REGIONAL PLANNING, a term used by community planners, engineers and geographers to describe a comprehensive ordering of the natural resources of a community, its material equipment and its population for the purpose of laying a sound physical basis for the "good life." In America the term has also been used to describe plans for city extension over wide metro politan areas; this type of planning should properly be called metropolitan planning. Regional planning involves the develop ment of cities and countrysides, of industries and natural resources, as part of a regional whole.
The programme of regional planning has grown out of a multi tude of fresh initiatives ; the activities of foresters and conserva tionists with forest working plans, of engineers with water power plans, of municipal engineers with plans for city extensions and parkways, and finally, of a great school of regional geographers, who, under Vidal de la Blache in France, Herbertson in England, Fenneman, Smith and others in the United States, have established the region as a definite unit, with its special individuality of geologic formation, climate, vegetation, landscape and human cul ture. The method of the regional plan can perhaps best be grasped by considering its simpler prototype, that which covers but a single aspect of regional life. Take an actual forest work ing plan for an area in the State of Washington, between the Cas cade range and Puget sound : it is about the size of Rhode Island. Except for the mountain barrens and narrow strips of agricultural land along the rivers, the whole region is under forest. The plan divides this area into six "cutting-blocks," each block to be cut within a ten year period and the logs hauled to a central saw mill. When the last block has been cut over the first is ready to be cut again. The central mill and the houses provided for its working force are permanent fixtures.
This plan brings out the essential characteristics of every re gional plan, whether specialized or comprehensive. (I) It deals with a geographic area ; (2) it surveys that area and discovers its natural characteristics and resources; (3) it suggests a method of conserving its resources and developing its economic life; (4) it erects relatively permanent seats of human habitation, with all the social facilities that derive from such stability. Lacking such a plan and such a public policy, current commercial methods of exploitation would cut over the entire area in one operation, would provide only temporary employment and temporary habitations, would make no provision for natural reforestation, and would, as .a result, permit the soil of the timber-mined area to be washed away, degrading the whole region and making further human activity difficult, if not impossible in it.
like lumber, wheat, dairy produce, manufactured articles—some product required for human sustenance. The flow may also be that of population; this includes industrial plant and social insti tutions—schools, libraries, churches, colleges, museums, hospitals —in short, a flow of civilization. We usually regard these things as static ; actually, they are always in motion, improving, deteri orating, changing their position, if not from year to year, then from decade to decade. Regional planning would direct and modify these changes to the advantage of the whole community, instead of simply letting them "happen." A comprehensive re gional plan involves not merely the forces of man's industrial life but his cultural activities as well ; for plans that concern them selves solely with the means of life are in danger of defeating man's cultural activities, which express his aims or objectives. In contrast to the view of industrial production almost universally accepted during the 19th century, regional planning recognizes that the means must be subordinate to the ends. Thus, in utilizing sites along a river, the regional planner may reserve for recreation a spot that would ordinarily be dedicated to heavy manufacturing; or between two possible types of industry, he may select that which has a higher civilization-value. Regional planning, following Rus kin, recognizes as the ultimate product of industry not money or commodities but human life. Briefly, regional planning deals with the ecology of the human community. Just as plant ecology treats of the climate, soil, the plant and insect partnerships necessary to the existence of a species of plants, so regional planning deals with the climate, vegetation, minerals, power resources, landscape, economic and social institutions necessary to a flourishing human community. It is not an effort to make a region self-subsistent ; it is an attempt to bring it into the highest state of economic and human cultivation. No region is a self-contained unit. Ex cept for islands and isolated mountain areas, there are no self-contained units even in the narrow geographic sense, whilst economically and culturally no region has existed without con tact with other regions. Inter-regional relationships are just as important as internal ones, and of as much concern to the regional planner. Thus it has been pointed out that the only funda mental solution of New York's congestion of population and traffic involves a redistribution of the flow of commodities through the Atlantic ports, decreasing the share that now falls to New York, and redistributing part of New York's growing population in regional cities outside the immediate metropolitan area. Such a programme was partly sketched out in the final report of the New York State Housing and Regional Planning commission (1926).