Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism
During the interwar years, the discourse of regional planning profoundly reformulated the spatiality of race and place in the United States. In the South, Jim Crow brutality and agriculture crisis fueled unprecedented population outmigration. Sociologist and author Howard W. Odum founded the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina to develop a Southern regionalism that reasserted organic territorial culture amid that flux. Regionalism connected the arts, humanities, and social sciences across the country in a collective effort to elevate place-based narrative and folk sensibility to an all-encompassing social theory.

Stephen J. Ramos refocuses the history of US regionalism and regional planning on the South, illuminating the modern tensions inherent in regionalism as nostalgic cultural practice paired with future-oriented planning ideology. By tracing Southern regionalists' intellectual history and institutional biography, Ramos explores how they developed a regional-nationalism through survey and plan that came to inspire federal New Deal policies for the South. In showing how Odum’s influence crossed regional and national borders, Ramos offers us a nuanced way to reappraise race, social science, and planning in the US South.
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Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism
During the interwar years, the discourse of regional planning profoundly reformulated the spatiality of race and place in the United States. In the South, Jim Crow brutality and agriculture crisis fueled unprecedented population outmigration. Sociologist and author Howard W. Odum founded the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina to develop a Southern regionalism that reasserted organic territorial culture amid that flux. Regionalism connected the arts, humanities, and social sciences across the country in a collective effort to elevate place-based narrative and folk sensibility to an all-encompassing social theory.

Stephen J. Ramos refocuses the history of US regionalism and regional planning on the South, illuminating the modern tensions inherent in regionalism as nostalgic cultural practice paired with future-oriented planning ideology. By tracing Southern regionalists' intellectual history and institutional biography, Ramos explores how they developed a regional-nationalism through survey and plan that came to inspire federal New Deal policies for the South. In showing how Odum’s influence crossed regional and national borders, Ramos offers us a nuanced way to reappraise race, social science, and planning in the US South.
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Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism

Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism

by Stephen J. Ramos
Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism

Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism

by Stephen J. Ramos

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Overview

During the interwar years, the discourse of regional planning profoundly reformulated the spatiality of race and place in the United States. In the South, Jim Crow brutality and agriculture crisis fueled unprecedented population outmigration. Sociologist and author Howard W. Odum founded the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina to develop a Southern regionalism that reasserted organic territorial culture amid that flux. Regionalism connected the arts, humanities, and social sciences across the country in a collective effort to elevate place-based narrative and folk sensibility to an all-encompassing social theory.

Stephen J. Ramos refocuses the history of US regionalism and regional planning on the South, illuminating the modern tensions inherent in regionalism as nostalgic cultural practice paired with future-oriented planning ideology. By tracing Southern regionalists' intellectual history and institutional biography, Ramos explores how they developed a regional-nationalism through survey and plan that came to inspire federal New Deal policies for the South. In showing how Odum’s influence crossed regional and national borders, Ramos offers us a nuanced way to reappraise race, social science, and planning in the US South.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469690100
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 11/04/2025
Pages: 296
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Stephen J. Ramos is a professor of urbanism at the University of Georgia.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In this book, Stephen J. Ramos holds Howard Odum and his time at UNC as his lodestar of analysis but smartly connects his argument within the broader national and international canon of those theorizing the region at the turn of the century. A much-needed text that treads on new ground.”—Barbara Brown Wilson, University of Virginia

“An original and deeply researched analysis of the movement known as Southern Regionalism from the 1920s through the 1950s, centering on its best-known figure, Howard W. Odum. Stephen Ramos’s interpretation is fresh and original, his scholarship impressive, and his prose vigorous.”—Robert Fishman, University of Michigan

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