Lecturer Peter Ekman publishes “Radburn Rackets”: Robert D. Kohn and Marjorie Sewell Cautley’s Sketches Against the Speculative Suburb in the journal PLATFORM
The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) came together in 1923 when a heterodox group of New York–based architects, planners, economists, and other reformers, galled by the footloose patterns of speculative development they saw unfolding on the edges of that city and others, decided the time had come to issue a critique. The next year, the RPAA launched the City Housing Corporation (CHC), which by the end of the 1920s would give physical form to the group’s critique via two projects: Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn. Each was conceived as a “whole” new unit of settlement. Each provided a tangible model of how else to build at or just beyond the edge of town. Neither was uncontroversial.