A natural system is a natural system and it's comprehensible to the
operation of laws and time. It is an interactive biophysical system, but it
is also a social value system. It contains resources. However, what
constitutes the resources is a function of the perception of people and
available technology captured in labor. However, when a resource is perceived
its location is determined by its natural history,whether it's coal, iron,
bauxite, transportation, clams, shellfish, it doesn't matter what the hell
it is. That thing is there because of its natural history. So the resource
is located with the means of production. The means of production selects
for the exploiters. The people who are going to do it or exploit it have to
know how to do it and this, except in American colonial history, selected
people who not only had an occupational identity, very often had an ethnic
identity, had a religious identity, and had characteristic settlement patterns
characteristic institutions and characteristic values. And the values and
institutions could be seen very, very clearly as adaptive strategies to
perpetuate themselves and I'm sure their success. So it's not random. It
doesn't matter whether we look at urban neighborhoods in Philadelphia or
through Jon Berger's eyes the hills of Pennsylvania or Kenneth Square,
Pennsylvania, or Chestnut County, Pennsylvania, or the Pinelands, all of
which have been examined exhaustively. We find the same systematic
relationship. The people are who they are, doing what they are doing, where
they're doing it, for very good and comprehensible reasons and they have
characteristic values. They have characteristic settlement patterns. They
have characteristic institutions. They are not random.

 So here we go. So that's what I do and, of course, the whole enterprise,
that is, to try and understand and to assemble together those scientists,
physical, biological, and social, with architects, landscape architects,
city and regional planners, is to develop a method by which we can associate
with people in order to help them to ensure their health and well-being.
The world Health Organization defines a healthy person, and by extension
family and institution, as one that seeks and solves problems, and, of course,
planning, at least in this sense, really is problem solving. It's the
identification of environments which offer the most, where the least work of
adaptation has to be done in order to ensure the success and well-being of
whoever is trying to do it. It is important to recognize, of course, the
purpose of this exercise is not to cause planners to be healthy. The health
of the planners is a byproduct. If he's paid, he doesn't also have to be
healthy. The purpose of the exercise is to get the people themselves to
reach into and engage in seeking and solving problems, which process of
seeking and solving problems seems to be health giving. So the artifacts
are not the product, the process is the product, and the most important part
of the process is the capability of the people and the animals, microorganisms,
and plants in that system to be able to seek and solve problems. So there.
That's what we are all about.

 So what are we going to do? It seems to me that we are going to be able
to plan alternative futures, really dream for some all but unfulfillable
future, or many of these. One realizes we don't have this capability now.
As a matter of fact, I don't think most people know what they're doing.
Certainly most institutions don't know what they're doing. I would say as
a proposition, on the basis of 25 years of planning in the United States,
that tihe capability of knowing what you are doing is absolutely an inverse
relationship to the level of organization of the system. That is, individuals