A “Fruitful Hypothesis”? The Regional Planning Association of America’s Hopes for Technology

The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) in the 1920s articulated a vision of regional development, grounded in the possibilities of then-emerging technology, 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 planning 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 remarkable insight into the transformative potential of two major emerging technologies: motor vehicles and electric power. But it was utterly ineffectual in its attempts to realize 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.