Dissertation Focus: A Model for the World

Mapping Postwar Planning Pedagogy

In the spring of 2018, I came upon seven dusty boxes in the storage room located behind the planning library at the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP) at the University of North Carolina. Within these boxes, I found twenty-two master theses spanning the years between 1951 and 1959. Dispersed within these booklets were countless articles from local North Carolina papers touting the work of the UNC "Missionaries of Planning." DCRP students did this planning work in a collaborative graduate-level studio project with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the federal agency that had provided seed money for the department in 1946.

Once these artifacts of early post-war planning pedagogy were located, I began layering the student's original diagrammatic analysis of North Carolina towns using a modern rubric (see maps A + B from Morganton, NC). The goal of the layering process was to give insight into which population the TVA and UNC students were serving and which they left without consideration. The method which subjugated the voices of Morganton's African American population was the norm repeatedly found in the other 21 documents.

These maps represent a pivotal moment in my research which moved my dissertation from speculation to dimensional fact. The TVA considered the DCRP as its training arm for the future generation of planners and would spend the Cold War exporting the lessons learned in the American South to decolonizing nations around the globe.

Take a moment. Consider that.

The result of this layering, map C, demonstrates that the students' assertion that "Practically all areas of Morganton are well served by the existing water facilities, which extend for some distance into the county" is accurate with regard to the white population of Morganton. The students went on to suggest that an updated water treatment plant would bring the community to modern standards of sanitation. They proposed a site for this plant at the confluence of the Catawba River and Hunting Creek. This was—and continues to be—an area primarily populated by the African American residents of Morganton. With this recommendation, Morganton pursued federal grants for its construction and the plant remains there today.

The result of the further layering of Morganton's maps helps to extrapolate the impact of zoning suggested by the students. The students' recommended zoning delimitation would displace over 125 African Americans in the southeast area and in parts of the northwest area of Morganton if zoned as areas for industry rather than for residential use. This, too, was agreed upon by the city and implemented.

The most significant finding which resulted from the layering technique was the complete failure to comply with all commonly accepted planning standards for the time. These standards suggested that it was unwise to situate a school a mile from the neighborhoods which it served, and indeed it would be ill advised to situate a school in a location that required children to cross a railroad track to attend. When applied to Morganton's one African American school, these principles show the proposed plan for the future of Morganton as woefully inadequate. The school designated for African Americans served students from three separate neighborhoods, one over a mile away and another located across a busy industrial railroad track. According to the graduate students’ zoning suggestions, this railroad track would only become increasingly trafficked if Morganton's master plan was accepted.