Aspects.—In the countries where there is regional planning one aspect or another has usually been dominant, although regional planning involves every aspect of a region's life. In France, for example, the necessity for political administrative units that bear some relation to economics,. history and geography has made the political side dominant ; similar considerations have governed the drawing up of new governmental units in Siberia. Regional sur vey brings out the arbitrary nature of a great many political boundaries, and suggests the possibility of re-drawing them, or of co-operatively ignoring them, as in the constitution of the New York-New Jersey port authority. Economically, regional planning seeks the fullest development of local resources and skills, without the extravagant waste and degradation that accompanied this process in the past ; in America this aspect of regional planning has been uppermost in the work of foresters and conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Liberty Hyde Bailey. Socially, regional plan ning attempts to curb the growth of metropolitan slums and to create independent cities in more effective relationship with nature and industry and to take care of further increments of population: in England, the garden city movement, which has built Letchworth and Welwyn, has emphasized this side of regional planning. In reports on the Deeside and the Doncaster districts in England,. and the newly found coal-areas in Kent, as well as in the final report of the New York State Housing and Regional Planning commission, these various aims have been co-ordinated and fo cussed. Regional rather than metropolitan development has been aided by motor transport and the aeroplane, by the radio, tele phone, and giant power ; and regional planning tends to make the fullest use of these. Similar reports and surveys have been made
for the Ruhr district in Germany, for the French Alps, and, on a smaller scale, for agricultural communities in the Caucasus.
Among the precursors and intellectual preceptors of the modern regional planning movement, one must note Auguste Comte and Frederic Le Play in political decentralization, Henry Thoreau in philosophy, George Perkins Marsh, author of The Earth as Modi fied by Human Action, Reclus, Ratzel and Shaler in geography, Kropotkin in economics, and Patrick Geddes, whose social studies and technical initiatives as city planner have touched every part of it. The first conception of dealing with the administration of modern utilities like electricity on a regional, rather than a na tional or local scale, was embodied in a Fabian pamphlet in the "New Heptarchy Series" on Municipalization by Provinces; the first definitive project for a regional city was that issued by Sir Ebenezer Howard in Tomorrow (see GARDEN CITIES) while nu merous books and reports have appeared during the last twenty years.
See Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration, A Philosophy of Regional Planning; Victor Branford and Patrick Geddes, The Coming Polity; C. B. Fawcett, The Provinces of England; J. Charles-Brun, Le Regionalisme; J. Russell Smith, North America; J. M. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas; the "Regional Planning" number of the Survey Graphic, May 1925; and the Report of the New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission (1926).