Folk Engineering

Planning Southern Regionalism

By: Stephen J. Ramos

Write A Review

Paperback | 4 November 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
288 Pages

Paperback

$82.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $20.69 with

Ships in 5 to 10 business days

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.

Shipping

	Standard Shipping	Express Shipping
Metro postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Regional postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95
Rural postcodes:	$9.99	$14.95

How to return your order

At Booktopia, we offer hassle-free returns in accordance with our returns policy. If you wish to return an item, please get in touch with Booktopia Customer Care.

Additional postage charges may be applicable.