12 A War Memorial for Belfast. 



be unified and co-ordinated to a single whole 1 It seems to 

 mc that the value of citizenship, and the dignity of the 

 city, would be increased by throwing full responsibility upon a 

 single elected body for controlling each and all of the departments 

 of civic administration. There are many such details in the art 

 of clean, efficient and popular government which could with 

 advantage be studied in connection with proposals for a Greater 

 Belfast. 



SOME HOUSING NOTES. 



I have dealt, in a very summary manner, with some eight or 

 ten sections of the work which would lie before our Institute 

 Committee. May I refer back to the first of these sections, 

 {Housing), p. 11, and elaborate it a little further ? 



Why is it that our typical new city street is a slum-street 

 before ever a tenant enters a house in it 1 Mainly because we 

 put too many houses upon an acre. Fifty human beings, or, say^ 

 ten houses, is amply enough per inhabited acre : we are accustomed 

 to a plan which encourages four or five times this figure. Putting 

 it another way, if Belfast builds 5,000 new houses during the 

 next five years, it ought to take at least 500 acres of land to 

 accommodate them. Unless they are prevented from doing it, our 

 present civic regulations in this matter will probably squeeze 

 the whole 5,000 houses into about 100 acres. Then we shall 

 have a new slum on our hands, which will cost a lot of money 

 to pull down and reconstruct within thirty or forty years. 



What is the remedy 1 It is twofold. ( 1 ) The new work 

 must be done in a new way, not in accordance with the slum 

 tradition : and (2) the old work must be gradually reconstructed. 



New Housing. The best arguments I can produce are not 

 so easily stated in words, as in maps and drawings. In FiG. 

 8 (a) I have shown an estate at Harborne, which the specu- 

 lative builder had actually planned for " development" (save the 

 mark!) as it is drawn. In Fig. 8 (b) is seen the same estate as it 

 was subsequently jjuilt over for a Co-Operative Tenants' Society. 



