The principal argument of this article is that for a century and more the region has been a significant scale for planning practice, for the provision of basic services, and more recently for citizen activism. Yet within planning history, attention to regions and regionalism has waxed and waned. When practitioners, historians, and social scientists have considered regions retrospectively, they have tended to view events and endeavors as episodic; they have assigned the region to particular moments or movements (a City Beautiful, the New Deal, a “new regionalism”), to discrete eras or decades (ecological regionalism, regional science), and to particular localities. Often those who study practice have seen regions when those they write about organized their efforts, framed their plans, implemented policies, and constituted these explicitly as regional in scale and scope. Because the attention of those who write planning history has been more periodic than comprehensive, scholars and practitioners who seek to understand the development over time of region as a concept, an ideal, and a space of analysis and intervention have turned to geography and allied disciplines for theory and empirics.
Proceedings of the First National Conference on City Planning, Washington, D.C. May 21-22, 1909 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991); Robert Fishman, "The Death and Life of American Regional Planning," in Reflections on Regionalism, ed. Bruce Katz (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000): 107-126. The time scale is consistent with the American Planning Association’s "Pathways in American Planning History: A Thematic Chronology." "Regional Planning" begins with the completion of the Erie Canal (1825), "History of Planning Profession" with the Columbian Exposition (1893); http://www.planning/org/pathways/regional.htm and http://www .planning/org/pathways/history.htm (both accessed February 18, 2008). For representative overviews of planning and region, see Thomas Adams, Outline of Town and City Planning: A Review of Past Efforts and Modern Aims (New York: Russell Sage, 1935); Otis D. Duncan, W. R. Scott, S. Lieberson, B. Duncan, and H. H. Winsborough, Metropolis and Region (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1960); John Friedmann and William Alonso, eds., Regional Development and Planning: A Reader (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1964); Kevin Lynch, Managing the Sense of a Region (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1976); Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928); Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: Natural History Museum, 1969); Howard W. Odum, American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1938); Myron Orfield, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); M. Pastor, Jr., P. Dreier, J. E. Grigsby III, and M. Lopez-Garza, Regions That Work: How Cites and Suburbs Can Grow Together (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Charles B. Purdom, The Building of Satellite Towns: A Contribution to the Study of Town Development and Regional Planning (London: Dent, 1949); Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
2.
The sources for this prolegomenon are scholarly (drawn from ongoing research into the origins of southern California’s regional economy), institutional (how might planning historians contribute to professional education and training), and practical (what is the significance of region for citizen planners). See, e.g., the essays exploring history and pedagogy in Journal of Planning History5, no. 4 (November 2006).
3.
These are issues of emphases and interpretation rather than questions of epistemology, paradigms of knowledge, or ideology. In his introduction, Schaffer suggested planners had become less effective and planning less relevant since 1950: "If planners did not rationally plan the physical shape of the city and region (or had failed in their attempts to do so), then what did they do?" (p. 2) Sies and Silver introduced the latter volume with a redefinition of planning and planners as "not only individuals belonging to the planning profession, narrowly defined, but all those public officials and private citizens, men and women, who create the urban landscape and shoulder the many responsibilities this entails, from zoning and transportation to settlement house work, subdivision development, and historic preservation." Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 2. Schaffer had published a book on the American garden city experience and at the time he compiled Two Centuries was employed by the Tennessee Valley Authority. See Daniel Schaffer, ed., Two Centuries of American Planning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Sies and Silver are academics for whom planning is one aspect of their broader training in cultural and urban history.
4.
R. Bruce Stephenson, "A Vision of Green: Lewis Mumford’s Legacy in Portland, Oregon," Journal of the American Planning Association 65, no. 3 (1999): 259-69; Scott, American City Planning; Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). I appreciate the suggestion of an anonymous reviewer who brought Wheeler’s essay to my attention. See Stephen M. Wheeler, "The New Regionalism: Key Characteristics of an Emerging Movement," Journal of the American Planning Association 68, no. 3 (2002): 268-69.
5.
Maureen Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Leonie Sandercock, ed., Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural Planning History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sies and Silver, Planning the Twentieth Century American City; June M. Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf, eds., Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997).
6.
Historians’ portrayal of the interwar years as a moment when individuals and social groups participated in culture they viewed as innately regional with distinctive inflections in language, arts, and popular culture ought to account for contradiction.
7.
The tally: in 2001, 2 sessions of 48, 4 papers out of approximately 120; 2003, 1 of 42 sessions, 3 papers out of 110; 2005, 1 session, 6 papers out of 112; 2007, 2 of 53 sessions, 4 papers out of 140. One of the 4 was a presidential address and the basis of this essay, with 2 of the remaining 3 were presented by professionals from a regional organization of planners.
8.
The respective authors are Emily Talen and Kristin Larsen. JPH accessed via Sage Publications at http://jph.sagepub.com/. Stephanie Frank (USC) performed the search and tabulation of JPH.
9.
Key term search conducted via EBSCO/Academic Search Premier, December 26, 2008.
10.
Exemplary works from geography include, John Allen, Doreen Massey, and Allen Cochrane, Rethinking the Region (London: Routledge, 1998); Manuel Castells and Peter Hall, Technopoles of the World: The Making of Twenty-First Century Industrial Enterprises (London: Routledge, 1992); and Allen Scott, Technopolis: High Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Sies and Silver call attention to interdisciplinarity and an integration of "information from several perspectives" as signature elements of new directions in histories of planning; methods and insights drawn from cultural and economic geography are implicit (pp. 1-2).
11.
Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Michael Storper, The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy (New York: Guilford, 1997); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis.
12.
Author interview with William Fain, February 26, 2008, and email follow-up with Nora Shih-Pu Chen, February 2008.
13.
Pereira Archive, Department of Special Collections, University of Southern California, boxes 6, 7, 11, and 34.
14.
For an overview of regional advocacy in southern California, see the report by The Building a Regional Voice for Environmental Justice Collaborative (2004). For activism in reaction to goods movement, see Robert Gottlieb, Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2007), 312-19. See also A. Logan et al., Comments re proposed clean trucks program. Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports, June 25, 2007, http://www.cleanandsafeports.org/fileadmin/pdf/Green_LA_CTP_Comment_Letter_6-25-07_2_.pdf (accessed February 6, 2008); M. Gold, "Trains Make El Sereno Not So Serene," Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1997, p. 1.
15.
Marion Kalb, Kristen Markley, and Loren Gustafson, "Feeding Young Minds: Hands on Farm to School Education Programs" (Community Food Security Coalition, March 2005); Community Food Security Coalition, "Weaving the Food Web: Community Food Security in California (CFSC),"http://www.foodsecurity.org/CFSCgudie-foodweb.pdf (accessed February 10, 2008).
