ABSTRACT
BOTH the conception and the procedure of national planning must be based on the understanding that analysis and synthesis belong together. The last hundred years have laid stress almost exclusively on analysis; they produced a gigantic amount of factual knowledge, but the facts thus discovered were not welded together into a synthetic and co-ordinated whole. This tendency is still strong, hence the predisposition towards research which fancies that its isolated results, though they might be valuable, automatically produce an integrated system in themselves. But it appears that we are now entering a stage where the opinion is spreading that we must co-ordinate and systematise what we have achieved. We cannot any longer be content with adapting man to nature, but we must adapt nature to man. There is something inevitable and predestined in this evolution; and it is up to us to make not only the right use of the possibilities offered to us but to do it in time and on a grand scale. This enormous task confronting us loses somewhat its overwhelming impressiveness if we realise that the influence which man is exerting upon nature is nothing unusual; that it has enabled man to change the natural landscape into a man-made landscape; and that, especially in a country like Great Britain, there is hardly any part that has not been transformed by man's work. Planning on a national scale means a re-shaping of our environment. The redistribution of population involves a far-reaching remoulding of the land of Great Britain. The face of this island will not be the same if and when national planning does its job. Possibly more than in any other field it seems imperative to look at the problem as a whole and to interrelate the various regions and their specific potentialities from a national aspect. The world around us is an integral whole; it is a synthesis in itself; but man's response to the ever changing challenge of nature has been a haphazard, conservative and over-analytical and retarded response to many little details while ignoring the underlying unity. Our approach to this problem has been termed “Human Geography”, but, as a matter of fact, it has inspired, in the first instance, contributions to an analytical explanation of the natural and man-made landscape. This science deals with the elements of settlement, traffic, economy and the interdependence of man and his environment. It cannot lead us to synthetic conclusions because we have used the analytical method in our past researches into these problems. We made the same mistake as in town planning; we tried to deal with different functions in isolation. But now we are convinced that the functions which make up the practical life of man must be balanced against each other; and that it is man himself and his personal life which alone can hold this balance and integrate the functional parts creatively. It would go beyond the scope of this book to indulge in theoretical disputes about the true meaning of Human Geography; but national planning would land us in an impasse if we did not try to keep away from an analytic segregation in a double sense: the mastering of nature by man embraces the natural as well as the cultural landscape already reformed by man during thousands of years. Furthermore, the knowledge of detailed facts piled up, especially during the last 150 years, must be fitted into the synthetic conception of the whole problem. We must understand the interdependence of man and nature in its totality if we hope to be sovereign masters and trustees of the gigantic monopoly which nature as the greatest producer has built up.
