Southern regionalism: social science and regional-national planning in the interwar U.S. South

ABSTRACT In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first meeting of the Regional Planning Association of America in New York City, there is also the chance to recognize concurrent interwar regionalisms from other parts of the United States. Howard W. Odum led the Southern regionalism initiative with colleagues from his Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina. The South served as their laboratory, where resource development proposals became the model for national regional planning practice and beyond. Southern regionalists understood the regional scale entirely through the cultural lens of the social sciences to abstract, describe, and project it. The South’s secessionist past informed their cultural/territorial proposals for folk regional planning, which later functionalist modelling elided. As these histories reach their centenaries, the article considers Southern regionalism more fully in relation to the broader social science and regional planning thought of the interwar period.