Invisible Cities: Lewis Mumford, Thomas Adams, and the Invention of the Regional City, 1923-1929

"Americans ense that something iswrong with the places where we live and work and go about our daily business." So begins a recent jeremiad by author Howard Kunstler on the "environmental calamity" we call the suburbs [Kunstler, 1996, p. 43]. Critics point to fundamental spects of post-war planning, such as zoning, highway dependence, and decentralization, asthe determinants of our current suburban landscape. But how did business come to the suburbs, and how did zoning create the "Edge Cities" we have come to both love and hate? Long before urban renewal, the interstate highway program, Levittown and Edge Cities, a coherent altemafive to the "congested city" already dominated popular, professional, nd political discourse. The new ideal of the "regional city" projected a rationally planned and zoned city which segregated residential, commercial, and industrial uses, as well as social classes. The new metropolis would be anchored by a concentrated central business district, connected by expressways to concentric, low-density residential nd industrial suburban tings. Most importantly, the whole ensemble would be ordered according to a comprehensive regional plan. It was out of the debates over "regionalism" during the 1920s that this new urban vision emerged. In March of 1923 critic Lewis Mumford, architect Clarence Stem and other like-minded reformers formed the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), a loosely knit association of urban reformers. In July of the same year Thomas Adams became Director of Plans and Surveys for the Russell Sage Foundation's proposed Regional Survey of New York and its Environs, the forerunner of the RPNY.• As a result of these efforts, the