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The article reports that the villages of Stams, Mötz, Silz, and Haiming, located between twenty-two to thirty miles west of Innsbruck, in an agricultural region of the Austrian Tyrol, constitute an area that has aroused great interest as a pilot project in co-operative planning and development. But little affected by the Industrial Revolution, bound by economic patterns and cultural customs, many of which have been in existence since Roman times, the Stams-Haiming region presented problems that could be solved only by a complete reversal of the former attitudes and practices of the local population. How they were brought to an awareness of joint responsibility in any basic undertaking and to an acceptance of technological change is the subject of this paper. It would be impossible to understand how enormous has been the reversal of attitudes and practices of these strongly independent peasants without understanding the history that has engendered them. Hence, various aspects of their culture, from the thirteenth century to the present, including the problems arising from staunch adherence to customs and laws, population increases, recurrent droughts, and technological changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have been treated in an effort to show how these factors finally impressed upon the people the need for regional planning.