Regional Planning Association of America

by

Peter Ekman

• LAST MODIFIED: 22 November 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190922467-0107

Introduction

The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) was formed in 1923, appalled by what its members saw as the demonstrable failures of unregulated growth at both the congested centers and distended fringes of the urban United States. Over the ensuing two decades, the RPAA agitated for its vision of a properly planned settlement pattern—substantially dispersed and polycentric—in which the most ruinous consequences of advanced capitalism would be held at bay; agricultural landscapes would survive and thrive between compact but growth-limited cities; solidaristic forms of “community,” last enjoyed prior to the Industrial Revolution, would be reconstituted for an age of new technologies; and “life” itself would thereby be renewed. Its organization remained loose. At times the RPAA spoke in one voice, but its constituent members had complex intellectual lives, professional commitments, and opinions all their own. As a consequence, to study the RPAA involves striking a balance between the group’s core and many peripheries, its consistent principles and a range of endeavors pursued by one member or a subset of the core group—minimally, Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, and Catherine Bauer. For scholars of urban studies, planning, architecture, geography, and adjacent fields, it also means dividing attention between the few tangible, localized instances in which the group built new neighborhoods from scratch—famously the Garden City experiments at Sunnyside, New York, and Radburn, New Jersey—and their broader project of diagnosis, conceptualization, and critique. Though difficult to categorize politically or philosophically, the RPAA remains an inescapable point of passage between Progressive Era approaches to planning and those dominant in the period following the Second World War, when widespread automobility and other technologies unmade American cities even more thoroughly than before. For urban observers ill at ease with prevailing styles of development, the RPAA’s work remains a perennial source of unrealized possibilities.

General Overviews

A number of works give broad overviews of the RPAA’s thought and practice, whether treated as a standalone case or embedded within broader intellectual histories of planning and design. Sussman 1976 supplies a strong introduction to the group and collects a set of key early RPAA documents. Paired with Lubove 1963, and with the relevant sections of Hall 2014, it contextualizes the group’s contributions. Spann 1996 and Parsons 1994 detail the RPAA’s many idiosyncratic personalities and partnerships. Friedmann and Weaver 1979, Ramos 2023, Dorman 1993, and Nelson 2021, with differing emphases and scopes, add complexity to the contested concept of the “region” on which the RPAA’s existence always depended. Looking back, Mumford 2023 takes stock of the group’s interwar work.

• Dorman, Robert L. Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

  Treats the RPAA in tandem with a series of other intellectual tendencies in the interwar United States that laid claim to “the region” as a way of countering what Louis Brandeis called “the curse of bigness” in political organization—including the modernizing social scientists gathered around Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina, but also, and crucially, the conservative literary critics known as the Southern Agrarians.

• Friedmann, John, and Clyde Weaver. Territory and Function: The Evolution of Regional Planning. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

  A classic survey of regionalism in theory and practice. Although the endpoint is a critique of postwar “regional science” and ecologically illiterate “regional development” due to their inattention to inequality, the first half of the book is a meticulous intellectual history. The RPAA is discussed as part of an American “search for regional balance.”

• Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880. 4th ed. Chichester, UK: Wiley–Blackwell, 2014.

  A standard text, originally published in 1988, that details debates within urban and regional planning since the late Victorian era, mostly along transatlantic circuits. Hall draws out the linkages between the RPAA and its English and Scottish sources with particular clarity.

• Lubove, Roy. Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963.

  The first monographic study, covering the period up to 1933, of the RPAA as a collective entity. Lubove’s book, though brief, is a necessary starting point to understand how regionalist ideas from England, Scotland, and France—along with lessons learned planning towns for shipyard workers during the First World War under the United States Housing Corporation and Emergency Fleet Corporation—informed its critique.

• Mumford, Lewis. “The Regional Planning Association of America: Past and Future.” Planning Perspectives 38.4 (2023): 737–739.

  DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2023.2216489

  Mumford’s own brief reflections on the RPAA’s accomplishments, penned in 1948, just as he and Stein sought to reconstitute the group for the postwar world after years of geographic and intellectual dispersal.

• Nelson, Garrett Dash. “Regional Planning as Cultural Criticism: Reclaiming the Radical Wholes of Interwar Regional Thinkers.” Regional Studies 55.1 (2021): 127–137.

  DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2020.1737664

  Offers a close reading of a 1929 14th-edition Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “regional planning,” written by Mumford and MacKaye, arguing that the region concept suggested a vital force by which to reunite a fractured social world, not primarily a scalar unit amenable to the academic or administrative gaze.

• Parsons, Kermit C. “Collaborative Genius: The Regional Planning Association of America.” Journal of the American Planning Association 60.4 (1994): 462–482.

  DOI: 10.1080/01944369408975605

  A succinct inventory of the major personalities who drove the RPAA, slotted tidily into roles such as “the organizer” (Stein), “the writer” (Mumford), and “the analyst” (Wright). Parsons is openly celebratory of the group’s “genius,” but the article is valuable in stressing that its ideas took shape in interpersonal interaction and cannot meaningfully be disentangled from that context.

• Ramos, Stephen J. “Southern Regionalism: Social Science and Regional–National Planning in the Interwar U.S. South.” Planning Perspectives 38.4 (2023): 799–817.

  DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2023.2215731

  Discusses the RPAA’s contributions alongside a specifically Southern US tradition of regional thinking in which the term accords far less priority to the fact of urbanization. Ramos carefully explores the group’s demonstrated or hypothetical affinities with the sociology of Howard Odum, his Regionalism Lab, and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina.

• Spann, Edward K. Designing Modern America: The Regional Planning Association of America and Its Members. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996.

  Principally useful for gleaning further detail on the individuals who intersected to constitute the RPAA. Each chapter focuses on a single person.

• Sussman, Carl, ed. Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976.

  Reprints the contents of the May 1925 “Regional Planning” issue of Survey Graphic, conventionally taken as the RPAA’s first and most complete statement of principles. Contributors include figures addressed elsewhere in this bibliography—Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye—plus architects Frederick Ackerman and Henry Wright, heterodox economist Stuart Chase, journalist–reformer Robert Bruère, and financier Alexander Bing. Additional selections follow the development of the RPAA’s thought into the 1930s.