New York State is head-water country. The Iroquois knew this 300 years ago, and they built and ruled an empire. We of the twentieth century also need to understand the nature of these watersheds.
Why has it taken us so long to see the need for integrated multipurpose programs in the river valleys of these hilly hinterlands of our cities? Why only now are we beginning to design dams and reservoirs to serve as recreational sites, water supply and stream stabilization, as well as flood control structures? Why have we been so slow to respond to the changing role of agriculture especially to the plight of our low-income farmers on submarginal lands?
I believe that the crux of the trouble lies in the lack of coordination between the two major forms of areal planning in this country, that is, between urban and regional planning. There should be no dichotomy. Both are concerned with the same fundamental problem—to bring our ways of living into harmony with the natural environment.
In practice, however, urban and regional planning have gone along separate paths. The gap between them has grown wider through the years until now it is a gulf of ignorance, broad and deep. City and regional-resource planners use two different vocabularies. Communication has become extremely difficult.
Traditionally, the city planner has focused attention upon the immediate pressing demands of the city itself. He has given but cursory attention to the city's space relations with surrounding regions; witness the haphazard sprawl of our suburbs.
By contrast, and due largely to the manner in which regional planning emerged in the 1930s, with federal assistance to river valleys where social and economic stagnation were widespread, the resource planner's "region" became identified with the river basin or watershed. Such examples as the TVA, the Missouri or the Arkansas-White-Red River basins come to mind immediately. Just as the city planner failed to make clear what he meant by a region, the regional planner went all out in the opposite direction. To him, the region was the watershed, and to develop the river valley would lead inevitably to the panacea.
Unfortunately, and in the South especially, this concept was nurtured by men who were clinging to agrarian tradition, trying in a last dying breath to maintain the "folk culture" of a rural South. The urban-industrial giant, pressing upon them from the North, was somehow to be repelled by dynamic planning in the framework of "the natural region," the river valley.
Whether we like it or not, metropolitan areas are here, growing bigger, more complex, more demanding, every day. We are living through the growing pains of a new planning concept thrust upon us by this wave of urbanism. Only if watershed planning is integrated with city-region planning, with metropolitan planning a fundamental part, will it make sense and continue to make sense.
—Eleanor E. Hanlon, in a paper given at the annual convention of the New York State Conservation Council at Glens Falls, October 1960.
A version of this article appeared in print in the February 1961 issue of Resources magazine.
