Atlanta Unbound: Enabling Sprawl through Policy and Planning

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Anthony Downs, “Urban Realities: Some Controversial Aspects of the Atlanta Region’s Future,” Brookings Review, Summer 1994, 27. Another version of the argument that Atlanta’s sprawl is the result of unplanned growth is contained in Robert Bullard, Glenn Johnson, and Angel Torres, eds., Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000). 2. Lewis Mumford, “The Plan of New York,” in Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America, ed. Carl Sussman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 225. The history of regional planning in the United States has been covered by many authors. Among the important contributions are Gill C. Lim, ed., Regional Planning: Evolution, Crisis, and Prospects (Totowa, NJ: Allanheld, Osman, 1983); Robert Fishman, ed., The American Planning Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); John Friedmann and Clyde Weaver, Territory and Function: The Evolution of Regional Planning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Bruce Katz, ed., Reflections on Regionalism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000); Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963); Mark Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region (New York: Guilford, 1995); Ann Markusen, Regions: The Economics and Politics of Territory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987); Mel Scott, American Planning since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Carl Sussman, ed., Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976); and Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928). Notes 188 | Notes to Chapter 1 3. Lewis Mumford has written more about regional planning than any other American intellectual. While his writings are far too vast to recite here, perhaps the most well-developed introductions to his ideas about regionalism and planning are The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938) and The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961). Mumford’s ideas about regional planning were perhaps most succinctly expressed in a public argument between him and Thomas Adams about the value of the Plan of New York and Its Environs , completed under the guidance of Adams in the early 1930s. Mumford criticized the plan as being metropolitan rather than regional. Adams took offense and defended the effort. For the details of the debate, see Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, especially chaps. 15 and 16, where the exchange between Mumford and Adams has been reprinted. Mumford’s conceptualization of regional planning was inspired by the Englishman Ebenezer Howard, whose A Path to Peaceful Reform: The City of To-morrow (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902) provided the clearest enunciation of the idea of Garden City, and Scotsman Patrick Geddes, who spent years developing many ideas about regionalism. See, for example, Geddes’s City Development: A Study of Parks, Gardens, and Culture-Institutes, a Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust (Birmingham , UK: Saint George, 1904). Other relevant early works by American regional planners include MacKaye, The New Exploration; Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1934); and Clarence Stein, Toward New Towns for America (New York: Reinhold, 1957). The sociologist Howard Odum represents yet another branch of American regional planning, one derived from Geddes’s vision but usually associated with the South. For an introduction to Odum and his ideas, see Howard Odum, The Regional Approach to National Social Planning (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1935); Howard Odum, Southern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936); Howard Odum, ed., In Search of the Regional Balance of America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945); and Pat Vernor, “The Missionaries of Chapel Hill,” Planning 53, no. 6 (1987): 6–12. 4. Among the most influential advocates of regional planning and governance as a matter of public policy in the late 1930s in the United States was Thomas Harrison Reed. A political scientist by training, Reed published several books examining metropolitan governance and advocated the establishment of regional planning agencies in U.S. cities. As a consultant for the National Municipal League, Reed authored dozens of reports analyzing different cities, Atlanta being one of them. Reed’s influence on postwar regional planning, though likely extensive, is largely undocumented. For an example of his writings, see Thomas Harrison Reed, Municipal...