Founded in 1923, the Regional Planning Association of America was a small but influential circle that included Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, Catherine Bauer and Alexander Bing. Drawing on Ebenezer Howard's garden cities and Patrick Geddes's regionalism, the group argued for planned decentralisation into balanced communities tied to a wider regional framework. Its ideas were tested in projects such as Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn, New Jersey, the latter introducing the superblock and pedestrian–car separation. Mumford became the movement's leading critic and theorist.
The RPAA introduced regionalist and garden-city thinking to American planning and produced enduring experiments in community design.
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