"We must create in every region people who will be accustomed, from school onward, to humanist attitudes, co-operative methods, rational controls. These people will know in detail where they live and how they live; they will be united in a common feeling for their landscape, their literature and language, their local ways, and out of their own self-respect they will have a sympathetic understanding with other regions and different local peculiarities. They will be actively interested in the form and culture of their locality, which means their community and their own personalities. Such people will contribute to our land planning, our industry planning, and our community planning the authority of their own understanding, and the pressure of their own desires. Without them, planning is a barren externalism."
-- Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (1938)
the only qualifications i would make to mumford's statement involve "humanism," which is to species-oriented for me and which i'd replace with something like "vitalism" so as to include all living things; and "rational controls" which, though necessary, need to be tempered with good measures of the irrational, surrational, etc. i would also want to make sure there is a wide range of diversity within these "common feelings" broadly construed.
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