Civics: as Applied Sociology/Part 1/E—Cities, Present and Future

Hence, after a Liberal and an Imperial generation, each happy in their respective visions of wealth and expanding greatness, the current renewal of civic interests naturally takes the form of an awakening survey of our actual environment. First, a literal mapping of its regional elements, and then an historic interpretation of these—not, alas, merely or mainly in terms of the cities of sacred or classic tradition, nor of the Mediaeval or Renaissance cities which followed these, but as stupendous extensions of the mediaeval Ghetto, of the Wapping Stairs, of the Lancashire factories and of the Black Country, relieved by the coarse jollities of Restoration London, and adorned for the most part, with debased survivals from the Italian and the French Renaissance. There is thus no more question in our civic discussions of "bringing in" or "leaving out" geography or history; we have been too long unconscious of them, as was M. Jourdain of his speaking in prose.

But what of the opening Future? May its coming social developments not be discerned by the careful observer in germs and buds already formed or forming, or deduced by the thinker from sociological principles? I believe in large measure both; yet cannot within these limits attempt to justify either. Enough for the present, if it be admitted that the practical man in his thought and action in the present is mainly the as yet too unconscious child of the past, and that in the city he is still working within the grasp of natural conditions.

To realise the geographic and historic factors of our city's life is thus the first step to comprehension of the present, one indispensable to any attempt at the scientific forecast of the future, which must avoid as far as it can the dangers of mere utopianism.