Regional Planning Association of America

Members of the RPAA

Stein, the city planner and urban critic Lewis Mumford (1896–1990), and the forester and environmentalist Benton MacKaye (1879–1975) were among RPAA's most active members. Other members included the architects Frederick L. Ackerman (1878–1950), Robert D. Kohn (1870–1953), and Henry Wright (1878–1936); the publisher and architect Charles Harris Whitaker (1872–1938); the economist Stuart Chase (1888–1985), the developer Alexander Bing (1878–1959); the social reformer-publisher couple of Robert Bruère (1876–1964) and Martha Bruère (1879–1953); and the housing experts Edith Elmer Wood (1871–1945) and Catherine Bauer (1905–1964).

The group was small and diverse—there were seldom more than a dozen active members at any time—and its independent-minded members never collectively produced a manifesto, a city or regional plan, or an executed project. However, the RPAA did articulate a set of values and principles, as well as a list of goals, which found expression in the form of writings and lectures, and to a lesser extent, in projects designed and realized by small subgroups of the whole.

Interests and Inspirations of the RPAA

Post–World War I housing shortages and interest in new theories of regional planning were major areas of focus for the group's early activities, but group members were also driven by deeply held social and community values. The intellectual lineage of the RPAA may be traced to two sources: the Garden City movement of the English reformer Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) and the regional planning theories of the Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). In the 1890s, Howard had proposed the creation of garden cities, cooperatively [Page 1156]owned settlements of finite size that provided housing, open space and healthy living, and social and economic opportunity for all residents. Protected by an encircling greenbelt, these garden cities, radical in both spatial and economic configurations, were to be linked by intercity rail, thus creating the cultural vitality of a metropolis without the environmental and social drawbacks of pollution, overcrowding, and sprawl.

A contemporary of Howard, Geddes also advocated planned cities of limited size, linked by transportation arteries. However, he conceived of this new urban configuration as geographically situated, so that limited numbers of cities would be sited in, and served by, a region's topography and natural resources. Furthermore, Geddes insisted that the survey of a natural region and the human responses to that region necessarily preceded any planning activity.

Like Howard and Geddes, the RPAA approached planning of community, city, and region as a complex, interdisciplinary task, with the goal of transforming society through architectural and spatial means. Central to the group's efforts was the relationship of modern technologized society to the natural world. As new technologies such as the automobile, electricity, and the telephone supported a dispersal of once-concentrated urban populations, the RPAA called for planning on both metropolitan and regional scales to guide development, and thus to distinguish what Mumford called the “fourth migration” from previous unregulated migrations that had resulted in environmental damage and social pathologies. To this end, the RPAA proposed the creation of garden cities in a regional plan; the initiation of selected regional surveys; the design and implementation of regional projects such as the Appalachian Trail; and collaboration with like-minded individuals and agencies in Europe and America, including the American Institute of Architecture's Committee on Community Planning, on which a number of RPAA architects served.

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