The Plan for the Valleys

Abstract

Development pressures threatening northwestern Baltimore County, Maryland, in the early 1960s led to the creation of the private Valleys Planning Council, which commissioned University of Pennsylvania Professors Ian McHarg and David Wallace to produce The Plan for the Valleys, featuring McHarg’s approach of ecological determinism to locate development and preserve land, with Wallace designing the type and density of development. We analyze The Plan’s development and land protection elements and the County’s subsequent use of an urban growth boundary, agricultural zoning, and conservation easements. Although a catalyst for landscape protection, The Plan’s substantial development elements were never built.