Abbreviation | RPA |
---|---|
Formation | 1922 |
Type | Non-Profit |
Purpose | Regional planning |
Headquarters | Manhattan, New York, New York |
Region served | New York metropolitan area USA |
President | Thomas K Wright |
Staff | 30 |
Website |
rpa |
The Regional Plan Association is an independent, not-for-profit regional planning organization, founded in 1922, that focuses on recommendations to improve the quality of life and economic competitiveness of a 31-county New York– New Jersey– Connecticut region in the New York metropolitan area. [1] Headquartered in New York City, it has offices in Princeton, New Jersey, and Stamford, Connecticut. [2]
RPA has produced four strategic regional plans for the New York metropolitan region since the 1920s. The chronology of their plans is as follows:
The RPA program represents a philosophy of planning described by historian Robert Fishman as "metropolitanism," associated with the Chicago School of Sociology. It promotes large scale, industrial centers and the concentration of population rather than decentralized development. Its critics point out that this results in windfall real estate profits for downtown interests. Whether this approach to regional planning is efficient, particularly because of the infrastructure and energy required to sustain such concentration, has been questioned by scholars including James Howard Kunstler. [3]
Regional Plan Association's strategic plans have proposed numerous ideas and investments for the New York metropolitan area that have turned into major public works, economic development and open space projects, including:
Notes
It has also been my hope that a strip of this land of adequate width might ultimately be developed as a parkway, along the general lines.
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Further reading