Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
by his own testimony, through his uncle Frederic Delano. Delano, who had
been a sparkplug in the creation of Daniel Burnham's Chicago Plan of
1908, went on to chair the planning committee for the NewYork Regional
Plan of the 1920s.
11
Before World War I, Delano introduced Roosevelt to
the City of Chicago Plan. “I think from that very moment,” Roosevelt
wrote in 1932, “I have been interested in not the mere planning of a sin-
gle city but in the larger aspects of planning. It is the way of the future.”
12
Upon his nephew's election to the presidency, Delano moved to Washing-
ton as an advisor, and became head of the newly created National Planning
Board.
13
While governor of New York, Roosevelt solidified his concern with
planning and, as the historian Paul Conkin has written, his enthusiasm for
“preserving scarce resources, for moving as many people as possible back
onto the land, for making cities as orderly and country-like as possible.”
14
In an address on state planning delivered in June of 1931, Roosevelt defined
his philosophy: “Government, both State and national must accept the
responsibility of doing what it can do soundly, with considered forethought
and along definitely constructive, not passive lines.” One area of concern
was land utilization. “Hitherto,” he said, “we have spoken of two types of
living and only two—urban and rural. I believe we can look forward to
three rather than two types in the future, for there is a definite place for an
intermediate type between the urban and the rural, namely a rural-
industrial group....It is my thought that many of the problems of trans-
portation, of overcrowded cities, of high cost of living, of better health for
the race, of a better population as a whole can be solved by the States them-
selves during the coming generation.”
15
Roosevelt's interest in regionalism doubtless was behind the invitation to
be keynote speaker at the July 1931 Roundtable on Regional Planning at
the University of Virginia. Important members of the New York-based
Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) were there: Clarence
Stein, Lewis Mumford, Henry Wright, and Benton MacKaye. Stuart Chase,
Howard Odum, Charles W. Eliot II, Frederick Newell, and others made
presentations. Roosevelt forcefully asked a receptive audience:“Isn't there a
third possibility [between urban and rural], a possibility to create by coop-
erative effort some form of living which will combine industry and agri-
culture?”
16
This important theme, a third way between city and rural area,
was repeated often during the years leading up to Roosevelt's successful
campaign for the presidency and during the first years of the New Deal.
