Folk Engineering

There’s regionalism as we all learned in planning school led by Louis Mumford at the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) and then there’s southern regionalism that Howard W. Odum and his Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS) led from the University of North Carolina. The history of the southern regionalists was largely overlooked until Stephen Ramos published “Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism.” Sadly, Stephen passed away shortly after publishing this book, leaving behind an accomplished career and scholarship that elevated the urban planning program in the College of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia. 

The main difference between regionalism and southern regionalism is the focus on agrarian folk society and preservation against the growing industrialization and urbanization taking over in northern cities. While Odum understood the role of science in society advocated for by his northern counterparts, he “also qualified his own version of social science as “folk sociology.” It was an attempt to fuse the modern with the traditional, again guarding that rural agrarian way of life. Odum felt strongly that while change was necessary, it needed to be at a slow enough pace to allow individuals to adjust.

Odum carried this approach into his writings and direction on race. He kept his ideas broad enough to appease his northern funders, but not to upset his southern audience. As a result, he never overtly calls out the injustice of racism in the south, but also never explicitly endorses it either. Although the author notes that “This hearty endorsement of eugenics in 1929 clearly refutes claims that Odum was already doubting the biological argument for race and instead seeking a Boasian environmental approach while writing his dissertation at Columbia.”

The book highlights several unrealized ideas that came out of Odum’s work like a division of the U.S. into just six major regions–the Middle States, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Far West, the Northwest, and the South. He also “envisioned a nine-member federal planning agency with an extensive mandate and prerogatives, fully staffed by ‘research and planning experts’ who could advise the board” with each state establishing their own similar, but smaller planning agency also with nine members. This would then coordinate with “a regional planning agency comprising members from the state agencies as well as other regional groups, like the TVA, which would serve ‘as a buffer between States and the United States planning agency and the national government.’”

“Folk Engineering” is an academic look into the past at a subset of 1930s and 1940s era regionalism planning. Beyond an interesting story about how the South approached the topic in their own way, the book holds lessons for practicing planners today like how to balance competing interests in order to advance new planning concepts and how to accept setbacks along the way. Odum was by no means a perfect regionalist, but he did inspire a generation of individuals at the IRSS to carry on the work.