Regional Planning and Development: The Process of Using Intelligence, Under Conditions of Resource and Institutional Interdependence, for Securing Community Values

Abstract

In this issue the Iowa Law Review makes distinguished and comprehensive contribution to clarifying the goals, determining the conditions, and appraising alternative means of regional planning and development, with special reference to the Missouri Valley. The contemporary demand for more and better regional planning is appropriately placed by Mr. Cooke, in his Plain Talk about a Missouri Valley Authority, in the context of "a many-sided world wide movement." It is "part and parcel" of ever increasing demands by people the world over for more effective instruments for the richer and- fuller achieving of their basic values. In our time, as Mr. Cooke insists, the dignity of the individual has taken on a new meaning and is receiving a new recognition. People everywhere are demanding, with the rightness of their demands universally conceded, a wider sharing in such representative values as power, respect, knowledge, wealth, safety, health, skill, and character. They are, furthermore—to make their demands sharply relevant to the problem in hand—beginning both to get some glimpse of what a bold, imaginative remoulding of their physical environment, and the provision of appropriate iublie services, can do to increase their production and sharing of values and to recognize that existing disparities between actual and potential achievements in their communities are due not so much to inevitable natural forces as to their own failure to exercise foresight and to create efficient institutions. So informed, they do not choose to continue "to live in unhealthy, inefficient, and unattractive environments, to deny themselves the full richness of their potential personality development, to subsist on a low real income, to submit the important decisions of their community to wills other than their own, to allow their natural resources and capital equipment to waste, unused and undeveloped," or finally, to allow their community "a prey to hastening ills to degenerate and decay." Within the United States our people have recently, as terrible as the occasion was, been partners in a tremendous undertaking and have had opportunity to observe the effectiveness, without loss of basic freedoms, of careful planning and' of large-scale cooperative effort. They have felt the enthusiasm of a common cause and of deep identifications with their fellow men and have known the satisfaction of exercising their capacities on important work. Some are beginning to wonder why similar foresight, enthusiasm, and initiative, unhindered by the objectives and burdens of war and reinforced by the availability of atomic power, cannot be applied to the creation of communities which will give them opportunity to continue to do important work and to put their capacities and energies to an unprecedented production of basic values.