Members' 25-Year Reminiscences

F. Stuart Chapin, Jr., FAICP

White Salmon, Washington

My career falls into roughly three phases: A phase from 1940 to 1949 (excluding three years of WWII activities) was spent acquiring firsthand experience with land-use problems and urban and regional planning approaches to solving them as community and regional planner with the Tennessee Valley Authority, and as planning director for the City of Greensboro, North Carolina. During this first phase, it became clear to me that the education of urban planners needed a more systematic and scientific grounding for planning practice.

So, in the next phase of my career, extending from 1949 to 1978, this need became a mission. I moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the opportunity to teach in the new Department of City and Regional Planning, to conduct research in the Institute for Research in Social Science, and later to establish the Center for Urban and Regional Studies.

My early research focused on methods for analyzing land use in cities, resulting in the first textbook in the field: Urban Land Use Planning (New York: Harper Brothers: 1957). But to back up my belief of the need for a more systematic and scientific grounding in planning practice, it seemed important to steer the bright young minds coming into the field to make a commitment and acquire the skills to deal with these needs of the profession.

During the next five years, with colleagues, this work led to more detailed studies of land development processes and experiments with computer models to simulate the residential growth of a city. While my colleagues focused on the supply side of land development processes, my interests shifted in the period from 1965 to 1978 to the consumer demand side. How do people presently use the city in the course of their daily activities? If they were to move, what would be their location preferences in making constrained choices, considering their present income level, their present stage in the life cycle, the living qualities they would be able to afford, and the out-of-home activities they would want to pursue?

The third phase of my career evolved when I retired from University teaching and research. My wife and I moved to a family place in the Columbia River Gorge in the state of Washington. My interests took a wholly different turn and came to focus on resource use issues, in many respects quite different from those I had experienced in the Tennessee Valley, when regional resource management was in a very early stage of development in what at that time was a severely depressed region.

Here in the Columbia River Area, for a number of years there had been a strong movement to protect the scenic resources of the Columbia River Gorge, coming largely from the Portland metropolitan area. There was no groundswell of interest in the communities along the river. In fact, there was growing hostility from real estate, business interests, and local government officials to the Gorge protection movement. A federal/state presence in the area and a concern that this would bring land-use regulation was threatening to them. I felt that the balkanization of land development practice, with each county going its own way and each of the two states emphasizing different land-use traditions, would do damage to the scenic qualities of the area.

After several years in a lobbying effort by several citizen organizations, in November 1986, the Congress finally took action, establishing a national scenic area in the Gorge and calling for the preparation of a management plan for t his area. The legislation led to the U.S. Forest Service preparing the plan for U.S.-owned lands and a Columbia River Gorge Commission (to be formed of three appointees of each of the governors of the two states and one appointee of each of the six counties, plus a non-voting member representing the federal interest) preparing the plan for non-federal lands.

I was a gubernatorial appointee for a five-year term. This was a fascinating experience for me. In the course of developing goals, standards, and policies for the management plan, the commission came to consider me a “house planning consultant.” I participated in the development of the management plan — with all the political push and pull involved in reaching a consensus — and the eventual certification of the plan to the Secretary of Agriculture and finally to the counties in the effectuation of the plan. It was an experience!