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This chapter discusses the main trends and the most prominent focuses of research regarding geography as an applied discipline. It concentrates on the contributions of geographers in Britain and the applied developments in human geography. The development of physical geography and earth sciences has been particularly influential on the development of applied geography at various stages. The chapter also examines regional planning and policy, town and country planning, land use planning and other specific fields.

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

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 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 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 emphasizes the importance of infrastructure development for the regional economy and addresses the specific challenges of and opportunities for such development in the Pan-Pearl River Delta (Pan-PRD). It examines infrastructure developments including the regional transport plan; and highway, rail, port, waterway, and airport projects. It also addresses the challenges inherent in implementing infrastructure development proposals, arguing that a timely regional cooperation framework is essential for the advancement of cross-boundary infrastructure works.

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.

This chapter discusses strategic planning in the United States. The country's development in the new century is facing a host of challenges that require strategies for sustainable, equitable, and prosperous growth. The Regional Plan Association's America 2050 project is dedicated to responding to these challenges through the National Infrastructure Investment Plan, which involves the full range of infrastructure systems including water, energy, and transportation. This chapter emphasizes that the plan for such investment should encourage economic growth in an equitable and sustainable manner.

The preceding chapters of the book are primarily focused on rural or inter-urban transportation. This final chapter suggests that, at least in some places, top-down fears of patterns of subversive mobility have also shaped transportation investments within cities. To make this case, the chapter uses the example of New York City. The chapter argues that elite refusals to invest in New York City’s freight infrastructure during the 1920s must be understood in the political context of the German sabotages and Red Scare of the 1910s. The memoirs of the city’s bomb squad captain during the 1910s indicate a local official perception that the inner city’s primary methods and spaces for freight-handling—the lighter-boats of New York Harbor, the city’s riverfront piers, and the adjacent urban complex of factories which made use of this local freight transport network—were being utilized by politically subversive parties. Ultimately, elite refusals to modernize the inner city’s freight-handling facilities helped to undermine New York City’s strength as a manufacturing center.

This chapter discusses the major themes in the evolution of accessibility over the twentieth century. The idea of accessibility is not new, either to urban and regional planning or to the social sciences in general. The concept dates back at least to Richard Hurd's 1903 analysis of urban growth, Robert Haig's 1926 “ease of contact,” and John Stewart's 1948 “demographic energy.” In Stewart's analysis, the first of the three to quantify the accessibility concept, it was a good predictor of outcomes, including observed income at the state level. Stewart also recognized the potential of accessibility as a normative goal early on: if energy or accessibility can predict important outcomes such as income, then surely it could also be seen as a policy variable to be directly manipulated by central planners. Echoing earlier authors, Walter Hansen applied the term “accessibility” to Stewart's “demographic energy” and broadly introduced the concept into the urban and regional realm with three ideas central to the planning use of the tool. First, like Hurd's and Haig's analyses early in the century—and unlike Stewart's nationally scaled research—Hansen's analysis was metropolitan, not the continental. Second, the outcome variable for Hansen was residential development, a central concern of the urban-planning profession. And finally, where Stewart had implicitly treated peoples' inclination to travel as a constant value, Hansen showed that it was a variable subject to empirical investigation.

This chapter focuses on the colonial context where state engineers planned and constructed a wide range of infrastructure projects. It argues that the notions of “comprehensive technology” or “technologies for developing Asia” (kōa gijutsu) discussed in Chapter 2 actually took shape through specific colonial projects rather than simply in the minds of Japanese engineers imitating prominent Western projects. Instead of focusing on experts and their ideas, this chapter analyzes how their plans were formed in dynamic relation to various tensions and contingencies during construction involving colonized peoples, different business and institutional interests, environmental conditions, and war exigencies. Three different examples of “comprehensive technology” are examined: Liao River basin planning in southern Manchuria, urban planning in Beijing, and regional planning on the Manchuria-Korea border. As a result of the above processes of negotiation, the actual projects embodied certain conceptions of technology over others.

This chapter examines the nature of roads’ environmental impacts and presents four fundamental strategies to ensure that road planning minimized the worst and least reversible of these impacts. Recent experiences in Brazil and Bolivia illustrate how the threat to road‐induced habitat loss was addressed in varying circumstances

This chapter examines how newly-professionalized park planners addressed mounting regional park needs from the 1880s through the 1930s. Planners in New York’s environs rethought the city-suburb relationship, conceptualized a recreating public, and facilitated the germination of planning theory through regional park and beach plans. The territory for which regional park systems were planned comprises the ring of counties north and east of Manhattan in New York State. Regional park planning began with the vanguard 1884 Bronx park system. In the 1920s and 1930s, planners refined this ideology in plans for Westchester County and its municipal amusement park Rye Playland, on Long Island, and in the city. Planners valued parks as a form of environmental management and boasted that their work reserved open space from development. They also valued the capacity of large reserves to segregate and control both land use and public recreation. Overlapping appointments empowered regional park planners with a border-crossing perspective situated not in the city center but on the edge. Most famously, Robert Moses simultaneously headed the city department, the Long Island State Park Commission, the State Council of Parks, and additional public works authorities, becoming the most powerful non-elected official in New York’s City history.

This chapter examines the development of a regional integration plan in Omaha, Nebraska. It begins by discussing why regional agreements are important in addressing stratification and segregation between districts in metropolitan areas. It then describes the central elements of the agreement and examines the process by which the agreement in Omaha unfolded. The chapter ends with an analysis of the current state of the agreement, an illustration of the fragility of metropolitan solutions, and a discussion of policy recommendations.

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.

As one of the world’s largest and most diverse metropolitan areas, New York City has also been a leader in thinking about how to promote health by improving physical structures, social conditions, and the natural environment. It is also the home of an independent, nonprofit, civic institution, the Regional Plan Association (RPA), that has worked to improve the prosperity, sustainability, and quality of life in the NYC metropolitan region for the past 90 years. In this case study, the authors tells the story of how the RPA reconnected health and equity with planning in the Fourth Regional Plan for Metropolitan New York. The chapter also discusses the strengths and limitations, the lessons learned, and the challenges related to implementation of the Plan.