Planning

Mel Scott has written an official history of city planning that thoroughly covers the profession, but its encyclopedic quality makes it most useful as a reference work: American City Planning Since 1890 , Berkeley, 1969. A better place to begin might be John L. Hancock's brief account of what planners were really doing, "Planners in the Changing American City, 1900-1940," Journal of the American Institute of Planners , 33 (September 1967), 290-304. Then one might open up the issues of urban and regional planning by consulting a number of very different and contradictory books. There are two books on conventional policy and practice by very wise and experienced men, the first by the housing authority Charles Abrams, The City Is the Frontier , New York, 1965; the second by the planner Hans Blumenfeld, The Modern Metropolis: Its Origins, Growth, Characteristics and Planning , Paul D. Spreiregen, ed., Cambridge, 1967. The man who laid out the Appalachian Trail offered a modern-sounding ecological ideology for regional planning: Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration , 1928, Urbana, 1962. The reader should test MacKaye's call against his own politics by looking at the case study of America's one re-

gional planning effort in Philip Selznick, T.V.A. and the Grass Roots: A Study of the Sociology of Formal Organization , 1949, New York, 1966. Finally, Lloyd Rodwin has written an excellent review of recent national urban planning: Nations and Cities: A Comparison of Strategies for Urban Growth , Boston, 1970.