A history of race, region, and planning in the US South.
A Cappella Books and the Auburn Avenue Research Library welcome author Stephen J. Ramos in honor of his new book, “Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism.” The author will appear in conversation with Atlanta-based real estate developer and historic preservationist Gene Kansas.
This event is free and open to the public; copies of “Folk Engineering” will be available for purchase.
About the Book
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.
About the Author
Stephen J. Ramos is a professor of urbanism at the University of Georgia.
About the Conversation Partner
Gene Kansas is an Atlanta-based real estate developer and historic preservationist renowned for spearheading the preservation of the Atlanta Daily World building in Sweet Auburn. He is also the founder of Constellations, a civic, social, and cultural workspace in the area. Kansas’s writing has appeared in Atlanta Magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other publications. His work has been recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
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