URBAN PLANNING

When the Department of City Planning was put "on the shelf" at the end of last year, the furore that was raised at the time showed how intensely people are interested in the maintenance of many academic "outlets" for individual interest. Now the Corporation has approved the appropriation of a sum of money to revive the planning school. The same sum will be allotted for three years, at the end of which time the ultimate fate of the school will be decided. This situation must be brought to the attention of those persons whose clamorings were heard so far and wide two years ago. If interest is ever to be manifested in city planning at Harvard, now is the time.

Authorities consider the three-year plan an experiment. Dean Hudnut has indicated that the appropriation may be increased if interest warrants it. Members of the faculty of the school are doubtful about the number of students who will be attracted to city planning next fall, because no gnage of popularity on the basis of previous years is available. The school, an offshoot of the Department of Landscape Architecture, was first set up as a separate department seven years ago, financed by Rockefeller money. When this money was no longer available, the school went into a scholarly hibernation during which it was still called one of the best in the country.

The University will now support the school with its own funds. Unless considerable student interest is shown in city planning during the next three years, members of the planning faculty will have to concentrate on private practices for their livelihood. It is surely to be hoped that the persons who voiced objections two years ago when the school was made inactive will now come to the fore and make their protestations form the core of a concrete interest that will reclaim regional planning at Harvard from a limbo of tentative experimentation.