To see the interdependence of city and country, to realize that the growth and concentration of one is associated with the depletion and impoverishment of the other, to appreciate that there is a just and harmonious balance between the two—this capacity we have lacked. Before we can build well on any scale we shall, it seems to me, have to develop an art of regional planning, an art which will relate city and countryside in a new pattern from that which was the blind creation of the industrial and the territorial pioneer. Instead of regarding the countryside as so much grist doomed to go eventually into the metropolitan mill, we must plan to preserve and develop all our natural resources to the limit.
It goes without saying that any genuine attempt to provide for the social and economic renewal of a region cannot be constrained to preserve vested land-values and property rights and privileges; indeed, if the land is to be fully loved and cared for again we must recover it in something more than name only. The main objection to keeping our natural resources in the hands of the community, namely, that private capital is more zealous at exploitation, is precisely the reason for urging the first course. Our land has suffered from zeal in exploitation; and it would be much better, for example, that our water power resources should remain temporarily undeveloped, than that they should be incontinently used by private corporations to concentrate population in the centers where a high tariff can be charged. The number of things that are waiting to be done—the planting of town forests, the communal restoration of river banks and beaches, the transformation of bare roads into parkways—will of course differ in each region and locality; and my aim here is only to point to a general objective.
The beginnings of genuine regional planning have already been made in Ontario, Canada, where the social utilization of waterpower has directly benefited the rural communities, and given them an independent lease on life. In the United States, Mr. Benton Mackaye has sketched out a bold and fundamental plan for associating the development of a spinal recreational trail with an electric power development for the whole Appalachian region, along the ridgeway; both trail and power being used as a basis for the reafforestation and the repeopling of the whole upland area, with a corresponding decentralization and depopulation of the overcrowded, spotty coastal region. Such a scheme would call for a pretty thorough dislocation of metropolitan values; and if it is slow in making headway, that is only because its gradual institution would mean that a new epoch had begun in American civilization. At the present time it is hard to discover how tangible these new hopes and projects may be: it is significant, however, that the Housing and Regional Planning Commission of the State of New York was called into existence by the necessity for finding a way out of our metropolitan tangle; and it is possible that a new orientation in power and culture is at hand.
In a loose, inconsecutive way, the objectives of regional planning have been dealt with by the conservation movement during the last century; and if the art itself has neither a corpus of experience nor an established body of practitioners, this is only to say that it has, as it were, broken through the surface in a number of places and that it remains to be gathered up and intelligently used. When regional planning starts its active career, it will concern itself to provide a new framework for our communities which will redistribute population and industry, and recultivate the environment—substituting forestry for timber-mining, stable agriculture for soil-mining, and in general the habit of dressing and keeping the earth for our traditional American practice of stripping and deflowering it. Architecture begins historically when the “Bauer” who plants becomes the “Bauer” who builds; and if our architecture is to have a substantial foundation, it is in a refreshened countryside that we will perhaps find it.
IV
Let us now turn to industry. The medieval order was disrupted in America before it could fully take root. As a result we have no craft-tradition that is properly native, with the exception of the shipbuilders and furniture-makers of New England, whose art has been on the wane since the second quarter of the nineteenth century. We have covered up this deficiency by importing from generation to generation foreign workmen, principally Germans and Italians, in whose birthplaces the art of using wood and stone has not been entirely lost; but we are still far from having created an independent craft-tradition of our own. If art is the fine efflorescence of a settled life, invention is the necessity of the roving pioneer who every day faces new difficulties and new hazards; and accordingly we have devoted our energies to the machine, and to the products of the machine. All that we cannot do in this medium we regard as “mere” art, and put it apart from the direct aims and practices of everyday life.
Our skill in working according to exact formulae with machines and instruments of precision is not to be belittled: socially directed it would put an end to a hundred vapid drudgeries, and it would perhaps give the pervasive finish of a style to structures whose parts are now oddly at sixes and sevens. Unfortunately for us and for the world in general the machine did not come simply as a technological
