City Views - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

come an academic/' says Reps, who,
in fact, never did get a PhD, although
the University of Nebraska conferred
an honorary doctorate last year.
Born in St. Louis in 1921, Reps
grew up in Springfield, Missouri, and
in 1939 left for Dartmouth College—a
big deal, he says, for a young man
from a provincial town. In his junior
year, he took the only geography
course offered, in North American
regional geography, and was hooked
on planning. That experience, he says
today, makes it all the sadder that
there is no geography program at Cornell.
That course led to a senior project,
an in-depth study of a Vermont
town, and to a job studying the same
town for the National Resources Planning
Board.
His report on the town was his
first publication, although by the time
it came out in 1942 he was in the Army
Air Corps, stationed just outside Denver.
There, more good luck: an introduction
to Carl Feiss, who had just arrived
from Columbia University to become
planning director of Denver.
Reps' s formal planning education
began with a long bus and trolley ride
to the night course Feiss taught at the
University of Denver, and with a
course on local planning administration
offered through the Armed Services
Institute. "By the end of the
war, I had already decided to go to
graduate school in planning," he recalls.
He went to Cornell, where architecture
dean Thomas Mackesey,
Grad '39-41, himself an MIT planning
graduate, had started a planning program
in 1938, and was virtually the
sole teacher as well. Reps notes that
the education of planners in that postwar
period was spotty, to say the
least.
He had another good mentor,
though, in Mackesey, whose interests
were wide-ranging. In 1947, Reps
went to England to study planning law
and administration in the Department
of Civic Design at the University of
Liverpool. He came back to what he
describes as "the best postgraduate
education in the world," a three-year
stint as executive director of the
Broome County, New York, planning
board in Binghamton.
In the late 1940s, Broome County
was a scene of wild suburban growth,
sparked by the pent-up postwar housing
demand. Reps saw his job both as
helping the local towns and villages
cope with the results of this growth
and, even more important, trying to
convince them of the need for planning.
A Fulbright grant lured him
abroad again in 1950. When he returned,
there was an offer of a fulltime
teaching job at Cornell. He said
he would try teaching for three years,
assuming at the time that he would return
to practice. But he has been at
Cornell ever since, a full professor
since 1960 and chairman of the Department
of City and Regional Planning
from 1952 to 1964. For years, he
was the only full-time faculty
member—which, he says, "made department
meetings a breeze.'' For the
last four years, he has been on a
"phased retirement" schedule, generally
teaching only one course a semester.
But even while teaching, Reps
kept his hand in as a practitioner by
serving as a consultant to Upstate
New York and Pennsylvania communities,
including some of the towns affected
by the building of the St. Lawrence
Seaway. In the late 1950s and
again in the 1960s, he served on the
Ithaca planning board, and he was a
member of the American Society of
Planning Officials (ASPO) board of
directors from 1966 to 1969.
THE REQUIEM FLAP
Reps came to national attention with a
speech called ' 'Requiem for Zoning"
atthe 1964 ASPO conference. Itwasa
polemical call for drastic changes in
U.S. land policy to control development
on the urban fringe. ''Zoning,"
he began, "is seriously ill and its
physicians—the planners—are mainly
to blame. What is called for is legal
euthanasia, a respectful requiem, and
a search for a new legislative substitute
sturdy enough to survive in the
modern urban world."
Strong stuff. It was followed
three years later from the same podium
with "Requiem or Renascence?"
which suggested a cure: Create a
"metropolitan land corporation" with
power to buy and condemn. Then
lease or sell the land back to its present
occupants—farmers, for example—or
to developers, chosen in design
competitions. Uses and development
would be strictly controlled by
the public agency. The result, said
Reps, would be a way of providing effective
public control over urban
growth.
It was a powerful argument, vividly
and at times humorously expressed.
Reps talked about the "planability
gap," the difference between
what planners are capable of achieving
and what they have achieved. Examples
of the former: Washington,
D.C., and Austin, Texas, both of
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