INTERNATIONAL REGIONAL SCIENCE REVIEW 24, 3: 386–395 (July 2001)

Friedmann / REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

INTERNATIONAL
ANDREGIONAL
PLANNINGSCIENCE REVIEW (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2001)

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND

PLANNING: THE STORY OF
A COLLABORATION

JOHN FRIEDMANN
School of Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada, 106244.116@compuserve.com

This article takes a critical look at the collaboration between William Alonso and John
Friedmann in compiling two early collections of readings on regional development and plan-
ning. Important as these volumes were at the time they appeared (1964 and 1975), helping to
delineate a new field of study, the world has changed. Metropolitan regions have moved into the
foreground of interest, and there is now a much greater concern with questions of environmental
sustainability, technological innovations, and the consequences of spatial restructuring in
advanced economies. But pulling materials together on these new topics represents a formidable
task.

I arrived at MIT in the fall of 1961 to teach regional planning. As a development

planner, I had spent the preceding five years in Brazil and Korea, and this was to be
my first U.S.-based job. My dissertation had been on the Tennessee Valley Author-
ity, and it was this engagement with regional resources development that had
launched my career as a planner (Friedmann 1955). Despite my work at the Univer-
sity of Chicago with such luminaries as Harvey Perloff and Edward Ackerman, my
understanding of “regional planning” was rudimentary at the time. The 1930s had
left the United States with a rich legacy of cultural regionalism (see, e.g., Mumford
1938; Odum and Moore 1938), but with World War II, this ideological movement
had come to a dead stop. In the postwar era, the new ideology that captured our
imagination was economic development, the dream of material progress in which
everyone would share. With the United Nations (UN) firmly established in New
York and former European colonies rapidly decolonizing and attaining their (at
least nominal) independence, the territorial focus of economic development in
both theory and practice was clearly the nation-state. In the United States itself,
interest in regional questions was waning, as attention shifted to cities and urban
economies more broadly. River basin development, so salient in the 1930s, no

© 2001 Sage Publications

Friedmann / REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING 387

longer compelled public attention in the 1950s (Friedmann and Weaver 1979, chap.
3, esp. 78-79).
I was thus confronted with a challenge: how to teach graduate students in plan-
ning the basics of regional development and related strategies. Clearly, such a
course would have to become centered on economic rather than resources develop-
ment. National economic growth was the “hot” theory of the day, and with scholars
such as Paul Rosenstein-Rodan and Everett Hagen, MIT was one of its theoretical
workshops. But how to link these essentially “space-less” theories with regional
progress? The answer came from an unexpected quarter. In 1954, Walter Isard had
created the Regional Science Association and, two years later, published his magis-
terial work on location and space economy (Isard 1956). Location economics, once
the province of obscure German theorists, had suddenly reemerged as a sexy new
topic for research. And here was the missing link I was looking for. Combining the
concept of a space economy (i.e., of a national economy in its spatial configura-
tions) with the incremental location of new economic activities would allow a
dynamic theory of regional or, more properly, spatial development to be formu-
1
lated.
It was not long after this epiphany that I caught up with Bill Alonso at one of the
weekly lunches at the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. Bill was newly
appointed at Harvard and a recent Ph.D. from Walter Isard’s shop at Penn. His
sophisticated understanding of the economics of location and his broad interest in
regional issues would dovetail into what I conceived of as a collaborative project: to
delineate a new field of regional development planning through an edited volume of
selected readings. Bill’s response to my suggestion was enthusiastic, and we found
an easy rapport with each other that made collaboration a pleasure.

DEFINING A NEW FIELD

In our joint introduction, we launched the new enterprise with appropriately ringing
words:

In the few years that nations have sought economic development as an explicit goal it
has become clear that the arithmetic of macro-economics has need of and is made
more powerful by the geometry of regional considerations. (Friedmann and Alonso
1964, 1)

And to lay our cards on the table, as it were, we continued,

The decision of where to locate a new project is as important as the decision to invest
in it. The questions of social justice in the distribution of the fruits of economic devel-
opment are as important and as difficult in terms of regions as in terms of social
classes. (P. 1)
388 INTERNATIONAL REGIONAL SCIENCE REVIEW (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2001)

What we wanted in the longer term was a textbook on regional development and
planning. But we had to settle for something less, an eclectic collection of those ar-
ticles, which, we believed, were central to this new field of study and practice. In the
introduction, but nowhere else in this tome of 722 pages, we outlined a primitive
“stage” theory of regional economic development, arguing somewhat hopefully
that there might be an “optimal strategy for spatial transformation” from initial
growth centers to a fully articulated and spatially integrated national economy. Our
operational language was based on the center-periphery model, which was then
coming into vogue, but further distinguished among four spatial formations: metro-
politan regions, development axes, frontier regions, and depressed areas. We
thought that the broad objective of regional planning should be the economic and
social integration of national territories. Countries that had already achieved a high
degree of integration would, we believed, have a diminishing interest in regional is-
sues, except for the planning of vast metropolitan regions (or “urban fields”) and the
pockets of poverty remaining in economically depressed areas. In the early 1960s, a
“globalizing” economy was still far from our minds. Nevertheless, we acknowl-
edged that the integration of a space economy might some day extend beyond na-
tional boundaries to encompass larger “multinational” regions.
On the whole, we accepted the thesis of unrestricted labor mobility within a
national territory. Although we did not spell it out, we held to the idea of an urban
transition that, over a period of two or three centuries, would lead to most of the
world’s population living in cities. The exodus from areas of primary production
was inevitable, we believed. Urban life was the wave of the future. Finally, we
adopted national planning for regional development as our point of view, implicitly
positing a Keynesian welfare state engaged in some form of economic, social, and
now regional or spatial planning. With our edited collection, we hoped to provide
the conceptual tools for such planning.2
It is not my intention here to provide a handy summary of our readings. Suffice it
to say that the volume was divided into five main sections: Space and Planning,
Location and Spatial Organization, Theory of Regional Development, National
Policy for Regional Development, and Guide to the Literature. I will briefly com-
ment on each of these.
The first section served as a prelude to our volume and comprised only three
readings: the by now classical essay by François Perroux on “Economic Space,”
Lloyd Rodwin’s “Choosing Regions for Development,” and “Regional Planning as
a Field of Study” by myself. The Perroux selection situated our work in economic
theory broadly conceived. Rodwin’s essay was the first to make a specifically spa-
tial argument on development in his advocacy of “selective concentration,” an early
American version of the growth pole doctrine. And my own article was an effort to
give new meaning to the phrase “city and regional planning,” which was the banner
under which most American planners professed whatever it was they did.
The second section on location and spatial organization covered the spatial logic
of regional planning. Here, Bill Alonso made his initial contribution with an elegant
Friedmann / REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING 389

treatment of the location theory of the firm as this was understood at the time. The
remaining selections in this segment all dealt with the patterning or organization of
space. Authors included here were August Lösch, Brian Berry, Edward Ullman,
Richard Morrill, and a coauthored work with John H. Thompson in the lead. Except
for Lösch, an economist in the German historicist tradition, all of them were
geographers.
The next section shifted from this static to a more dynamic analysis that
addressed regional development head-on. Unable to offer a single theory that might
somehow “explain” regional development, we opted for a disjointed approach. In
the first part, we grouped essays on the role of natural resource endowments and
labor migration; in the second, we emphasized the role of cities; and in the third, we
looked at problems of the rural periphery.
The most important thinking at the time had to do with the role of resources and
exports in regional development. Harvey Perloff and Lowdon Wingo laid out the
basic issues in a historically informed essay, but the specifics had first been formu-
lated by economic historian Douglass C. North, whose theory of export-led growth
(supported by his research on the Pacific Northwest) would eventually be con-
firmed on a global scale when export-led development began to be the official doc-
trine promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the
World Trade Organization. We decided to include here not only North’s debate with
Charles Tiebout on the role of exports in regional development but also a Pacific
Northwest case study by Richard L. Pfister. Bernard Okun and Richard W. Richard-
son concluded this section with their classical essay on the effects of internal migra-
tion on regional income inequalities in the United States.3
The subsection on the role of cities reflected a particular interest of mine that had
originally been spurred by the work of economic historian Bertram Hoselitz at the
University of Chicago. The articles featured the work of two American urban histo-
rians, Eric Lampard (United States) and Richard Morse (Latin America), as well as
brilliant young Indian sociologist Shanti Tangri and a longish essay by myself on
“Cities in Social Transformation.” But the social history of cities sat uneasily in this
collection of geoeconomic narratives and probably contributed only marginally to
our broader argument.
Finally, we had a section on what we called the rural periphery. At the time, both
Alonso and I were impressed by the careful work of William H. Nicholls on the per-
formance of rural economies as a function of distance to major cities, a hypothesis
that had originally been formulated by Nobel Prize–winning economist Theodore
W. Schultz. Nicholls had carried out his measurements in the southern United
States. Despite this empirical work in a positivist vein, Nicholls was also deeply
conscious of the role of social institutions and cultural influences on regional devel-
opment, one of the few economic theorists to investigate this difficult topic. (Albert
Hirschman also comes to mind in this connection.) Nicholls was teaching at
Vanderbilt University in Nashville and considered himself to be part of the South’s
“intellectual aristocracy.” He wrote as a southerner about the South in the only arti-
390 INTERNATIONAL REGIONAL SCIENCE REVIEW (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2001)

cle in our collection that attempted the uneasy merger of cultural regionalism with
the universalistic language of neoclassical economics. Moreover, as a self-pro-
fessed Christian, he wrote (and this in 1959!) from a perspective that condemned
southern racism as un-Christian and immoral. These two selections were supple-
mented by a United Nations chapter on the “periphery” of Western Europe and fea-
tured a map that showed major income disparities on the continent—Gunnar
Myrdal was director of the UN Economic Commission for Europe at the time—and
an essay by Dale Hathaway on out-migration from agriculture in the United States,
which concluded,

The total effect of the migration from farms has apparently been of value to both the
farm and non-farm economies. Therefore, it would appear that the nation could well
afford some public policies to cope with the social and economic problems attendant
to migration. Without such supplemental forces it is unlikely that migration will, by it-
self, bring about a significant improvement in the position of agriculture. (Hathaway
1964, 486)

As people left the farm, agriculture would be forced to become more capital inten-
sive, more like a capitalist enterprise. And this was something to be welcomed. But
migration had social costs as well. Hathaway thought that policies to facilitate labor
mobility out of farming would, on the whole, be a good thing.
The last section (leaving aside the literature review) addressed planning issues
more specifically, among them the definition of planning regions, the territorial
division of powers, institutional settings for regional development, the question of
regional income accounts, and specific strategies for regional development.
Readers interested in these questions are encouraged to begin their exploration of
these topics here. I would now like to move on to the reception our selected readings
received and to a brief comment about the second edition that was to come precisely
ten years after publication of this volume.

THE SECOND EDITION

By the early 1970s, both Bill and I were teaching in sunny California, Bill as a pro-
fessor at Berkeley while I was in charge of UCLA’s new Planning Program. Our
book was doing well, and each year little royalty checks kept arriving in the mail as
total sales approached the 20,000 mark. It had been a happy decade for regional
studies generally and for planning in particular. We had no inkling that all this was
about to change, as the world got ready for globalization. It must have been around
1973 that the MIT Press wrote to inquire about our willingness to prepare a second
edition of the reader. I flew up to the Bay Area, and Bill and I spent an afternoon
mulling things over. It would not be so difficult, we thought. There was a great deal
of new literature to incorporate, including some of our own recent writings, and we
knew that we could work quickly, even though we were both busy with other pro-
jects. In the end, preparing the new edition took us less than six months.
Friedmann / REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING 391

Although the overall framework remained unchanged, we had a new title:

Regional Policy: Readings in Theory and Applications. Only a handful of essays
were carried over from the first edition, which we called “classics.” Overall, the
selections became more multidisciplinary; there were now seven country studies in
addition to two studies on the urban labor economy in developing countries, and we
included critical discussions of the so-called growth center policy. As editors, we
contributed ten essays of our own, including an extensive literature review. The new
edition, like the first, was dedicated to Walter Isard, who had opened multiple path-
ways to this burst of creative work on the economics of space.
All this was unexceptionable. But I would like to pause here briefly to consider a
couple of sentences in the literature review that concluded the volume in which I
made a curious admission:

Despite this wealth of information, it cannot be claimed that we really know whether
and in what sense regional policy and planning may be said to work. . . . An interesting
and even somewhat embarrassing question may be asked in this connection. To what
extent have the theories discussed earlier in this chapter influenced the actual practice
of planning?
The answer is, probably, not much. (Friedmann and Alonso 1975, 802-3)

In other words, if I was right, important as many scientific contributions undoubt-

edly were as explanations of spatial phenomena, they had failed significantly to in-
fluence actual policies. To give one example: many countries had played with the
idea of “growth centers,” but when growth center politics encountered regional sci-
ence, it was always politics that won. The political reality is that it is a lot easier to
bestow the title of growth center on a city than to practice a policy of what Lloyd
Rodwin (1964) had called selective concentration. Chilean politicians, for exam-
ple, had developed the art of designating an entire hierarchy of growth centers, so
that every region could claim to have at least one with pride. Other countries, such
as Spain, were engaged in similar semantic shenanigans. And planners’designation
of Korean growth centers had done nothing to slow down the steady concentration
of people and economic power in Seoul. As regionalists, we ourselves were partly
to blame for this outcome, having unwittingly conflated Perroux’s industrial pôles
de croissance, originally a nonspatial concept, with a potentially dynamic urban
matrix, or growth center, from which positive “spread” and negative “backwash”
effects would emanate into surrounding regions (Boudeville 1966; for a critical re-
view, see Darwent 1975).
And so it was with many other ostensibly regional policies. Politics and markets
were more powerful than the applications of science. There were spontaneous
growth centers, such as Phoenix, Arizona, that made the desert bloom, and many
government policies, though not explicitly “regional” in their intention, had
implicit effects on the spatial structure of development. But this was a far cry from
the brave new world of regional planning. Still and all, many governments in devel-
oping countries, as well as in Europe, found it convenient to have a central
392 INTERNATIONAL REGIONAL SCIENCE REVIEW (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2001)

government agency responsible for regional planning, Raum-und-Landesplanung,

aménagement du territoire, or whatever the name might be. Even President Nixon
had a brief flirt with a “national growth policy” for urban and rural areas
(Ehrlichman 1975).
In any event, the revised edition was launched and did quite well initially.
Reviews were favorable, although some expressed disappointment that we had not
been more critical of the entire Keynesian enterprise of capitalism “with a human
face.” This was the period when academic Marxism was at its height, and we had
not jumped on the bandwagon. On the other hand, we had ignored the rise of envi-
ronmental consciousness that was then developing its own brand of eco-regional-
ism and had skirted other areas, such as the resurgence of cultural regionalism as a
political force throughout the world and the revival of interest in rural development
in poor countries just as our book (with its explicit urban bias) was coming on
stream. In any event, by 1975, the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions that would
change the nature of academic debate even for regional scientists and planners were
not far on the horizon.

THIRTY-SIX YEARS LATER: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

If only we could have heard the grass grow or consulted the Delphic oracle! What
had our two books accomplished? By 1975, one critic thought that Regional Policy
sounded “tired.” In retrospect, it was indeed the “last hurrah” of an era that was soon
to disappear forever. We now live in a world that is very different from those hal-
cyon years with their optimistic view of the future. Since 1975, the world has gone
global, and national boundaries have become porous. In an era of global competi-
tion, it is no longer necessarily the case that national economies are the primordial
units of economic growth. New technologies, particularly in transportation and
information technology, have radically changed the costs of overcoming distance.
New multinational blocks—EU, NAFTA, MERCOSUR—have emerged and are
consolidating their respective bureaucracies. The Keynesian state has become a
taboo concept. The new wisdom is that states must become more frugal, privatizing
many of their traditional functions even down to police, prisons, and schools, and
show less kindness toward those for whom there is no place in a world fashioned
according to economic rationalism. Along with fitful democratization, a sphere of
civil society has emerged here and there, insisting on their “citizen rights.” And then
there are these contradictions: on one hand, large parts of the world economy have
been criminalized—the trade in drugs, prostitutes, illegal migrants, weapons. On
the other hand, there is a new concern with human rights, the state of the environ-
ment, and cultural identity.
Ethnic and religious violence is devastating countries as far apart as Indonesia,
Sri Lanka, Kashmir (India), Israel/Palestine, and Sierra Leone. The old Soviet
Union has imploded and given way not only to some two dozen new national enti-
ties but also to an economic “order” (or disorder) that could be called, depending on
Friedmann / REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING 393

one’s taste, either primitive accumulation or mafia capitalism. And there have been
other profound rearrangements. The one-fifth of humankind living in China has
embarked on a gradual process of transforming Chinese communism into a market
economy “with Chinese characteristics.” India, where roughly another fifth resides,
has similarly (if less spectacularly) opted for wider participation in the global sys-
tem. Meanwhile, much of Africa south of the Sahara has descended into chaos,
Latin America (with a couple of exceptions) continues to be marginalized both eco-
nomically and politically, many Middle Eastern countries are dominated by tyrants
of one sort or another, the former Yugoslavia has all but ceased to be as its compos-
ite republics hived off to become separate states, and so forth. Clearly, we now live
in a world in which regional development and planning have little purchase and
where old issues need to be reposed.4
There are new constellations of power, new passions, and a new sense of time
and place. In this new world, space still matters—even regions and nation-states
still matter—but we must think of them in new ways, at multiple scales, from nano-
seconds (where space for communication and financial transactions is all but abol-
ished) to multinational trading blocs and intercity networks (Brenner 1999;
Friedmann 2000). Our world is much less stable than we had imagined; it is a turbu-
lent world where thinking informed by Euclidean geometry is quite useless
(Rosenau 1990). But which of any number of alternative geometries are relevant?
The hierarchy of cities is now a global hierarchy of city-regions with, in some cases,
tens of millions of inhabitants (Knox and Taylor 1995). Industrial production has
relocated in part in so-called newly industrializing countries (NICs) and regions
with low-cost diligent labor and political regimes that look unkindly on trade union
activities. Rural areas continue to empty out and are being turned into “plantation
economies” owned and/or controlled by huge multinational concerns. The forest
regions of the world are either going up in smoke or become chainsaw victims.
The very notion of a general theory of economic growth and development has
come to be questioned. More precisely, it has been swallowed up by the market fun-
damentalist doctrines of privatization and free trade. IMF-enforced conditionality
adds up to saying that the business of government is, well, business. Remove
bureaucratic restraints and venial rent seeking, and cornucopia will distribute its
blessings. As Bill and I argued as early as 1964, regional issues in rich countries
would be chiefly concerned with the articulation of city-regions, this being more a
matter of governance arrangements than of development strategies. This prediction
has turned out to be accurate (Lefèvre 1998). To be sure, there continues to be con-
cern with economically lagging regions in the European Union, and Brussels chan-
nels substantial funds in its direction as a way to ensure its adherence to the Union.
But the real drama of European policy lies elsewhere: in the restructuring processes
of “rustbelt” cities, high-speed trains, urban competitiveness, and the mysterious
processes that give rise to “innovative milieux.” None of these issues are easily
encompassed by “regional policy.”
394 INTERNATIONAL REGIONAL SCIENCE REVIEW (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2001)

This is not to say that spatial analysis is no longer important. To the contrary:
space, in its many modulations, pervades the social sciences to a degree that could
not have been envisioned in the 1960s and 1970s (Soja 2000). But I wonder
whether, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Bill Alonso, were he still with
us, would have agreed to a third edition of Regional Policy. Indeed, I doubt that I
myself would wish to undertake the task. Over the years, my focus has shifted to
questions of citizenship, the incorporation of transnational migrants, intercity net-
works, and the role of civil society—topics that are far removed from my concerns
of three or four decades ago (Douglass and Friedmann 1998; Friedmann
forthcoming).

NOTES
1. Regions need to be bounded in some fashion, whereas spatial development has to do with the pat-
terning of selected variables that, in principle, do not require boundaries.
2. We explicitly excluded methods for regional analysis from the reader, as Isard’s well-known
methods volume was already available (Isard 1960).
3. For a recent critical treatment of the “export development framework,” see Parr (1999).
4. This comment notwithstanding, the review of so-called territorial policies has become a lively
activity in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) bureaucracy in Paris.
An OECD document speaks even of a “new consensus” concerning the importance of territorial devel-
opment policy and its implementation in both developed and developing countries. Three areas of policy
intervention are identified: spatial development, economic development, and social development. The
detail sounds all very familiar, echoing the language of thirty-six years ago: spatial distribution of eco-
nomic activities and infrastructure, territorial disparities, social and spatial integration, and so on.
“Rather than treating the three domains in isolation as has often been the case, the overall policy objec-
tive is to integrate them at the most suitable territorial level of intervention and in an appropriate gover-
nance framework” (OECD 1999, 4). Are we in a time warp here, or is this the new future?

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