Regional Visionaries and Metropolitan Boosters: Decentralization, Regional Planning, and Parkways During the Interwar Years

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The debate between Lewis Mumford and Thomas Adams over the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (RPNY) often stirs intellectual debate among planning professionals, academics, and students. Recent scholarship has been primarily concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of Mumford's `regionalists' and Adams' `metropolitanists'. Mumford, as well as Benton MacKaye and other members of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), were heavily influenced by their vision of regional planning as a method for progressive social change. At the same time, Adams and the metropolitan planners associated with the RPNY saw regional planning as a tool by which to minimally tweak the underpinnings of the market and thereby provide for a minimum amount of congestion and economic hardship for the maximum number of citizens. The debate between these two traditions helps to inform on current planning issues, including sprawl, sustainable development, and the new urbanism.

This book analyzes one of the only instances where the theoretical debate between the regionalists and the metropolitanists moved from intellectual polemic to planning practice. As our metropolitan areas continue to grow and consume land, regional planning must find a way to consider the uniqueness of regional economies and culture without succumbing to metropolitan sameness.

Regional Visionaries and Metropolitan Boosters: Decentralization, Regional Planning, and Parkways During the Interwar Years Review

Matt Dalbey has truly scored with this book, which unfortunately is in limited supply and is not popularly printed. It is a perfect complement to Anne Whisnant's book "super-scenic motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History."

Matt Dalbey and Anne Whisnant both cover an exceptional period of American history, the plans for mountain parkways as part of the New Deal. We are fortunate, in my mind, to have both the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Skyline Drive. Matt contrasts the successful development of Virginia's Skyline Drive with the ultimate rejection of Vermont's Green Mountain Parkway. His treatment of the National Park Service plans for the Green Mountain Parkway punctures the still-popular -- and erroneous -- myth up here in Vermont that the Parkway would have been a skyline route on "the spine of the Green Mountains." He is very sympathetic to Laurie Davidson Cox, the NPS resident landscape architect who planned the final route and who attempted to incorporate Benton MacKaye's concept of a flankline route as opposed to a skyline road. The latter is a direct allusion to the Skyline Drive, which incurred MacKaye's wrath. (MacKaye was the visionary behind the Appalachian Trail.)

Toward the end of his book, Matt Dalbey asks what might have been had Vermont approved in 1936 "William Wilgus' call for a million acres for land for the Parkway and connected state and national parks, and Laurie Davidson Cox's flankline road." It did not take long to get an answer. In 1939, Vermont Gov. Aiken unleashed the ski industry by authorizing the first ski towers on public land on Mount Mansfield. Today, our precious Green Mountains have been turned into amusement parks sporting indoor water parks and mountainside roller coasters. They are littered with high-priced real estate developments that few Vermonters can afford. Now, the worldwide wind entrepreneurs are scalping our ridgelines for industrial wind turbines, projects that are doing more harm to our mountaintops than the Green Mountain Parkway would ever have done.

Yes, indeed, read Matt Dalbey's book if you can get it in a library or if some wise publisher decides to reissue it at an affordable price.

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