About
The Galena City Beautiful Committee is a coalition of planners, experts and volunteers, architects, artists, civic officials, journalists, business people, and interested ordinary citizens working together to create a more beautiful and harmonious urban environment for local inhabitants and visitors to our historic city.
​
According to Daniel H. Burnham, one of the founders of the City Beautiful Movement: “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men's blood. ... Make big plans ... remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with ever growing consistency.”
​
Burnham’s Good Citizenship, he argued, was “the prime object of good city planning.”
Burnham’s classic definition of “the city” was the means to the “good life,” a life in which humanity could aspire to be more than mere physical survival.'
City Beautiful analyses the problems posed by actual cities, from the efficacy of streets, sidewalks, waterfronts, and bridges, to the realities of sustenance, transportation, and commerce, industry, and human habitat.
Galena City Beautiful
City Beautiful utilizes the current political and economic structure of the city to create beautiful, spacious, and orderly urban environments that contain healthy open spaces and showcase public and private buildings that express the moral values of the city. It is suggested that people living in such cities would be more virtuous in preserving higher levels of morality and civic duty.
​
City Beautiful strives to protect and preserve city landmarks, local history, and local tradition and culture.
​
City Beautiful advocates for appropriate landscaping that encourages green spaces, urban parks, and roadway connections to the natural rural geography of the place.
​
City Beautiful seeks to improve their city through urban beautification to inspire civic loyalty and civic ownership.
City Beautiful should lead to more effective urban planning, but also promote economy, commerce, efficiency, and good citizenship within the city it serves.
​
Architects and planners need to reconsider what constitutes good design and to think of the long-term ramifications of their efforts.
​
City Beautiful in its concern with beautifying the urban environment should set a good example and inspire all city neighborhoods.
​
City Beautiful's emphasis is on the preserving and restoring all city landmarks.
​
City Beautiful's urban embellishments should add a cultural dimension to the entire urban environment.
The civic center's beauty should reflect the souls of the city's inhabitants, inducing order, calm, and propriety therein.
​
The citizen's presence in the center, together with other citizens, should strengthen pride in the city and awaken a sense of community with fellow urban dwellers.
​
The ultimate goal of Galena City Beautiful is to develop an urban aesthetic that ultimately generates civic pride and civic ownership.