The Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the College of Environment + Design will host a launch party for Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism, the new book by Stephen J. Ramos, professor of urban planning and design in CED. The book will be published with the University of North Carolina Press on November 4. Snacks and light refreshments will be on offer, and Ramos will take part in a conversation with Joshua Barkan, associate professor in the department of geography. The reception is free and open to the public.

Folk Engineering engages with the understudied history of race, region, and planning in the US South. From the publisher:

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 agricultural 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 surveying and planning that came to inspire federal New Deal policies for the South. In showing how Odum’s influence crossed various borders, Ramos offers us a nuanced way to reappraise race, social science, and planning in the US South.