ABSTRACT
Regionalism can be generally characterized as a discourse about connectedness to place and within this discourse are distinct conversations about contextualism, site-specificity in art and design, landscape urbanism, and planning. The discourse of regional planning is central to that of architectural regionalism. Regional planning, as framed by Lewis Mumford and the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), was about revising the logic by which people develop our settings, including whole regions, cities, neighborhoods, and streets. Bioregionalism emerged in the US as part of the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s and was influenced by Peter Kropotkin, whose work on anarchism, self-sufficiency, and communal life inspired the Bay Area bio-regionalists. Providing what may be a new and fruitful direction for both regionalism and sustainable development is the emerging discourse of civic environmentalism (CE). A civic environmental design is inherently democratic, socially engaged, ecologically informed, and aesthetically skilled.
