other. The invention of steam power made it economical to assemble workmen into large factories which added another cause to the growth of cities. The use of this steam power forced the city worker out of his home and into the more economical factory, thus developing the factory system.
The continual growth of cities soon filled the land with large groups of houses, crowding each other for room. As the houses were built closer and closer together, the amount of light and air was shut out, in order that the distance the workers lived from their work might not increase. At first workers went from their work to their houses on foot, later by means of the horse car, still later by steam car and now the electric car is supreme. As these transportation facilities first used to get provisions into the city and the manufactured product out of it were utilized to get the workers to and from their work, the houses began to follow the transportation lines. 33
Transportation Determines the Form of Cities.
As time and the expense of transportation rather than distance were the elements that governed the distance from the heart of the city that could be used for workers’ homes, the utilization of fixed lines of traffic resulted in the city building out along main streets, trolleys and railroads. Along main lines of traffic, as between two important cities, the population began to group itself into lines.
This is the state of the distribution of population to be found in the world to-day. But the present distribution is imperfect. The trolleys carry people to the street corner but make no provision for getting them into their homes or for getting the meals on the sideboard, the book from the library to the center table, or the camphor from the drug store to the sick room.
The means of conveying the necessities of civilization is almost wholly that of rails, pipes and wires. The former is the means of transporting people and parcels, the second of34 liquids and gases, the third of electricity in its various forms.
These mechanical servants have been placed in the streets which were first built as roadways for carriages. In the streets, the pipes and wires must be buried beneath the pavement at great expense. Through these streets, frequently full of curves and angles which offer little trouble to the free moving horse-drawn vehicle, the rails must be bent and the cars slow down for curves. From beneath the pavement the pipes and wires must be separately led into the basements of each building and up through successive stories to the apartments above. Within the building, separate vertical car lines called elevators, must be built and city transportation becomes a matter of three dimensions with train service running in from principal outlying points, cross-town trolley lines and vertical elevators, all separate schemes of transportation requiring changes and delays, endless duplication, colossal expense and criminal waste.
Now rails, pipes and wires can be most economically laid in continuous straight lines.35 In the case of railroads, the greater the speed without stops the more the necessity for straight lines. A car running at a speed of forty miles per hour has sixteen times the force for derailment as a car at ten miles, and there is a like increase in the cost in power and time to stop the car. Moreover, to be efficient the railway should be where nothing will obstruct the passage of trains. Pipes must be kept from freezing, live wires from giving shocks and yet all must be available for new installation and repairs. None of these needs are filled by present city conditions; all can be fulfilled if the city is planned to fit the rail, pipe and wire civilization of to-day instead of the pedestrian and equestrian civilization of the past.
Building in One Dimension.
The Roadtown is a scheme to organize production, transportation and consumption into one systematic plan. In an age of pipes and wires, and high speed railways such a plan necessitates the building in one dimension instead of three—the line distribution of population36 instead of the pyramid style of construction. The rail-pipe-and-wire civilization and the increase in the speed of transportation is certain to result in the line distribution of population because of the almost unbelievable economy in construction, in operation and in time. The people will return to Mother Earth because it is in every way desirable for them to do so and not because some merchant prince, railroad king or social worker says they ought to go.
In modern life an office building, store or apartment house is considered especially fortunate if it has a rapid transit station near or better still within the building. All the inhabitants of the Roadtown will live upon the main line and be near the station. They will live there because the utilities of civilization can be provided there more economically than elsewhere. But the line distribution has yet another significance of as great importance as the more safe and economical distribution of people, parcels, fluids and electricity.
The development of cities was originally brought about by the desire of men to get close37 together for industrial needs and social fellowship. This same want for ready communication and distribution of men and things I have shown can now be most completely fulfilled by the city which will be strung out in a line. In other words, the very laws which built the congested cities will, with the construction of the first section of the first Roadtown, surely mark the beginning of their gradual dissemination. Such a tendency can already be seen at work, but its development has not progressed far because of the isolation of the functions of house construction and horizontal transportation devices.
As soon as horizontal transportation is put in the house, the skyscraper on its side, and is pointed towards the endless country instead of up against the force of gravity, and the wonderful transportation devices now available are installed, you will see the cities spread out in lines amidst the fields and farms, as if by magic. Indeed it will be the magic of economy, the natural force to which all of humanity always promptly responds.
The height of the skyscraper is limited by38 the stresses and strains on the steel, by the instability of the foundation, by congestion of the elevators. The length of the skyscraper on its side has no limit for it is built on solid ground, it has no lighting and ventilating problems. Its transportation system by the aid of local and express service, by the fact that it can run trains, not single cars, and can run many trains following each other on one track and not require a whole shaft for a single car as in the case of the elevator, removes the mechanical limitation of length of the horizontal skyscraper. We can build not only a thousand feet, but a thousand miles and have every story connected with every other story by rails, pipes and wires.
A Line of City Through the Country.
The Roadtown will start at the end of the present subways or other rapid transportation systems of present cities or tap these lines far enough out to get comparatively cheap land and build out in the direction of other cities, passing near enough to the smaller cities, towns and villages to summarily attract much39 of their renting population. This movement will surely mark the “beginning of the end” of such wasteful loafing centers for the few, and the stagnant pools of wasted energy for the many. It will be a line of city through the country. It will take the apartment house to the farmer and incidentally free the farmer from the necessity of feeding the well-meaning townsfolk who give him in return scant clothing, the use of a hitching post for his team—sometimes; a place to get his weekly paper and a little social fellowship on the sidewalk Saturday afternoons. It will give the suburbanite all that he seeks in the country and all that he regrets to leave in town. It will enable him to play at farming, do real farming or retain his city job. The people will go to the land and take the best things of the city with them, take in fact all that is good in the city to-day and in addition much that is now pigeon-holed as unused patents, because the conglomeration of isolated homes and the crude horse paths called streets, owned by “hold-up men” called politicians, do not permit of the general adoption of these great inventions.