URBAN RENEWAL

comprehensive scheme to redress a complex of urban problems, including unsanitary, deficient, or obsolete housing; inadequate transportation, sanitation, and other services and facilities; haphazard land use; and traffic congestion. Early efforts usually focused on housing reform and sanitary and public-health measures, followed by growing emphasis on slum clearance and the relocation of population and industry from congested areas to less-crowded sites, as in the garden-city and new-towns movements in Great Britain. Each country approaches urban renewal according to its means and its political and administrative systems. The chief activities of urban renewal are redevelopment, the clearance and rebuilding of structures that are deteriorated or obsolete in themselves or are laid out in an unsatisfactory way or the reuse of the land for other purposes; rehabilitation, the improvement of structurally sound buildings that have deteriorated or lost their original functions; and conservation, a protective process designed to maintain the function and quality of an area, for instance, by requiring or assisting adequate maintenance and preventing inappropriate developments or changes in the use of land and buildings.