ABSTRACT
Community education, as carried out by Cooperative Extension's MIDNY Project in the five-county region, helped focus attention on rural problems. It provided opportunities for productive interaction between professional planning offices and numerous agencies and organizations concerned with rural interests. Despite the systemic relationship between the "urban crisis" and the little publicized problems of rural areas, professional planners have given little attention to rural areas. City planning in America very early became the "City Beautiful Movement". Simultaneously, social reformers tended to see the city as the source of all evil, and the rural areas as the faunt of all virtue. Rural areas were viewed by planners as "undeveloped land" or "open space," rather than vital element in the whole system that was a city-hinterland unit. Recent legislation, focusing on problems of non-metropolitan regions, has revealed a lack of knowledge and experience in rural planning.
