ABSTRACT
The Regional Plan was an attempt to articulate, coordinate, and expand the public agenda, and through the public agenda to influence private decisions. Many kinds of organizations attempt to shape the public agenda in pursuit of their values. These values are derived from a variety of sources: behavioral norms, ideologies, Utopian constructs, professional values, client group interests, and, not least important, from a need to perpetuate the organization. An organization succeeds in altering or adding to the public agenda if it is able to evoke a response from a relevant element of the apparatus of public decision making. The Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs was but one of many reform activities whose roots lay in the progressive era, but which culminated in the 1920s and subsequently influenced social and legislative activity in the New Deal period.
