Projecting “Spread City”: The New York Metropolitan Region Study and Its Critics, 1956–1968

By Peter Ekman

“This project is not a blueprint for action. It has no recommendations to make about the physical structure of the Region or about the form or activities of the governmental bodies there. At the same time, it is a necessary prelude to future planning studies of the Region.”[1] The project in question was the New York Metropolitan Region Study (NYMRS), executed 1956–59 for the Regional Plan Association (RPA) by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Harvard’s Graduate School of Public Administration. Unlike the RPA’s original Regional Plan of New York, issued 1929–31, which was zealously promoted to the public and substantially implemented by 1940, the ten-volume NYMRS very deliberately was not a plan.[2] It was only a series of methodical “projections” extending to the notional New York of 1965, 1975, and “Metropolis 1985.” Widely debated in New York and beyond, the Study allows a fascinating glimpse into what might be called the intellectual history of the urban future — one imperfectly rendered “future past” whose complexities still bear on planning and its critics in the early 2020s, amid what some have called a “crisis of predictability” in national politics and at a time when even the near future of the city seems less certain than ever.[3]

Adrift at midcentury and obsolescent in the minds of many, the RPA wagered its future as an organization on the success of the NYMRS. The Rockefeller Foundation granted the team $240,000 to cover expenses through 1960, with matching support from the Ford Foundation and additional funding from the Twentieth Century Fund, the Merrill Foundation for Financial Knowledge, and the Taconic Foundation.[4] New York, somewhat improbably, was to serve as the diagnostic “archetype of the American metropolitan community.”[5] “A simple extension,” David Rockefeller wrote to Harvard president Nathan Pusey, would make the insights of the report relevant to other, “similar” cities, all of them left unnamed.[6]

Raymond Vernon, the Study’s director, was an economist, a Columbia PhD, the child of Russian immigrants, a City College graduate at age fifteen, and, on his telling, “a financial-type guy” who took a fifty-percent pay cut from high-profile work to choose the topics, delegate the work, and become the public face of the project, which was often called the “Vernon Report.”[7] Many of the contributing scholars, significantly, were economists, representing, aside from Harvard, a band of universities including Rutgers, Hofstra, and MIT.

Cover art for the nine main volumes of the NYMRS as published by Harvard University Press, 1959–61. Those by Hoover and Vernon, Handlin, Wood, and Vernon were soon reissued by Anchor in paperback with different cover designs. Source: Regional Plan Association, Goals for the Region Project, vol. 1 (March 1963), page 4.

The component volumes numbered nine, plus one “technical supplement,” Projection of a Metropolis (1960), devoted entirely to methodology.[8] Four of them — a title co-authored by Vernon and the location theorist Edgar M. Hoover, along with works by Oscar Handlin, Robert C. Wood, and Vernon alone — appeared in paperback with Anchor Books and could be called classics of postwar urban studies. Hoover and Vernon’s Anatomy of a Metropolis (1959) was prescient in marking out the further suburbanization of industry at a time when most commentators were mesmerized by the new residential landscape of lawns and tract homes. The Newcomers (1959), by Harvard’s Pulitzer-decorated social historian Oscar Handlin, addressed recent black and Puerto Rican migrations to the city as compared with the experience of earlier white ethnics.[9] In 1400 Governments (1961), MIT political scientist and future HUD undersecretary Robert C. Wood puzzled over how to redress greater New York’s intense fragmentation into tiny municipalities duplicative of basic-service provision. The region’s political map, he wrote, was “one of the great unnatural wonders of the world.”[10] Wood was also the only author to mention Robert Moses, if nothing else an agent of coordination,[11] who returned the favor in a 1962 Atlantic article, writing that he was “appalled” at the attention given “an obscure assistant professor with no record of administration.”[12] Vernon’s Metropolis 1985 (1960) was a sort of projection of projections containing few data of its own.[13] Should the RPA once again decide to issue a full-scale regional plan, the thinking went, it would have all the data points it would need. More importantly, it would have a method by which to trace trend lines off into the middle distance — with 1985, when the process would begin again, as the next Year Zero.

Max Hall, a former journalist and State Department official, put together Made in New York (1959), thick with detail on the agglomerative garment, printing, and publishing industries, and cognizant, as were Hoover and Vernon, that “manufacturing has roving habits”; it “is always shifting on the map.”[14] Economist and newly minted Harvard PhD Benjamin Chinitz visualized new geographies of Freight in the Metropolis (1960), just as Newark was supplanting New York as the chosen port for the age of containerization.[15] A trio of titles issued from less prominent economists: Martin Segal’s Wages in the Metropolis (1960); Robert Lichtenberg’s One-Tenth of a Nation (1960), which inferred New York’s economic fate from national-level data; and Money Metropolis (1960), on the financial sector, by Sidney Robbins and Nestor Terleckyj.[16] There was also a “lost” eleventh volume, Milton Abelson’s America’s Front Office, which disappointed the directors upon its delivery but would have supplied far more detail on building types — and white-collar office space, then ascendant as manufacturing dispersed — than the economists tended to.[17]

This 22-county map by Jeanyee Wong appeared in full color in the endpapers of each Harvard University Press edition of the NYMRS, with reduced coloration at the centerfold of each Anchor paperback, and in miniature in the RPA’s follow-up studies in the 1960s. Note the lettering, and most especially the calligraphic treatment applied to the names of larger bodies of water. Source: endpapers, e.g., Hoover and Vernon, Anatomy of a Metropolis (1959).

A vast team of researchers, too, many of them Jewish and Chinese American women, contributed to the Study, receiving warm acknowledgement in the published volumes but little explicit renown. Most notably, each volume reproduced an arresting two-page map by Jeanyee Wong, who would make her name as one of the premier calligraphers, illustrators, and book-cover designers in the age of the “quality paperback.”[18]

The Study’s top-line findings were essentially fourfold: increased regional dispersal of home and work; aggregate population growth for the region but a declining national share; a sectoral shift in New York City proper toward white-collar work; and a swath of decrepit or vulnerable “gray areas” (Vernon’s coinage and soon the conceptual bedrock of the Ford Foundation’s controversial Gray Areas Program) left behind in the outer boroughs and other “core” parts of the twenty-two-county region.

The watchword throughout was “forces.” “Forces” were at work upon the metropolis, readers gleaned. They might elude political capture or scholarly calculation, might bend or weave in coming years, but their general tendencies could be described. “Most of the forces,” Hoover and Vernon concluded, “move so clearly in the same direction” — outward from the traditionally defined urban core. “Leap-frog” development was now normal: “there is not just one high-density commercial center but many, of different orders of magnitude…. The widening ripples come, then, not from a single pebble dropped into a puddle, but from a scattered handful of large, middling, and small pebbles, each a focus of expansion.”[19] If these sounded like the beginnings of a critique of runaway postwar suburbanization, generally the task was something else entirely, the reportage roundly unpolemical in tone. “I can’t afford the luxury of either idle optimism or pessimism,” Vernon asserted in a New York Times profile titled “Regional Fact-Finder.”[20] “Forces” were to be systematically projected into the future, not tampered with. And if the number-crunching could all seem a tedious, “mechanical” exercise, economist Barbara Berman advised in Projection of a Metropolis, readers were to understand that “[t]he click of the gears is merely the sound of logic doing its work.”[21]

To a large degree, though, the jury was still out when it came to the reliability of these projections, even as the books went to press. “It is easy to slip into the use of the future tense,” wrote Hoover and Vernon; “the future is so much less clumsy and so much more authoritative than the conditional.” “Yet,” they continued, “no one will be deceived by the use of the future tense in this chapter. What we have stated as expectations could be set aside in reality by the unpredictable or the improbable.”[22] One moment social-scientific reason takes command and the facts are to speak for themselves; then deferral and self-doubt set in and we enter the world of probabilities, not causal arrows. “A careful guess is better than a heedless one,” Vernon counsels, but it remains just that, a guess: statistics are “an excursion beyond the limits of reason into the realm of faith.” In fact, Projection of a Metropolis was made public in the first place so that readers could “determine for themselves how much reliance to place on the projections” and try their hand at recalculating.[23]

There is also the inconvenient “Confession and Apology” embedded in Metropolis 1985’s “Introduction to an Epilogue”: “At critical junctures in the projection process, we had to confess that the results which these asserted relations generated were too improbable to be taken seriously. When this occurred, we did not hesitate to bend our results away from the answers which our models were producing.” In other words, “if the magnitudes produced by the process offended our general expectations,” they ignored them.[24]

To plan is inherently a future-making proposition. Yet urban projection entailed a still more specific form of temporal reasoning. It was unlike “prophecy,” divine or otherwise. “Projection” was not mere “prediction.” It was more solid than a wager, less absolute than a guarantee. It could exist independent of “prescriptions” or “plans.” But it could not forgo history. The task, Handlin would write, “is… to order the past from which the present grows in a comprehensible manner.”[25] And yet, so often their engagement with New York’s past and present inclined the team to err on the side of inertia, to assume that present trends — absolute growth for the region, but a declining share of regional population for New York City — just would continue unhindered. “The guiding principle,” Vernon wrote, “was one of simple extrapolation: what had grown fast would continue to grow, while laggards would remain laggards.” The Study’s tacit growth liberalism fused a pessimism about drastic change with a comforting optimism about the prospects for general advance.

Only Wood openly dissented. Yes, he wrote in 1400 Governments, “While these systems continue, the economist is safe.” But “the projection of trends ‘as they are’ may confuse rather than clarify the issue.” Politics reorder, indeed create, markets in their image. “Is not the gravest danger in sketching the Region of the future that of underestimating — or even ignoring — the prospects of revolution?”[26] “This is planning is it not — … taboo,” interjected the RPA officials when Wood raised these points during the Study’s organizational stage. “Where did this come from? What is it?”[27]

Internally, matters were complex, occasionally conflictual. Outwardly, the Study deflected attention from the question of political action — of coordinative planning as opposed to pure projection. Vernon’s public neutrality was a studied performance, a marvel of both/and social science that fought itself to a draw over and over again.

This neutrality frustrated some reviewers. Sociologist Daniel Bell, still leftish in 1961 and reviewing the ten volumes in Dissent, faulted Vernon’s executive summary, Metropolis 1985, as “curiously bloodless” in its refusal to speculate, or to nominate “remedie[s],” “alternative ‘models,’” or “political steps” toward other futures. No volume squarely named or shamed “the economic controllers of New York, and… their intentions.” It “simply extrapolates,” Bell wrote, “and calls it analysis.”[28] The Study, in other words, mistook the present for the future. Harrison Salisbury, in his reviews of two volumes for the Times, came away similarly disappointed with the report’s passivity. Something about New York, he wrote, compels “speculative ratiocination,” and the NYMRS, linking up “every measurable factor,” was the “most comprehensive inquiry ever undertaken.” Yet, while all the markers of a “jelly-like,” “quasi-urban” edge realm were apparent, Hoover and Vernon left the reviewer with “no clue” about what might be done.[29] What did the future hold? “The same thing we have today. Only more of it. Much more.”[30]

In the main, the Study was perceived as unduly pessimistic, “grim” in its resignation to suburban dominion. Word got out early that “death” was the diagnosis for New York and its densest satellites, and when civic leaders in Paterson, New Jersey, accused Vernon of libel, he met with them directly to insist, accurately, that he had never uttered the word. The RPA began running a “canned” editorial saying that cities across America were “here to stay.”[31] “A great misfortune for New York,” Jane Jacobs would nonetheless write on its 25th anniversary, that the Study had “become a “self-fulfilling prophecy. They gave prognoses that were taken as advice.”[32] The suburbs had won.

Spread City. The RPA directed its most critical comments at the “ugliness” of such postwar suburbs as Wayne and Paramus, New Jersey, in Passaic and Bergen Counties respectively. Long Island’s Nassau County and other automobile-oriented edge realms also came in for what by the 1960s was a predictable rebuke. Source: Regional Plan Association, Public Participation in Regional Planning (1967), page 58.

The Second Regional Plan, which the RPA finally issued in 1968, is not the Study’s major legacy — although the public-facing reports leading up to it, notably Spread City (1962), which took stock of the suburbs and promised that the RPA would at length “pose alternatives,” are underappreciated today.[33] As the decade wore on, some of its output adopted a more critical tone when it came to questions of dispersal. The RPA also came to define the “region” in an ever more permissive way. It encompassed “eleven older cities,” they decided: New York itself; Mount Vernon, N.Y.; Bridgeport, New Haven, and Waterbury, Conn.; and Trenton, Paterson, Passaic, Newark, Elizabeth, and the entirety of Hudson County, New Jersey.[34] By 1967, the RPA was positing four separate “rings of development” — not the three recognized by the NYMRS — comprising 551 municipalities across thirty-one counties.[35] The Region’s Growth (1967) scaled up dramatically, referring to “The Atlantic Urban Region,” a twelve-state, 39–Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, 150-county “urban chain” in which greater New York served as the “central link.” Even Megalopolis had included only 118 counties.[36]

The NYMRS helped entrench interdisciplinary, and often quantitative, urban studies as a fixture of the American research university. Its linkages with the emerging postwar constellation of centers, institutes, bureaus, and other interstitial units of “organized” urban research were many and tight.[37] Yet its legacies extend beyond the academy. In the mid-1960s, Daniel Bell himself came to chair a high-profile “Commission on the Year 2000” for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which culminated in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), subtitled “A Venture in Social Forecasting” and informed by some of the same methodologies of projection.[38] Future-orientation, he posited, was emerging as a whole new “temper” for society; it was the era’s most definitive “change in the character of knowledge.”[39] Bell’s encounter with the NYMRS seems to have had a role in shaping this book, one of the 1970s’ most widely read volumes of social science. His was not primarily a study of urbanism, but the geography of one deindustrializing city and its region seemed to have imprinted itself on his grand theory. For Bell, though, the whole point of projection was to learn the limits to political action, not to celebrate its potential.[40] This essential restraint marks one durable political afterlife for the NYMRS; among neoconservative urbanists of the late 1960s and 1970s, the deep-seated unknowability of the future — and its resistance to interventions that would steer its course — became a theme often sounded in print, by James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer (who had reviewed the Study critically), Edward Banfield, and other heralds of the insoluble “urban crisis.”[41] In their zeal for talking about the urban future, Vernon and his Study may, paradoxically, have helped undercut those making designs on it, those intent on glimpsing its outlines in order to etch them into existence — or to imagine how things might yet turn out otherwise.

Peter Ekman is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He is completing his first book, an intellectual history of postwar planning, urbanism, and social science, from which this piece is drawn. Articles of his have appeared in Planning Perspectives, History of the Human Sciences, the Journal of Planning History, and the Journal of Urban History.

[1] Edward S. Mason, Foreword to Edgar M. Hoover and Raymond Vernon, Anatomy of a Metropolis [1959] (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1962), x.

[2] Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs, 8 vols. (New York: Committee on Regional Plan of New York, 1929–1931); Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Graphic Regional Plan: Atlas and Description: Regional Plan Volume One (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1929); Thomas Adams, The Building of the City: Regional Plan Volume Two (New York: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, 1931); R. L. Duffus, Mastering a Metropolis (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930).

[3] After Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); see, e.g., Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future (New York: Liveright, 2020); and Jenny Andersson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post–Cold War Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[4] Civic Interests, Series D (FA313), Box 39, Folder 313, Office of the Messrs. Rockefeller records, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (hereafter ‘RAC’); Grant PA 56-210, Reel 156 (FA732F), Ford Foundation records (hereafter ‘FF’), RAC; Grant PA 62-103, Reel 392 (FA732F), FF; RPA to Merrill Foundation, 9 January 1957, Box 63, Folder 4; Osborne to Bernard L. Gladieux, 23 February 1954, Regional Plan Association records (hereafter ‘RPA records’), Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Box 63, Folder 8.

[5] Front matter, Hoover and Vernon, Anatomy, ii.

[6] David Rockefeller to Nathan Pusey, 23 December 1959, David Rockefeller papers, RAC, Box 12, Folder 145.

[7] “Regional Fact-Finder: Raymond Vernon,” New York Times, 1 June 1959; Mason to Norton, 28 November 1955, RPA records, Box 68, Folder 6.

[8] Barbara R. Berman, Benjamin Chinitz, and Edgar M. Hoover, Projection of a Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

[9] Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis [1959] (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1962).

[10] Robert C. Wood, with Vladimir V. Almendinger, 1400 Governments: The Political Economy of the New York Metropolitan Region [1961] (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1964), 1.

[11] Wood, 1400 Governments, 214, 192–193, 188; on Moses, 178–181 and passim; on RPA v. Moses, see Forbes B. Hays, Community Leadership: The Regional Plan Association of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 63–67.

[12] Robert Moses, “Are Cities Dead?” The Atlantic (January 1962).

[13] Raymond Vernon, Metropolis 1985 [1960] (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1963).

[14] Max Hall, “Three Industries on the Move,” in Made in New York: Case Studies in Metropolitan Manufacturing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 1–18, at 3. More recent accounts of some of the same geographies of production are Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000), 3–22; and Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 12–41. Hall’s collection also includes a chapter on the nascent electronics industry.

[15] Benjamin Chinitz, Freight and the Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

[16] Martin Segal, Wages in the Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); Robert M. Lichtenberg, One-Tenth of a Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); Sidney M. Robbins and Nestor E. Terleckyj, Money Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

[17] “America’s Front Office: N.Y.M.R.S. Vol. No. 11”; Vernon to Norton, 1959; RPA records, Box 143, Folder 3.

[18] See “Jeanyee Wong: Calligrapher, Cartographer, Designer, Illustrator, Letterer & Teacher”: available at http://jeanyeewong.blogspot.com, for a partial compendium of her illustrations and cover art.

[19] Hoover and Vernon, Anatomy, vii, 198–226, 56, 184.

[20] “Regional Fact-Finder.”

[21] Berman et al., Projection, 1, 2, 3, 23, 32.

[22] Ibid., 245.

[23] Berman et al., Projection, front matter, 32.

[24] Vernon, Metropolis 1985, 241, 247, 255.

[25] Oscar Handlin, “The Modern City as a Field of Historical Study,” in The Historian and the City, eds. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1963), 1–26, at 25; emphasis added.

[26] Wood, 1400 Governments, 191, 192; cf. Robert C. Wood, “1400 Governments on the Road Toward Greenbelt and Graybelt Economies,” address to RPA annual conference, 7 October 1961, RPA records, Box 143, Folder 4.

[27] “Progress Report to the Project Management Committee” (1955), RPA records, Box 68, Folder 7.

[28] Daniel Bell, “The Three Faces of New York,” Dissent 8 (Summer 1961): 222–232, at 223, 224, 230.; Tochterman, Dying City, 109–111. And see Pietruska, Looking Forward, 11, 108–155.

[29] Harrison E. Salisbury, “Patterns of Growth and Decay,” New York Times, 1 November 1959.

[30] Harrison E. Salisbury, “New York Tomorrow May Be Only More and More of Today,” New York Times, 13 November 1960.

[31] Abe Greene to Raymond Vernon, 14 January 1959; Vernon to Greene, 19 January 1959; Edward O’Byrne to Vernon, 16 January 1959; Greene to Norton, 4 February 1959, RPA records, Box 63, Folder 18; “On Second Thought, Thank You, Doctor!” Bergen Evening Record, 17 January 1959; “Paterson a Dying City?” Paterson Evening News, January 1959; “Study Brands Newark a Dying City,” New York Daily News, 11 January 1959.

[32] Martin Gottlieb, “New York City and Suburbs: Forecast and Reality,” New York Times, 10 May 1984.

[33] Regional Plan Association, The Second Regional Plan: A Draft for Discussion (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1968); Regional Plan Association, Spread City: Projections of Development Trends and the Issues They Pose: The Tri-State New York Metropolitan Region, 1960–1985 (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1962), 2, 33. See also Regional Plan Association, The Region’s Growth (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1967); Regional Plan Association, The Lower Hudson (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1966); Regional Plan Association, Public Services in Older Cities (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1969); Rai Y. Okamoto, Frank E. Williams, et al., Urban Design Manhattan (New York: Viking, 1969); Regional Plan Association, Public Participation in Regional Planning (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1969); Regional Plan Association, Goals for the Region Project, 5 vols. (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1963); William A. Caldwell, ed., How to Save Urban America (New York: New American Library, 1973); William B. Shore et al., Listening to the Metropolis (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1974); Kristian Taketomo, “‘Town Meetings by Television’: Regional Plan Association’s ‘CHOICES for ’76,’” Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History (4 October 2018): https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/town-meetings-by-television-regional-plan-associations-choices-for-76; Regional Plan News, no. 84 (May 1967), RPA records, Box 119. The RPA earnestly tried to coin “Spread City,” always capitalized, as a popular catchphrase, but in public consciousness it lost out to Gottmann’s “Megalopolis,” William H. Whyte’s “Exploding Metropolis,” or simply the epithet “sprawl.”

[34] RPA, Public Services, 12.

[35] RPA, Public Participation, 25, 61.

[36] RPA, Region’s Growth, 26.

[37] On which see Roger L. Geiger, “Organized Research Units: Their Role in the Development of University Research,” Journal of Higher Education 61 (1990): 1–19; and Ethan Schrum, The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

[38] Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 44.

[39] Daniel Bell, “Coda: Work in Further Progress,” in Daniel Bell, ed., Toward the Year 2000: Work in Progress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 378–381; “The Year 2000 — The Trajectory of an Idea,” in Toward the Year 2000, 5.

[40] Bell, Post-Industrial Society, 4.

[41] See, for instance, Edward C. Banfield, “Why Government Cannot Solve the Urban Problem,” in The Conscience of the City, ed. Martin Meyerson (New York: Braziller, 1970), 141–151. On the NYMRS, Nathan Glazer, “Megalopolis and How It Grew,” The Reporter, 12 November 1960.