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

Abstract

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. 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 RPAAmembers 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. 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. 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. 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.