All sections of the metropolitan region are intertwined in their common dependency on its environmental resources: land, water, air, and the landscape. What happens to any one of these in any part of the region can impoverish all or produce effects whose benefits accrue to the total community.
The needs for land by urban activities are deeply influenced by the extent to which public investment and services have extended the supply of accessible sites. The enhancement of the social productivity of land by investments in social overhead, such as in transportation and utilities, is the sum and substance of the resource development of urban land.
The conservation of land is a different problem, however. The unregulated market in land can have a number of consequences which are wasteful of land resources. The outward progression of urban development may leave behind parcels of land impaired by adjoining uses or by uneconomic size either for urban use or for continued agriculture. The loss of product resulting from the withdrawal of such land from economic use is a consequence of the wastage of land. Land can be polluted or damaged for certain kinds of site purposes and so require a substantial investment in its restoration before it can be economically used: in part, this is the problem of urban renewal.
The region-wide nature of water resources needs little exposition. The parts of a metropolitan area generally depend on common water sources for municipal supplies. The burgeoning demands of growing cities upon these sources throw into bold relief the intimate interconnections between urban waste disposal and water supplies in a rising water consumption accompanied pari passu by the deterioration of quality through pollution. These effects present a joint conservation and development problem which can be handled only on a metropolitan-wide basis: control of waste effluents entering the supply can be effective only when all parts of the region are party to regulations while the amounts of investment called for to develop water resources and the social benefits that flow therefrom make a region-wide approach indispensable.
Air is a commodity new to the resource field. Only recently have we awakened to the fact that air is not the "free good" that economics texts had casually described. How costly a resource high-quality air has turned out to be in metropolitan areas is suggested by the amount of social effort it is inducing. The air conditioning ("climate control," or what you like) of homes and offices, the growth of stringent anti pollution measures, the increasing tempo of research on the relationship of air pollution to Lung cancer and pulmonary disorders are symptomatic of this change in status; The rapid rise in the social costs of polluted air is likely to precipitate major problems in the conservation ... of aeroform resources.
Landscape resources are in a very real way the property of the whole region. In public or private hands, their aesthetic and recreational qualities attract people from all parts of the region. The growing awareness of regional populations to their landscape resources has created such pressure of usage that serious damage if not destruction is in the offing. These pressures will require doubled efforts at conservation coupled with broad development programs to sustain even their current contributions to the well-being of the community at large.
From an article by Harvey S. Perloff and Lowdon Wingo, Jr., of RFF, in the May 1962 issue of Journal the American Institute of Planners.
A version of this article appeared in print in the February 1963 issue of Resources magazine.
