For the past 100 years, the Regional Plan Association has played an extremely significant role in shaping the urban planning for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region. Per its website, the RPA is an independent non-profit civic organization that develops and promotes ideas to improve the economic health, environmental resilience and quality of life of the New York Metropolitan area. In fact, the RPA began its 100 year campaign by being one of the first to consider the tri-state area as an interconnected metropolitan area. In the span of those 100 years, the RPA released four seminal reports known as “Regional Plans” that provided decision-makers and power brokers with the long term guidance to develop and grow the tri-state area as we know it. The plans have spawned legendary projects such as the construction of the George Washington Bridge and the revitalization of downtown Brooklyn, Stamford, and Newark.
Now, a century after the release of the first regional plan, City & State sat down with RPA’s President and CEO Tom Wright, to discuss the celebration of the organization’s centennial, which includes a special exhibition at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal, from Oct. 7 to 24.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Well it’s great to meet you. And I think we have some exciting things to talk about with the centennial. So just to start with a basic primer. Can you talk about the RPA’s mission, and how it came about 100 years ago?
Sure, I’m happy to. So in the spring of 1922, a group of civic business and political leaders came together to lead off this effort to create a regional plan for the New York metropolitan region. The driving force behind it was this man, Charles Dyer Norton, who had actually been the instigator of the famous Chicago plan, known as the Burnham Plan for Chicago in 1909. He had been a member of the commercial club, and had led that effort and gotten it off the ground. I have his copy of the Chicago Plan here in my office. When he moved to New York to run a bank, he realized that greater New York City also needed this kind of planning effort, but on an even larger scale, because of the commuter rail system and the connected communities of southwestern Connecticut, Long Island, northern New Jersey and the Hudson Valley were all part of this great metropolis. So they launched this effort really to try and look to do an empirical study about the trends, the conditions, that were shaping the future of this city and region. What technology was going to be needed with air travel and limited access highways and more automobiles. What kinds of industries were expected to emerge. Where people were going to live. How they were going to have access to open space and clean air and water. So it was a very, very ambitious undertaking, really. It was the first and in many ways is still considered the greatest and most ambitious regional plan ever undertaken. So they launched the effort in 1922. Seven years later, in 1929, they released that first plan. Very tragically, Mr. Norton did not survive to see the plan because he had passed away, nor the incorporated Regional Plan Association as a private nonprofit group to advocate for the implementation of the plan.
To this day, we still kind of see our role as thinking about issues that shape the entire metropolitan region. We work across the political boundaries. We work across the silos of transportation and land use and environmental consideration. When I started doing this about 30 years ago, first as an intern at RPA while I was a graduate student at Columbia. regional planning was a kind of niche field that didn’t have much emphasis behind it or, frankly, much agency. Over the last generation, we’ve seen more and more issues like climate change, and economic development and housing patterns really move in the direction that people understand that you have to have a regional perspective to really change…
Read More: Regional Plan Association chief on 100 years of shaping NY’s urban planning