American Cities; Their Methods of Business (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE PROPER OBJECT FOR CITY PROMOTION The proper treatment of any subject dealing with material factors demands scientific methods, the methods that have led to such valuable results in the sciences such as chemistry, biology, and geography, and in the applied sciences such as the various kinds of engineering. Only by these methods can accurate knowledge and the best methods for reaching desired ends be obtained. Any other methods involve too great a waste of time and means and energy to be seriously considered by us at the present time. City promotion is essentially an applied science. It implies activity toward a certain end or certain ends; activity necessarily implies an objective and it is most important to decide what this objective should be. In true science there is no objective, but rather the scientist aims to arrive at the truth concerning certain groups of observed phenomena; in the applied science, on the other hand, the objective is all important because a change in objective may demand a revampingof the entire body of usable facts and methods. An applied science of economics, for instance, having as its objective the maximum increase in the wealth of the king or the wealth of a small aristocratic class, would be almost entirely different from one in which the objective taken was the maximum increase in wealth of the majority of the nation. An applied science of city promotion demands first of all a choice of an objective, and second the drawing on all the other applied sciences and sciences for knowledge and methods that will be useful in working toward this end. It can be made an applied science because its field embraces almost entirely plain matters of fact and because it touches or involves human nature only in a general way, in such a way th...