ABSTRACT
The appointment of planning commissions is the most recent step in the development of the unit idea in city planning [overall planning for the city as a whole]. In theory, the function of this new agency is to correlate the official plans prepared in the various municipal departments, to pass upon unofficial plans or suggestions for improvement, and to make plans of its own in all cases where no existing agency has jurisdiction.
Flavel Shurtleff, Carrying Out the City Plan, The Practical Application of American Law in the Execution of City Plans, 1914.
Local planning should be given or must gain for itself a place in the structure of government, where it will be closer to the local legislative body, the chief executive and the administrative departments.
Report of the Urbanism Committee, National Resources Committee, Our Cities, Their Role in the National Economy, June 1937.
In the past, city planning has stressed design and engineering to the exclusion of administrative and social considerations…. The city planning department should be a great coordinating agency, intimately contacting every municipal department.
John M. Pfiffner, Municipal Administration, 1940.
