JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / November 2002

D’Anieri / A “FRUITFUL HYPOTHESIS”?

A “Fruitful Hypothesis”? The Regional

Planning Association of America’s
Hopes for Technology
Philip D’Anieri
University of Michigan

The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) in the 1920s articulated a

vision of regional development, grounded in the possibilities of then-emerging tech-
nology, that remains compelling nearly a century later. Planners and scholars who see
twenty-first-century technologies ushering in a new era of substantively different
planning—that is, yielding different development outcomes, not just different plan-
ning methods—would do well to understand that this is not the first time that such
predictions have been made. There is no doubt that the RPAA demonstrated remark-
able insight into the transformative potential of two major emerging technologies:
motor vehicles and electric power. But it was utterly ineffectual in its attempts to real-
ize this potential in a manner that achieved social change. Its story indicates that
when the elements of a utopian program are stripped of their organizing principle and
adopted a la carte to other purposes, the utopian vision can become simply a cover
story for business as usual.

Keywords: Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, regional planning, technology,

transportation.

T
he Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) articulated a
vision of regional planning in the 1920s that remains compelling
nearly a century later. RPAA notions of social, economic, and envi-
ronmental balance and harmony are echoed to this day in the aspirations of
many planners and especially in the rhetoric of sustainable development.
As the American heirs to the Garden City tradition, the work of the handful
of writers, designers, and activists who constituted the RPAA remains a sta-
ple of courses in planning history and theory.
One aspect of the RPAA’s work resonates especially deeply today: the pre-
diction that emerging technology would yield a new urban form and a reor-
dering of society. Planners and scholars who see twenty-first-century tech-
nologies ushering in a new era of substantively different planning—that is,

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The term fruitful hypothesis is from Lewis Mumford’s “The Fourth Migration,” in
Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 64. Originally published in Survey Graphic (special edition, 1925).
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY, Vol. 1 No. 4, November 2002 279-289
DOI: 10.1177/1538513202238306
© 2002 Sage Publications

279
280 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / November 2002

that is, yielding different outcomes, not just different methods—would do

well to understand that this is not the first time that such predictions have
been made. In the early part of the twentieth century, Lewis Mumford,
Benton MacKaye, and other RPAA members built a vision for sustainable
regional development around the opportunities provided by the emerging
technologies of automotive transportation and electric power.
But although these new technologies did come to remake the American
urban landscape, demonstrating all of the potential for transformation that
the RPAA writers had accurately foreseen, they were not harnessed to the
socially progressive goals the association advocated. That is, the means of
change advocated by the RPAA were in fact seized upon, but the ends were
apparently jettisoned in favor of those advocated by other, more powerful,
interests.
This story is worth revisiting for two reasons. On its own terms, it sheds
light on an overlooked facet of a critical element of American planning his-
tory: the centrality of technological change to the vision of the RPAA. Sec-
ond and perhaps more important, it offers theoretical insight into a critical
planning concern: what happens when planners seize on certain means—in
this case, the spatial decentralization of cities made possible by emerging
technology—as providing the crucial missing link between an imperfect
today and a perfect tomorrow. It is of course an abuse of history to suggest
that one account or case is predictive of future events, and so there are not
necessarily “lessons” to be learned from the experience of the RPAA. But it
is appropriate to draw theoretical insight from individual cases, to observe
the broad outlines of a narrative in order to identify some of the paradigms
that might present themselves again.
In this case, there is no doubt that the RPAA demonstrated remarkable
insight into the transformative potential of two major emerging technolo-
gies: motor vehicles and electric power. But it was utterly ineffectual in its
attempts to realize this potential in a manner that achieved social change.
The economic, social, and political forces of the day were far more powerful
than the RPAA, its members, and their vision. This was true even though
the Great Depression provided a golden opportunity that the RPAA tried to
make the most of. In the end, and this was not entirely a surprise even for
the RPAA members themselves, technological change was not responsive to
public sector planning that had wholesale social change as its purpose.

RPAA Technology Vision

The centrality of technology to the RPAA vision is most clearly laid out in
Lewis Mumford’s famous article “The Fourth Migration,” which was one of
several authored by RPAA members for a special edition of the magazine
Survey Graphic in 1925.1 Mumford believed technology defined the human
migrations that together constituted the major trends in American history.
 D’Anieri / A “FRUITFUL HYPOTHESIS”? 281

The first migration, typified by the covered wagon, consisted of western

expansion and settlement. The second, whose icons were the railroad and
steam power, brought people into smaller cities and railroad towns serving
as hubs of commerce. The third, spurred by the concentration of financial
power, funneled millions into burgeoning metropolises that threatened to
grow ever larger. These metropolises were nests of ill health, ungodly living
conditions, abuses of nature, and a host of other evils. Thankfully, Mumford
said, a fourth migration was at hand, based on “the technological revolution
which has made the existing layout of cities and the existing distribution of
population out of square with our new opportunities.”2
Emerging technology meant that urban advantages could be obtained
practically anywhere. The existing insatiable metropolis would lose its rea-
son for being when it was no longer the exclusive location of such assets.
Telephones would enable business to be transacted from any location.
Radio would make high culture available across the countryside. In particu-
lar, automobiles would allow transportation over a dispersed and far-flung
web of roads, ending the tyranny of the rails and the congested city. And
electric power, no longer confined to the immediate vicinity of a generating
station, would provide for an improved, modern life on the farm and allow
the location of industry in new areas.
This new technology would allow a restructuring of people’s relations to
each other and nature. Where technological change had earlier made the
metropolis the dominant form of settlement, technology now provided the
means to create “that stable, well-balanced, settled, cultivated life”3 typi-
fied by the small New England village. The town with its commerce and
social life, the rural area with its enlightened agrarianism, and the hinter-
land with its abundant and protected natural resources would together con-
stitute a region of balance and beauty. Thus, as Carl Sussman has pointed
out, the fourth migration “had none of the trappings of a retreat toward a
primitive life style; it would depend instead on the wise use of new and
emergent technologies.”4
The group’s proposals for electric power, for example, constituted any-
thing but a back-to-nature movement. One can only imagine how a modern
Appalachian Trail hiker in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts would
react to reading of the enthusiasm of the trail’s creator, Benton MacKaye,
for dams and hydroelectricity in those same mountains. MacKaye spoke
most approvingly of the New England Power Company’s plans for dams in
the Somerset Valley and for the timber harvesting, small industry, and per-
manent settlement that would result. It is important to remember that
MacKaye viewed this progress in terms of the larger RPAA program, one that
included ideas of sustainability that were decades ahead of their time. Nev-
ertheless, the goal was not simply open space or nature preserves. It was
discovering “the ‘most efficient framework’ for regulating the outflow of
lumber from the Somerset Valley. . . . This framework . . . consists of a sys-
tem of roads and of periodic cuttings converging on a central sawmill plant
282 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / November 2002

and wood-working community.” To serve this settlement, MacKaye lauded

the work of engineers whose job was to find that “combination of reservoirs,
power sites and grades for guiding the stream’s flow which would yield more
power per annum, and more steadily, than any other combination.”5
The new electric power technology, referred to at the time as Giant
Power, was central to the RPAA goal of urban decentralization. Dispersing
electrical power meant dispersing all kinds of power—economic, social,
and political. In the past, steam and early electric power had only been
available near the sources of their generation. The rails hauled coal to the
cities, where it was converted into power for use by nearby factories. Giant
Power, however, generated by coal or especially water in the RPAA vision,
could be transmitted efficiently over vast networks of power lines to just
about any location.
Giant Power would therefore make possible a critically important goal of
the RPAA: stabilizing the countryside. Exploitation by the metropolis had
left the rural economy in tatters. Those living on the land lacked the techni-
cal resources to make a decent living, and many were compelled to scrape
out a meager existence in cities. Electric power, however, would allow for
farm modernization and the introduction of industry to nearby smaller cit-
ies. The rural dweller would, in both senses of the word, be empowered.
Robert Bruere, writing in Survey Graphic, said the model to be followed
was that of the province of Ontario in its use of hydro power from Niagara
Falls.

When the engineers began harnessing the Falls, the merchants, manufacturers and
craftsmen in the small Ontario towns, together with their socially interdependent
agricultural neighbors, rebelled at the notion of a huge suction pump at Niagara which
would draw the life out of their communities. . . . Accordingly they fought for the orga-
nization of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission, with a view to decentraliz-
ing the energy generated at Niagara and having it evenly distributed throughout the
province in order that their small towns and rural communities might flourish after
their kind. They won. Today their farms are undergoing rapid electrification; as con-
trasted with New York state, the small towns of Ontario are prospering. Woodstock, for
example, . . . combines within itself and its immediate rural environment the opportu-
nities for a balanced city and country life, of diversified industry and indigenous cul-
ture.6

Bruere went on to tell the story of a Pennsylvania farmer who, thanks to

electricity, was able to organize his farm as a factory, employ three men
year-round, boost output, and modernize his home. In Bruere’s eyes, the
farms had to be pulled from their primitive backgrounds to provide their
residents with economically and socially sustainable lives. Proper planning
of electrical power would allow this to occur. “Until . . . electrical current is
evenly distributed over wide areas, regional planning will remain without
its essential economic foundation and technical framework.”7
The second technological innovation that was crucial to the RPAA vision
was automotive transportation. Where earlier migrations utilized the
 D’Anieri / A “FRUITFUL HYPOTHESIS”? 283

wagon and the railroad, the fourth migration’s means would be the automo-
bile. In the railroad age, according to Mumford, there were basically two
kinds of space—the congested metropolis and the exploited hinterland.
The railroad did offer mobility for people and goods, but only from one
urban mess to another, or from a denuded rural area to the city. In direct
contrast to linear railroad lines and their hubs of concentration exploiting
the region, automobiles and highways would make possible a decentralized
web of activity. Urban advantages would no longer be confined to metropoli-
tan areas. The automobile would open up, as John Thomas put it, a middle
ground.8 The positive effects of schools and libraries could reach a more
widely dispersed population. The trucking of goods from farm to market
would open new opportunities. The finance of infrastructure would be
broadly shared over networks of roads, not concentrated in the hands of a
few rail lines.9
Perhaps nothing articulated the RPAA’s devotion to technological oppor-
tunity more than MacKaye and Mumford’s 1931 article for Harper’s
Monthly, “Townless Highways for the Motorist.” (A previous version, under
MacKaye’s byline, had appeared in The New Republic a year earlier.) The
authors’ ideal motorway was a vision not only of speed and efficiency but of
aesthetic pleasure achieved through sensible separation of uses. It would
“effectually transform the physical means of life and make possible a higher
type of civilization.”10 The three core elements were (1) separating through
traffic from urbanized areas, (2) creating public land all around the thor-
oughfare to provide natural surroundings, and (3) providing very limited
access at interchanges or “stations” offering highway-related services. As in
Radburn, New Jersey, the Garden City–inspired development designed by
RPAA members Clarence Stein and Henry Wright with careful separation of
pedestrians from vehicles, the Townless Highway would simultaneously
embrace the automobile’s possibilities while designing away its
complications.
The result, in MacKaye and Mumford’s description of the impact on a typ-
ical motorist, might well have been written by the highway lobby:

He awakens after a good sleep: the rumble and wheeze of long-distance traffic is at least
a mile from his residence. He glides out with his car on to the relatively narrow local
road, which need no longer be wide enough to take care of the heavy cross country
traffic, and he remembers with a smile, how his local tax bill has gone down since the
assessment for the widening of these local roads has been removed and the tax for
their upkeep has gone down with the decreased wear and tear. . . .
As he pauses for a minute to have his tank filled up he watches a group of tourists
eating their breakfast on the veranda of the well-equipped restaurant which has sup-
planted the half a dozen greasy hot-dog incubators that used to be scattered over the
roadside. . . . Now he is off; in a minute the car is doing close to sixty on the flat
stretches where the curves have all been smoothed out.11

Clearly, the RPAA had great hopes for technology. But it is important to
note that these writers did not see technology as an end in itself. Rather,
284 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / November 2002

they viewed technology, properly understood and planned, as a means to

the larger goal of social transformation. Like Ebenezer Howard and Patrick
Geddes before them, they advocated a new social order grounded in and
made possible by planning and technology. The rhetoric could be, in fact,
quite radical. Mumford wrote that the regional planning movement

goes hand in hand with what has been aptly called the industrial counter revolu-
tion. . . . [It] is an effort to spread the real income of industry. . . . Regional planning is
an attempt to turn industrial decentralization—the effort to make the industrial
mechanism work better—to permanent social uses. It is an attempt to realize the gains
of modern industry in permanent houses, gardens, parks, playgrounds and commu-
nity institutions.12

Clearly, the RPAA’s vision of technology was not just one of physical
transformation; it also encompassed economic redistribution. The RPAA
was made up of a multiplicity of independent voices,13 so a single rigid ideol-
ogy cannot be assigned to it. As historian Thomas notes, however, the
regionalist tradition embodies a “complex of values” constituting a “natural
socialism,” counter to both capitalism and Marxist revolution, featuring a
small-scale artisanal economy, healthy folk culture, respect for the indige-
nous landscape, cooperation, and communalism.14
This was the essential character of RPAA writing; it advocated
transformative—even utopian—social change, yet it offered a very specific
means with which to accomplish that change: the harnessing of emerging
automotive, electrical, and other technologies to effect a redistribution of
power and the elimination of urban decrepitude. The RPAA members were
not content to sketch out an ill-defined, over-the-horizon ideal (exemplified
perhaps by contemporary discussions of “sustainability”). Rather, they
foresaw with tremendous specificity and accuracy the ways in which these
new technologies would come to be used and the potential they possessed
for a remaking of urban form. It is a testament to their predictive abilities
that the landscape of limited-access highways and widespread electrical
usage emerged almost exactly along the lines the RPAA writers had
foreseen.
The social transformation desired by the RPAA, however, obviously did
not occur. Although decentralization and suburbanization accelerated,
these trends in many ways resulted in a new city suffering from the old ills15
rather than in a nation of small New England villages. The obvious question,
then, is this: What went wrong for the RPAA? How did it happen that its
ends went so completely unaddressed while its means were embraced?
The tools that the members of the RPAA saw as the key to transformation
were, in fact, not really theirs for the taking. That is, the technological
change they so admired was subject to a competition among different goals
and interests, and ultimately other interests won out. The challenge was not
merely to envision a marriage between technology and social ambition—
 D’Anieri / A “FRUITFUL HYPOTHESIS”? 285

this they did rather well—but also to achieve or enact such a marriage, and
on this count they were unsuccessful.
There is ample evidence that the general public was not exactly yearning
for such a marriage. Widely available electricity, for example, was seen pri-
marily at first as a way to spruce up the well-off home. Both gas and electric-
ity made their way into public use through the wealthy, the only ones who
could initially afford the appliances that took advantage of the technology.16
Just as bourgeois cultural notions of domestic spirituality and the ideal
home guided the move to suburbia,17 so did they guide the use and develop-
ment of electric technology. Electricity was a means to cleanliness, health,
and well-being in this view, an improvement in personal and domestic wel-
fare. Electric power not only made work easier; it made for a more righteous
household. Public effort and consumer demand were therefore geared
toward applying the technology to existing uses on a personal basis rather
than seizing on its broader transformative potential.18
Similarly, the early development of highways seemed tailored to meet a
fairly narrow set of interests. The limited-access thoroughfare had actually
been popularized through Frederick Law Olmsted’s park and parkway
designs of the previous century. They were invented to provide the wealthy
carriage rider with a pleasant drive insulated from commercial traffic. In
1923, Westchester County’s Bronx River Parkway opened to rave reviews
not only for its picturesque qualities but for the skyrocketing land values it
engendered. Even as the parkway was copied nationwide, highway planners
were beginning to trim costs by reducing and finally eliminating the pur-
chase of abutting parkland. Business interests concerned with moving
freight did not require an aesthetically pleasing lane to move it on.19 So dur-
ing and certainly after the RPAA’s decade of most intense advocacy of its
urban model (roughly the 1920s), roads were developing largely according
to the interests of commerce, not according to any philosophy of urban
transformation.
The lack of receptivity to the RPAA’s designs can also be seen in the tepid
response that its planning work received. The New York State Commission
of Housing and Regional Planning, chaired by the RPAA’s Clarence Stein,
produced a report in 1926 that would seem an ideal test case. It represented
an application of RPAA thought to actual regions on behalf of a reasonably
powerful New York State government, presided over by the popular Gover-
nor Al Smith. The commission report, to which Mumford, MacKaye, and
Wright contributed, was a full-blown manifesto of RPAA thinking. It began
with an extensive survey, generously illustrated, of the state’s natural fea-
tures, calling attention to the L-shaped valley formed by the Mohawk River
running east across the midsection of the state, joining with the Hudson
north of Albany, and running south to New York Harbor. The socioeconomic
history of the state was told in terms of these natural features, following the
pattern outlined in The Fourth Migration. Finally, the decentralizing possi-
286 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / November 2002

bilities of the motorcar and electric power were spelled out, and a call was
issued for effective regional planning to shepherd these forces in the service
of social transformation.20 The report went precisely nowhere, according to
Sussman.

Copies of the commission’s report, complete with its illustrative maps, are rare; the
state printed only a thousand of them. While this certainly contributed to the surpris-
ing obscurity of the commission’s work, the report’s radical message may not have
inspired the state to further publicity. The report demanded massive public interven-
tion in the private market. If the state actually implemented the commission’s recom-
mendations, urban property values would have been seriously undermined. During
the booming twenties such ideas encountered strong and unified opposition from the
business community.21

Radical intervention in the private economy may have been anathema

during the Roaring Twenties, but the cataclysm of the Great Depression
should have provided a congenial environment for RPAA ideas. To a certain
extent, it did. The Greenbelt garden cities program, the Tennessee Valley
Authority (TVA), and the rural electrification effort all were informed by
the RPAA’s work and RPAA members Wright, Stein, MacKaye, Catherine
Bauer, and others participated in New Deal agencies.22 In the final analysis,
however, even the New Deal failed to link the potential of technological
change to the regional planning model that the RPAA advocated.
The aspect of the RPAA’s automotive vision that received the most atten-
tion in the New Deal was the garden city. Rexford Tugwell’s Resettlement
Administration seriously watered down the concept, advocating garden
suburbs over self-contained cities. But with the input of Stein and Tracy
Augur of the RPAA, Tugwell’s agency built Greenbelt, Maryland, a modern-
ized Radburn emphasizing vehicular separation. Two other greenbelt towns
were built in Greenhills, Ohio (outside Cincinnati), and Greendale, Wis-
consin (outside Milwaukee); but the program was killed, in large part,
apparently, because of its underlying communitarian ambition.

As a leading New Deal planner, Tugwell was an obvious target for conservative Con-
gressmen, the media, the building and real-estate industries and the banks, to whom
the “Tugwelltowns” represented the start of a socialist takeover; they complained
about “shifting people around from where they are to where Dr. Tugwell thinks they
ought to be.”23

Perhaps the most telling example of the RPAA’s ultimate ineffectiveness

was the evolution of the TVA from an exercise in wholesale social transfor-
mation of a massive region into an agency primarily dedicated to power gen-
eration. Walter Creese writes that the socioeconomic transformation envi-
sioned by the RPAA was one of several rationales that made the TVA
appealing to President Franklin Roosevelt. But these were not mutually
supportive goals; they in fact competed with one another for supremacy in
the work of the TVA. Over time, the organizing principle of social transfor-
mation was left by the wayside.
 D’Anieri / A “FRUITFUL HYPOTHESIS”? 287

Electrical energy became the hard, bright beacon, the artificial element, to pursue,
because it was the easiest to think about and carried with it a cachet in the society at
large. . . . The visions of a more balanced core country-within-a-country, “a land in
which to live,” as MacKaye had put it; the need for a fresh infusion of homesteads and
villages to support an improved family and community life; and the wish that light
industry and vernacular crafts might take up suitable positions in the natural back-
ground were ignored and went glimmering.24

The RPAA’s Augur supervised the building of Norris Village, Tennessee, the
sort of new town that the group hoped would embody the balance of true
regional planning. In fact, Norris was but a tiny village of fifteen hundred
whose resemblance to a garden city is questionable. “In terms of the RPAA’s
grand vision it represents a ridiculous mouse,” according to Peter Hall.
“The fact was that America—even New Deal America—was not politically
ready for that vision.”25
American political economy of the 1930s would have seemed the most
favorable environment for RPAA thinking to be implemented. Change was
in the air, government was taking on a larger role, and policy experimenta-
tion was the order of the day. Technology was at hand that would fundamen-
tally alter the scale and form of human living. All that was needed was for
the two to be married, for technological change to be guided by public plan-
ning so that it would effect social change on the order the RPAA advocated.
This did not happen. Instead, “the New Deal administered these [regional
planning] programs as dosages of economic adrenalin,”26 not as means to
transformative ends.

Conclusion

And herein lies a critical theme to understand the ambition of planners to

adopt new tools or technologies to achieve previously elusive goals: means
and ends are distinct phenomena. The RPAA had identified the means to
accomplish its ends. But the same means, it turned out, could serve any
number of ends. Townless highways could be the arteries of a balanced
region or the tentacles of an ever-expanding metropolis. The TVA could be
an agency of sustainable regional development or a massive power pro-
ducer. Thus, the story of the RPAA is not merely one of a compelling vision
but also an example of a vision compromised by insufficient attention to
implementation in the context of the times.
Planning scholarship today has its own compelling visions—regionalism
and communicative action come to mind—that similarly promise radical
new outcomes. But advocates of such seemingly promising approaches
might see in the case of the RPAA a cautionary tale. When the elements of a
utopian program are stripped of their organizing principle and adopted a la
carte to other purposes, the utopian vision can become simply a cover story
for business as usual. Attention must be paid not only to creating a vision
288 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / November 2002

but to understanding which elements of that vision are realized and espe-
cially which motivations and organizing principles are retained.
Lewis Mumford, for his part, apparently understood that the RPAA’s aspi-
rations for technology, while nothing less, were also nothing more than
imagining a different future.

Fortunately for us, the fourth migration is only beginning: we may either permit it to
crystallize in a formation quite as bad as those of our earlier migrations, or we may
turn it to better account by leading it into new channels. To suggest what these new
channels are, to show how necessary it is for us to trench them open, and to indicate
how much the future may hold for us if we are ready to seize our destiny and shape it
freshly—that is the purpose of the present articles. Even if there were no fourth
migration on the horizon it would be necessary to invent one. It is at least a more
fruitful hypothesis than any of those we are now blindly following!27

1. L. Mumford, “The Fourth Migration,” in Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of
the Regional Planning Association of America, ed. C. Sussman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 64.
Originally published in Survey Graphic (special issue, 1925).
2. Ibid., 61.
3. Ibid., 56.
4. Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 30.
5. B. MacKaye, “The New Exploration: Charting the Industrial Wilderness,” in Sussman, Planning
the Fourth Migration, 107-8. Originally published in Survey Graphic (special issue, 1925).
6. R. Bruere, “Giant Power-Region-Builder,” in Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 114. Ori-
ginally published in Survey Graphic (special issue, 1925).
7. Ibid., 115.
8. The term middle ground, as it applies to the Regional Planning Association of America [RPAA], is
John L. Thomas’s. See J. L. Thomas, “Holding the Middle Ground,” in The American Planning Tradi-
tion: Culture and Policy, ed. R. Fishman (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000).
9. L. Mumford, “Regions—To Live In,” in Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration. Originally pub-
lished in Survey Graphic (special issue, 1925).
10. B. MacKaye and L. Mumford, “Townless Highways for the Motorist,” Harper’s Monthly, August
1931, p. 347.
11. Ibid., 355.
12. Mumford, “Regions—To Live In,” 91-92.
13. Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration.
14. Thomas, “Holding the Middle Ground,” 39.
15. R. Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
16. M. H. Rose, “Urban Gas and Electric Systems and Social Change, 1900-1940,” in Technology and
the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America, ed. J. A. Tarr and G. Dupuy (Philadelphia: Tem-
ple University Press, 1988).
17. Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias.
18. Rose, “Urban Gas and Electrical Systems.”
19. C. McShane, “Urban Pathways: The Street and Highway, 1900-1940,” in Tarr and Dupuy, Tech-
nology and the Rise of the Networked City.
20. State of New York, “Report of the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning to Gov. Alfred E.
Smith” (1926), in Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration.
21. Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 44.
22. Ibid.
23. P. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, rev. ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 130.
24. W. Creese, TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision, the Reality (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1990), 68.
 D’Anieri / A “FRUITFUL HYPOTHESIS”? 289

25. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 164.

26. Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 42.
27. Mumford, “The Fourth Migration,” 64, emphasis added.

Philip D’Anieri is a doctoral student in urban, technological, and environmental planning

at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the intersection of planning and pol-
itics, particularly in regard to regional institutions. He spent five years as a public radio
journalist and five years as a legislative press secretary and policy adviser before com-
mencing graduate study. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship.