Nowhere has our social atomism been more apparent than in our lack of city-planning: (1) we have had many beautiful single buildings, but no plan for the whole city; (2) and more important, we could not get any general plan for our cities accepted because the individual property owner (this was called individualism!) must be protected against the community. City-planning includes not only plans for a beautiful city but for all its daily needs—streets, traffic regulations, housing, schools, industry, transportation, recreational facilities; we cannot secure these things while property owners are being protected in their “rights.” The angry protest which goes up from real estate owners when it is proposed to regulate the height of buildings we have heard in all our cities. The struggle for enough light and air in tenements has been fought step by step. The “right” claimed was the right of every man to do what he liked with his own property. Now we are beginning to recognize the error of this, and to see that it is not a state of individualism but of anarchy that our new building laws are trying to do away with. No real estate owner is to be allowed to do that with his own property which will not fit into a general plan for the beauty and efficiency of the city. The key-note of the new city-planning is adaptation, adaptation of means to end and of part to part. This does not stifle individual initiative, but directs it. And the interesting point for us here is that the real estate men themselves are now beginning to see that particularistic building has actually hurt real estate interests. The “Report of the Advisory Council of the Real Estate Interests of New York City” admits that “light, air and access, the chief factors in fixing rentable values, had been impaired by high buildings and by the proximity of inappropriate or nuisance buildings and uses.” It is impossible to talk ten minutes with real estate men to-day without noticing how entirely changed their attitude has been in the last ten or twenty years. Moralists used to tell us that the only path of progress was to make people willing to give up their own interests for the sake of others. But this is not what our real estate men are doing. They are coming to see that their interests are in the long run coincident with the interests of all the other members of the city.