PLANNING 259 



and going to waste. To improve this situation, some kind of 

 a change must be made in our attitude toward the land. We 

 must work out a plan of land use which will reconcile the 

 changeable goals of man with the unchanging goals of nature. 



The basis of land planning is to work out a system that will 

 make land use profitable and, at the same time, preserve the 

 value of the land, that is, to balance the needs of our money 

 civilization and the needs of nature. 



These two needs must be reconciled. The difficulty is how 

 to reconcile them. The problem in a democratic civilization is 

 to work out plans which will at the same time protect the land 

 and the individual liberty of the land users. 



Planning is not a new idea. To build a steel plant, for in" 

 stance, requires months of planning. Any of the large jobs that 

 engineers do must be planned down to the last bolt. But this 

 planning is very different from land-use planning. The steel 

 plant is built with the single purpose of producing a maximum 

 quantity of steel at a minimum cost. Land-use planning is de 

 signed to find a way to use the land so that it will yield a con 

 tinuous profit. That profit is not merely money, but security 

 and satisfaction for the land users, permanent fertility for the 

 land. 



The idea of land planning first took hold in the cities 

 twenty-five or thirty years ago, and its purpose was to protect 

 the value of property. This idea is called zoning. It works this 

 way. The city passes a zoning law which says that in certain 

 areas there can be only certain kinds of buildings. Thus in dis 

 tricts in which people have houses, many zoning laws prohibit 

 the building of stores and factories. The reason for this is that 

 if factories and stores are built in a residential district, that 

 district is less desirable as a place to live. The value of the 

 houses consequently drops. Smoke and noise from factories 

 makes living near them unpleasant. To prevent such nuisances, 



