From prophecy to projection: the New York Metropolitan Region Study and the rescaling of the urban future, 1956–1968

Peter Ekman

Planning Perspectives, 2021, vol. 36, issue 1, 147-182

Abstract: Between 1956 and 1959, amid far-flung residential and industrial suburbanization and with the joint backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Twentieth Century Fund, an interdisciplinary coterie of scholars from Harvard partnered with New York’s Regional Plan Association to produce a widely read ten-volume ‘projection’ of what the physical plant, political economy, and everyday lives of that metropolis would look like in 1985. This paper considers the New York Metropolitan Region Study as a peculiar, consequential exercise in how postwar urbanists recast urban temporality. Rejecting both the certainties of prophecy and the hazards of mere prediction, the Study sought to establish a new tense for urbanism and a newly disciplined set of methods for making inferences about the urban future on the basis of the past and present. The constituent volumes of the NYMRS garnered various degrees of influence in isolation. The sum total both furthered acceptance of a regional scale of operations for planning and decisively chastened hopes for political intervention on urban and regional futures.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02665433.2020.1766546 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rppexx:v:36:y:2021:i:1:p:147-182

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rppe20

DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2020.1766546

Access Statistics for this article

Planning Perspectives is currently edited by Michael Hebbert

More articles in Planning Perspectives from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().