ARTUR GLIKSON 
programme and in the actual urban building forms. On the 
basis of a positive attitude towards the urban quality of living, 
a spatial framework for coexistence and relatedness of various 
human elements, has often been successfully established, at 
least on the level of the urban sub-unit. It is however, signifi- 
cant that our time has not yet produced an idea of the contem- 
porary large city. 
Of particular importance are the few realized schemes of 
regional planning and the influence of its ideas on other facets 
of planning. Regional planning is often erroneously inter- 
preted as an attempt at artificial isolation of region-wide 
populations from international cultural, social and economic 
influences. But this is contrary to its basic conceptions and 
intentions. Lewis Mumford has emphasized the essential unity 
of regionalism and universalism. In his conception, man’s 
relationship to environment should extend simultaneously on 
various environmental levels, such as the small community, 
the village, the town, the region, the country and the world. 
If one of these links is missing, the interaction between the 
individual and the larger communities is invalidated, and man’s 
relationship to environment is degraded to isolation or dis- 
ruption. 
So far as regional planning is concerned with the renewal of 
a specific area, it aims at the re-establishment of human self- 
identification with the environment; but a regional framework 
of settlement, work and recreation is inherently related both 
to the smaller framework of local communities and to the 
higher level of super-regions or countries. Regional planning 
therefore is also a means of establishing a graduated relation- 
ship between the individual and the world. 
The few existing instances of regional schemes, as in the 
Tennessee Valley Authority, Holland and Israel, exemplify both 
a trend of universal regionalism and of regional universalism. 
It also seems important that on the basis of this limited 
experience, proposals for the reconstruction of the regional 
landscape as the environment for both settled and mobile, 
rural and urban, working and resting populations have been 
150 
