Regional planning as cultural criticism: reclaiming the radical wholes of interwar regional thinkers

This paper examines the first appearance of the term 'regional planning' in the 14th edition of theEncyclop AE dia Britannica (1929) in order to foreground the centrality of cultural criticism in the first wave of regional thinking. Through an intellectual history of the work of Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford, the authors of the encyclopaedia entry, it is shown that the 'region' served as a device for conceptually reuniting the fractured life of modern industrialization, and not merely or even primarily as a new scalar object for the administrative state.

Automated summary

This paper examines the term 'regional planning' in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929) to highlight the importance of cultural criticism in early regional thinking. It shows that the concept of 'region' was used to reunite the fragmented life of modern industrialization, rather than serving as a new administrative object for the state.