Folk Engineering

Planning Southern Regionalism

Stephen J. Ramos

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English

The University of North Carolina Press
04 November 2025

History of architecture; History of the Americas; Urban communities; Ethnic studies; Local history

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.

By: Stephen J. Ramos
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 25mm, Spine: 155mm
ISBN: 9781469690117
ISBN 10: 146969011X
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 04 November 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Stephen J. Ramos is a professor of urbanism at the University of Georgia.

Reviews for Folk Engineering: Planning Southern Regionalism

""An original and deeply researched analysis of the movement known as Southern regionalism from the 1920s through the 1950s, centering on its best-known figure, Howard W. Odum. Stephen Ramos's interpretation is fresh and original, his scholarship impressive, and his prose vigorous.""--Robert Fishman, University of Michigan