Jason Carr
HIST 5302
October 19, 1998

Johnson, David A. "Regional Planning for the Great American Metropolis: New York between
the World Wars."

     The article is about American metropolitan planning in the 1920s and 1930s. Several
plans for the New York Metropolitan Region are used to illustrate how previously unrealized
planning ideas of previous planners were rehabilitated in the 1920s and realized in the 1930s.
     Johnson relies heavily on the submitted Plans and reports of actual planning bodies for
his article (such as the text of the Regional Plan of New York and it's Environs (1929)).  These
documents are augmented by a smaller number of scholarly journals studying this period of
metropolitan planning and some biographical secondary sources (such as for Robert Moses).
When Johnson addresses the critics of the various plans he frequently uses the published articles
of the critics themselves.  This is most pronounced in the criticism of Lewis Mumford, whose
writings for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects and New Republic are given equal
airing, indicating the social and lay importance of the planning movement.
     The author's thesis is that the ideas of the early urban planners such as Frederic Law
Olmstead and the City Beautiful camp were accepted, to some degree, by municipal planners in
the 1920s, and that these plans were actually initiated with vigor in the 1930s.  The author finds,
in the 1929 Regional Plan of New York and its Environs the most clear example of this trend.  
For example, the Plan's pragmatic centralization is reminiscent of City Beautiful's desire to
increase efficiency, where expedient, by centralizing, and to leave other functions decentralized if
no gains would be realized.  Interjections of open spaces (agricultral if not park areas) broke up
the relentless grid, and  Olmsteadian development of shorelines was pursued, even if for
commercial rather than humane purposes.  To be sure, there were other influences that
introduced different undertones (such as the redistribution of industry-tax income) but many of
the Olmstead's and the City Beautiful planners' ideas osmosed into the plans of the 1920s. 
When the depression of the 1930s led to widespread make-work projects the plans of the 1920s
were undertaken over objections by those who thought the plans were a priori mistaken.
     Johnson finds that after the publication of the 1929 Plan, the influence of the New York
planners spread nationwide and that planning bodies still hold powerful positions in New York
and elsewhere.  The author concludes that eventually, in Post-World War II America, the
roadway infrastructure constructed according to the Plan were used instead to facilitate suburban
sprawl at the expense of the dying inner cities, defying both the desires and predictions of the
Plan and its critics.
     
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