DUSAF: Master Planning
DUSAF has five technicians, working on the Master Plan for the whole Accelerator site while simultaneously promoting and cooperating with the efforts of city planners of the towns and villages surrounding the site. Warrenville, Aurora and North Aurora, Batavia and Geneva, and the West Chicago planners, stimulated by the potential created by the laboratory, are busily developing a plan for unified land use for the whole area. DUSAF planners are interested that roads leading to the accelerator pass through pleasant, clean and well-organized towns. We are also interested that the entire region should grow without jarring honky-towns next to our entrances, or expensive apartments or hotels which might go bankrupt in a short time because nobody could figure in advance the real needs for such new improvements.
What we do within the site boundaries influences what happens outside the site -- and the same is true in the reverse. If the planners are successful in achieving their objective when the accelerator is built, all will look as if there just couldn't have been any other place in the whole nation to build this "International" Accelerator Laboratory. In such a way the whole area will become a logical extension of the past.
The State of Illinois is working up a "doughnut" plan, where the "hole" in the doughnut is the 6800-acre Accelerator site and the surrounding "dough" is a 2-to-3-mile ring of communities. There is a good chance that harmony can be established between the needs and desires all around since usually the hole in the doughnut is the most important thing.
NAL is an instrument, and how successful it will be will depend upon the people who will operate it. The calibre of the people who will be attracted to run the instrument will be chiefly governed by the surrounding communities. Ugly and dull towns will attract ugly and dull people; neat, vibrant communities become homes to neat and vibrant people. Thus, it is a joint responsibility of NAL and the neighboring towns to chart a future for the whole region which will benefit all.