The historical lineage of New Urbanism is often narrowly limited to the traditional town-planning techniques of John Nolen and Raymond Unwin. This paper focuses on the historical basis of the regional, polycentric city concepts that are an essential part of the New Urbanist manifesto. I focus primarily on the regionalism of Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, and Benton MacKaye, and the principles laid out in the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) in the 1920s. I begin with a brief overview of the main principles of regionalism, culminating in the ideas of the RPAA, and then analyze how these ideas either connect or conflict with New Urbanism and its particular brand of the regionalist paradigm. An essential question for New Urbanists is how their particular version of regionalism stands up against earlier versions, and whether theirs will have a better chance of being implemented.
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8.
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15.
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BentonMacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning ( New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928).
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22.
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23.
See especially, James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere: Remaking our Everyday World for the Twenty-first Century (New York; Simon & Schuster, 1996); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005 ).
24.
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25.
MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning.
26.
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28.
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29.
MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning, 227.
30.
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31.
Andres Duany and Emily Talen, “ Transect Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association68 (2002): 245-266.
32.
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33.
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34.
Leon Krier, Architecture: Choice or Fate (London: Andreas Papadakis, 1998), 71, 187.
35.
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36.
Calthorpe and Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl.
37.
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38.
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39.
Fishman, The American Planning Tradition.
40.
Mathis Wackernagel et. al., “Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 14( 2002): 9266-9271; Andres Duany and David Brain, “Regulating as if humans matter: The transect and post-suburban planning” in Regulating Place: Standards and the Shaping of Urban America, eds. Eran Ben-Joseph and Terry S. Szold (New York: Routledge , 2002), 293-332.
41.
Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
42.
David Harvey , The Condition of Postmodernity ( Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, 4; Lewis Mumford, “The Natural History of Urbanization ” in Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. William L. Thomas (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1956 ), 382-400.
43.
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44.
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45.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961); Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life, 72; Lewis Mumford, Regional Planning in the Pacific Northwest (Portland, OR : Northwest Regional Council, 1939 ), 16, 19.
46.
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47.
MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning, 174; Mumford, Survey Graphic, 20.
48.
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49.
Mark Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the EcologicalRegion: The Politics of Planning (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); Thomas, Holding the Middle Ground in The American Planning Tradition.
50.
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51.
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52.
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53.
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54.
Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961); Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 207-208.
55.
Mumford, Survey Graphic May, 1925, 129.
56.
Ibid., 151.
57.
MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning, 45, 64.
58.
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61.
Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 58.
62.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938), 168.
63.
Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Geddes, Cities in Evolution, 189.
64.
MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning, 89.
65.
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66.
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67.
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68.
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70.
Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002).
71.
Stephen Wheeler, “ The New Regionalism: Key Characteristics of an Emerging Movement,” Journal of the American Planning Association68, no. 3(2002): 267-277.
72.
Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
73.
Mumford, The Next Twenty Years in City Planning, 49; Mumford, Regional Planning in the Pacific Northwest , 7, 9.
74.
Clarence Stein , A Plan for the State of New York. Planning Problems of Town, City and Region. Papers and Discussions at the International City and Regional Planning Conference ( Baltimore, MD: The Norman, Remington Co., 1925), 286.
75.
William Cronon, Nature'sMetropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).
76.
MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning, 71.
77.
Alex Marshall , How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
78.
Jose Luis Sert , Can Our Cities Survive? An ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their Solutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944).
79.
Peter Hall , “The turbulent eighth decade: Challenges to American city planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association55, no. 3(1989): 275-282.
80.
Geddes, Cities in Evolution , v.
81.
Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 3rd ed., 187.
82.
Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America, 44.
