GENERAL PLANNING OF A PARK SYSTEM 49 



3. Every unit selected in the system should be chosen with a view 

 to its usefulness for one or more specific services. 



4. The areas selected should be well balanced with respect to func- 

 tional services. A few large parks connected by boulevards and parkways 

 do not constitute a system in the modern sense; neither would a complete 

 plan of children's playgrounds and neighborhood playfield-parks alone con- 

 stitute a park system in the modern sense. The plans should give due con- 

 sideration to all the different types of areas that experience has shown to 

 be necessary to meet the needs of specific groups of people and to areas that 

 meet the needs of the people in general. Lack of adherence to this prin- 

 ciple, coupled with past neglect of proper planning, has brought about the 

 badly balanced systems so frequently found in American communities 

 today. 



Without this balance among such basic areas as children's playgrounds, 

 neighborhood playfield-parks, intown parks, large parks, reservations and 

 boulevards and parkways, any general principle, such as the allocation of 

 one acre for every hundred inhabitants in any given community, is prac- 

 tically meaningless. Thus a given city might have a total park acreage of 

 such size that the ratio would be one acre to every fifty inhabitants, and 

 yet the actual recreational resources for the children and young people 

 would be very low, were the property, for example, all in one large area too 

 far removed from the majority of the homes of the people to be of daily 

 use to the children and young people. Likewise the principle that a certain 

 percentage of any given administrative area for example, ten per cent, 

 twelve and a half per cent or twenty per cent should be set aside for 

 parks, should be used with a great deal of reservation partly for the reasons 

 stated above, but chiefly because there is no constant ratio in American 

 political units between population and the area within political bound- 

 aries. Thus one city may have a population of seventy tho'usand within 

 incorporated limits of one square mile, while another city with approxi- 

 mately the same number of inhabitants may have incorporated limits of 

 ten, or thirty or even ninety square miles. 



5. To ensure the securing of a plan which will take into account all 

 of these elements and principles, it is important that a study of needs and 

 resources be made. Such a study, and the laying down of the plan, should 

 be done by someone who is not only thoroughly trained in the art and 

 science of modern park planning but who is also fully conversant with the 

 principles of community planning. This principle is so important for both 

 large and small communities that it might well take precedence over all 

 others stated. 



