The Regional Planning Association of America at 100: a new exploration

2023 marks the 100-year anniversary of the first meeting of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) on 18 April 1923 in architect Robert D. Kohn’s office in the Manhattan 1913 Goupil Building on 56–58 West 45th Street in New York City. At the urging of Charles H. Whitaker, then editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the informal group came together to promote social values with territorial decentralization and balance. They chose to drop the additional items of ‘housing’ and ‘garden cities’ from the association title to emphasize the territorial scope and ambition of Benton MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail proposal, which he had been developing since 1921.¹ Over the next ten years, RPAA projects included a range of scales, from geographic projects such as MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail, to the residential designs for Radburn, New Jersey and Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York. After its demise in 1933, some members went on to work on New Deal projects and legislation, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (which celebrates its ninetieth anniversary this year) and Catherine Bauer’s authorship of the Housing Act of 1937. This special issue of Planning Perspectives is an opportunity to consider and discuss the RPAA legacy 100 years later.

Not all RPAA members were present at the April 18 meeting, so Lewis Mumford instead marked the association’s origins at a meeting the following month – May 19 – at the Hudson Guild Farm in New Jersey. Mumford recalled that a group of folk square dancers were at the farm that day and admonished the RPAA city newcomers for trying to participate in the dance without knowing its rules and manners. Mumford enjoyed the scolding, and the association would then try to incorporate square dancing into its future meetings as a way to connect with U.S. folk culture.² Mumford was drawn to imagined folk rurality at the outer edge of the metropolis, where the group hoped to find refuge from the teeming immigrant New York of the 1920s. It was an act of ventriloquy, in the spirit of the regionalist local colour literature of the period, where ‘a modern urban outsider … projects onto the native a pristine, authentic space immune to historical changes shaping their own lives;’ the projected indigenous connection to region itself a product for those metropolitan planners and administrators who would receive the new planning perspective.³ In her book on new towns of the period, Rosemary Wakeman describes this as ‘practicing utopia’, which also applies to the work of the RPAA.⁴ The affinities between the U.S. planning regionalists and the literary regionalists are surely testament to their shared futurist imaginary interests imbued with a nineteenth century folk nostalgia.⁵

At his farm at Mount Olive, near Hudson Guild, Whitaker spoke of an encounter a year earlier with ‘swarthy’ Italian immigrants encroaching on his pastoral refuge, and he and his friends looked ‘askance at them’ and kept their distance.⁶ The unfortunate tale is instructive, but not uncommon for a country in flux. Great migrations were arriving from Europe in the United States, from the U.S. South to the North, while regionalism and regional planning represented and projected static land ideals. Mumford returned from Europe with belief in the U.S. tradition of a still young nation, still culturally ‘malleable’, and still called to the freedom of the frontier. Yet simultaneously, he believed in rooted folk traditions and reified valley sections that would assign human activities based on geographic features.⁷ Within the RPAA, Mumford advocated for regionalism as the ‘cultural motive’ for regional planning, lest it ‘relapse into an arid technological scheme’.⁸ During the interwar period, these intellectual amalgams were conceived through expertise, but of course eventually the Italians (and many others!) would no longer wait or ask to join the square dance.

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner declared that ‘The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the Great West’. Arthur M. Schlesinger noted that in a private letter from 1925, Turner knew that an ‘urban reinterpretation of our history’ would likely contest his interpretation.⁹ Schlesinger himself wrote that reinterpretation, at least of the latter nineteenth-century U.S. history, in The Rise of the City, 1878–1898, in 1933 (another anniversary!). But the RPAA were still in the throes of utopian westward settlement (or ‘resettlement’, as Mumford had hoped) just as that frontier was ending. The 1920 U.S. census had only recently revealed for the first time that the urban population was slightly higher than rural population (51.2% to 48.8%), and this marked an extended post-World War I identity crisis of the decade that sought refuge in anti-consumerism and movements such as ‘One Hundred Percent Americanism’.

By invitation of the association, a Scottish visitor named Patrick Geddes was also at the Hudson Guild event. His endorsement was being courted in competition with the Regional Planning Association (RPNY), formed the year before, who had apparently paid for his trip to the U.S. Geddes and MacKaye hit it off famously, sharing their passion for forestry, and his endorsement was secured.¹⁰ Echoing Geddesian influence, the RPAA programme called for regional planning to replace haphazard big city growth with new population centres to preserve natural resources, efficient industrial activities, and ample space allotted for recreation and leisure activities. They then thought more broadly about regional economic activity to support their garden cities and villages. Their vision was comprised of elements: Howard’s Garden City, with Geddesian influence, at MacKaye’s scale, in the spirit of Turner’s frontier. From these utopian beginnings, the RPAA’s regional planning proposals would go on to have very real international influence for the next several decades.

The special issue celebrates the RPAA and its legacy with contributions from leading thinkers in the planning history field. It began with an email message to Kristin Larsen, a co-conspirator in the endeavour, and it continued at a special session in the nineteenth Conference on Planning History of the Society of City and Regional Planning Historians at the October 2022 meeting, appropriately enough, in New York City.

We launch the special issue with Lewis Mumford’s 1948 unpublished short history of the RPAA, which he sent around to potential new members in order to relaunch its mission. Mumford uses the RPAA twenty-fifth anniversary to extend invitations to the Southern regionalists and California regionalists to form sub-chapters of the new Regional Development Council of America. In Kristen Larsen’s contribution on the RPAA and the Regional Development Council of America (RDCA), she notes that Mumford’s RPAA history also marked the fiftieth anniversary of Howard’s Garden Cities book. Larsen provides a rich overview of the RPAA, the RDCA, and what she terms the ‘bridging period’ of membership collaborative work between the two eras. She identifies ‘communitarian regionalism’ as the conceptual axis that inspired their regional planning work through all three periods. As she notes, it was the ‘antithesis to materialism or corporate regionalism that privileged the city as an economic growth machine’, which, over time, was ‘increasingly diverging from mainstream planning practice’. Larsen also includes W.E.B. Du Bois’s rebuke to Alexander Bing, when he asks for his support of Radburn. As Larsen concludes, ‘Like the RPAA, the RDCA failed to advocate integration and equity … and the RDCA’s post-WWII proposals reinforced the significant harms of segregation’. Regionalisms were conceived by those with the power to do so.

Ellen Shoshkes’s contribution uses the concept of ‘bioregional urbanism’ as the conceptual thread that joins the work of Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, the RPAA, the Association of Planning and Regional Reconstruction (APRR), CIAM, and the various transnational networks, institutions, and groups in which British Planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt moved and participated. Shoshkes explores how Tyrwhitt develops the Garden City into the more nuanced, complex ‘Urban Constellation’ model, with a more pronounced protagonism of the central city, in response the common critiques of the period against regionalism as ‘anti-urban’. As she notes, the model represented a ‘synthesis of Geddes’s bioregionalism and modernist urbanism that framed debates on post-World War II reconstruction’.

Robert Fishman’s contribution methodically reviews and compares the contemporary work and legacies of the RPAA and the Regional Plan Association of New York (RPA). Fishman underscores their ‘very different visions of regionalism, reflecting two very different genealogies of theory and practice’. Using the challenge of ‘decentralization’, a key idea for most regionalism of the 1920s, Fishman asks, given the capabilities of subway transit and new automobile technologies, ‘How far would this decentralization go, and how much could planning … direct this movement to its highest ends?’ Noting the accomplishments of each group over time, his critique of the RPAA was that the beauty of their networked region at the periphery of urban centres ‘offered no way to control the key levers of transportation and land use that could have regulated the built form of Mumford’s Fourth Migration’.

My own contribution explores Southern regionalism, and the work of Howard W. Odum and colleagues at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute for Research in Social Science during the interwar period. Odum and colleagues developed a cultural concept of regionalism based on their work on race, Southern mill towns, the plantation system, and the region’s colonial economy. ‘Southern regionalism did not seek to disaggregate great cities, as the RPAA did, but to pre-empt them from taking over what Odum and colleagues believed to be small-town agrarian Southern society’. Like RPAA members, Odum, Thomas J. Woofter Jr., and Rupert B. Vance all provided preliminary reports for the TVA in the early 1930s, and Woofter eventually joined the Roosevelt administration. As I also show, ‘Southern regionalist discourse provided an ideological template for the FDR administration’s New Deal projects to succeed with Southern leaders by avoiding a frontal criticism of Jim Crow institutional racism’.

The final two contributions are more speculative thought experiments. In her contribution, Emily Talen provocatively asks, in light of their concern with underlying processes that produced urban problems, ‘What Would the RPAA Do?’ if faced with today’s most pressing issues: the urban impacts of public health and the pandemic, gentrification and displacement, and climate change. She observes,

The hope of the regionalists was to seize the technological revolution and change its course of direction so that the economic system would be reorganized within economically confined regions … It required a re-channeling of economic activity away from its global course, toward localized production and distribution systems.

This move certainly reflects the way technology ‘displaced’ urban social and economic activity during the COVID period. She argues that gentrification would have been understood as simply one more of the myriad of reasons why ‘big, dense cities are unjust’. With regard to climate change, she notes the RPAA’s ecological inspiration, particularly in the work of Benton MacKaye, echoing some of the themes that Shoshkes addresses. The thought experiment is rich with RPAA thought inserted into today’s urbanist challenges, with Talen’s concluding point that the RPAA would likely ‘still be fighting against a neoliberal, urban boosterism that … remains the dominant ideology’.

Finally, Peter G. Rowe, in his contribution, ask how modern the RPAA was by reviewing its 100-year legacy through theory and practice. Rowe draws on Friedmann and Weaver’s titular poles on regional planning – Territory and Function – to analyse the period swings across the century.¹¹ As Larsen points out with RDCA, the concept of development tracks closely with the RPAA conception of regional planning, and Rowe illustrates this in his threading of regional planning and development. He moves through the 1960s and into Marxist critiques of planning by luminaries such as Henri Lefebvre. He points out that contemporary discussions of planetary urbanism now question the very interpretive territorial categories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rowe concludes that while the RPAA was philosophically founded on notions of ‘Cartesian natural qualities of the world, rather than those of phenomenal appearances’, the ‘relevance of its functional integration … has been longer lasting than the specification of its territorial integration’.

We are grateful to all of them for their excellent contributions. The articles speak to one another across issues of ecology, scale, form, and community from a very clear point in 2023. The authors are academics based in various regions in the U.S. – Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and West. Although included in the articles’ rich bibliographic references, what it missing is the international impact of RPAA outside the U.S. and British networks. These contributions have been explored in Planning Perspectives by authors such as Gislaine Elizete Beloto, Jan Dostalík, Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Hugh Clout, Stephen V. Ward, Carola Hein, and Clément Orillard, to name only a few.¹² Recent books have also highlighted the RPAA’s international impact.¹³ It could perhaps be a future special issue, edited by someone outside the U.S.

For now, I invite you to what Benton MacKaye termed a ‘New Exploration’,¹⁴ in this special issue dedicated to the Regional Planning Association of America centenary.

Notes

1 Spann, Designing Modern America, 40.

2 Mumford, Sketches, 341–2; Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 137.

3 Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” 252; Bramen, Uses of Variety, 123; Brodhead, Cultures of Letters.

4 Wakeman, Practicing Utopia.

5 Bramen, Uses of Variety; Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces.

6 Spann, Designing Modern America, 32.

7 Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 137–8.

8 Mumford, My Works, 107.

9 Schlesinger, “City in American History,” 43.

10 Spann, Designing Modern America, 40.

11 Friedmann and Weaver, Territory and Function.

12 Ward “The Garden City”; Clout “The Great Reconstruction”; Hein “The Exchange”; Orillard “Transnational Building”; Dostalík, “The Organicists”; Beloto “Regional Cities”; Ferenčuhová “Thinking Relationally”.

13 Some examples include Gorelik, Ciudad Latinoamericana; Haney, When Modern Was Green; Moravánszky and Kegler, East-West-Central; Olsson Agrarian Crossings.

14 MacKaye, New Exploration.