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This chapter focuses on Clarence Samuel Stein's postwar concept of the Regional City as well as the maturation of his town planning ideas. Stein and his colleagues began to regularly use the term Regional City in 1927. Their early conception envisioned an amalgam of the romanticized medieval village with connections to the land combined with all the conveniences offered through new technologies to enhance modern lifestyles in distinctive, relatively small towns. Stein, together with MacKaye and Mumford, advocated for regional, even national, planning based on the ideas the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) had already promoted, including regional river basin planning, the townless highways, and state planning. This chapter considers Stein's postwar advocacy of communitarian regionalism and the rebirth of the RPAA as the Regional Development Council of America (RDCA). It also examines how Stein applied his collaborative regionalist and town planning ideals in a concrete project at Kitimat in Canada.

This chapter focuses on Clarence Samuel Stein's collaborative approach to community design with a specific focus on the formation and initiatives of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). It first provides an overview of Stein's early connections in housing policy and regionalism, along with his marriage to Aline MacMahon, before turning to the RPAA, conceived by Stein to address housing policy, community design, and regional planning, with the goal of building a Garden City. It also examines the City Housing Corporation's (CHC) community building and design strategy as well as its innovations in mortgage financing; the New York Housing and Regional Planning Commission's (HRPC) advocacy of a comprehensive housing program; the RPAA's participation in the 1925 International Town Planning Conference (ITPC) held in New York City; and the inception of the Radburn Idea. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Stein's advocacy of communitarian regionalism and metropolitanism and the CHC's demise during the 1930s.

This chapter provides context for Clarence Samuel Stein's engagement with and translation of Ebenezer Howard's proposed Garden City and for his advocacy of these ideas in his projects, service, writings, lectures, and consulting activities throughout his career. Stein promoted Garden City as an “ideal system” for neighborhood preservation, housing reform, traffic congestion mitigation, and park design. What struck Stein about the Garden City—rechristened Regional City—was its spirit of cooperation and community, the balance between open spaces and development, and the notion that distinctive planned new towns served as the building blocks of the region. This chapter reviews the Garden City concept with a focus on its adoption and evolution in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. It also considers the initiatives of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), where Stein served as founder and informal sponsor, including the Radburn Idea.

This chapter discusses the environmental and social consideration in the development of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) road network. The authors offer ideas for improving the balance between road development and socioenvironmental priorities

Matthew L. Downs concentrates on federally sponsored improvements to the South and their effects, specifically the role of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on the area near Decatur, Alabama. Downs posits that the twentieth-century Tennessee River Valley perfectly embodied the modern “Sunbelt” economy, one built on a firm and expansive foundation of directed federal investment resulting in the massive construction of dams, reservoirs, recreational facilities, regional planning, and expansion of electric power to countless rural inhabitants. Over time, though, the relationship between southern civic leaders and federal officials changed from regional development and large-scale resource management to one more concerned with attracting and retaining industry, investment, and economic development to the seven affected southern states. As a result, Downs maintains, by 1960 the TVA had largely abandoned its ideological foundation and converted to full cooperation with local civic leaders in a Sunbelt pattern of modernization, commercialization, and the attraction of new industry to the region.

This chapter examines how intergovernmental authorities carry out their responsibility for transportation systems that link the city to the suburbs across municipal boundaries. It also considers why the suburban representatives who dominate these intergovernmental authorities are unlikely to use their power over transportation investments as a tool to alter land-use patterns in the city. More specifically, it discusses the working of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) and leading regional operators of transit services. The chapter focuses on the MPO operating within the greater Philadelphia region, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), along with two other regional authorities that dominate transportation planning and investment in greater Philadelphia: the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority and the Delaware River Port Authority. It explains why these regional bodies are not the main actors advancing regional priorities to reshape central Philadelphia.

Early twentieth-century conservation in the United States has been identified in the public mind with the West and the protection of wilderness, parks, and national forests. Some scholars have explored conservation through the writings of naturalists and antimodernists like Henry David Thoreau. What we have only recently come to appreciate is that there was a whole generation of reformers very much concerned about the environment who were neither antimodernists nor wilderness protectors. They were modernists who rejected not the modern world, but the way the modern world was being fashioned. They did not retreat or long to retreat into the wilderness but lived in cities and towns. And they struggled to make the environment of the most settled parts of the nation more amenable to human habitation. It was in New England where these reformers first began to make their claims for the rights of citizens to clean air, clean water, and clean soil. The Massachusetts board of health argued, less than five years after the Civil War, for aggressive state action on the claim that “all citizens have an inherent right to the enjoyment of pure and uncontaminated air, and water, and soil, that this right should be regarded as belonging to the whole community, and that no one should be allowed to trespass upon it by his carelessness or his avarice.” And the New Hampshire board, in its first report, stated that “every person has a legitimate right to nature’s gifts—pure water, air, and soil—a right belonging to every individual, and every community upon which no one should be allowed to trespass through carelessness, ignorance, or other cause.” New England’s first environmental crisis was brought on by its people’s fecundity and by their material practices in the late eighteenth century. Out of that crisis emerged a changed New England with concentrated manufacturing centers and increasingly market-oriented agriculture. Although not all New Englanders enthusiastically supported this change all were affected by it. Within three generations, New Englanders saw their region transformed. That transformation created a new set of troubles. The emergence of those new problems, and the solutions nineteenthcentury Yankees offered, is the story of this book.