The Second World War, the “Green Bible,” and Planning the Big Cities
1940–1959

Depression era attempts to integrate programs of industrial recovery into comprehensive planning were now shifted toward integrating wartime defense programs into plan- ning. They were also shifted toward adjusting patterns of municipal finance to secure both victory, on the interna- tional level, and fiscal responsibility, at the local level. During this period, Segoe prepared comprehensive plans for a number of major cities, including San Francisco, Cincinnati, Richmond and Detroit.

In Detroit, Segoe had to convert his conception of “City in a region” into “regional planning for a metropolitan area” due to the effects of World War II. Southeastern Michigan had become both a diversely urbanized and diversely industrialized region. Thus, planning for Detroit needed to acknowledge not only its immediate “hinterland” as a metropolitan area, but also its embeddedness in an industrialized region. His policies and procedures accom- plishing this established a model for the professional.

Also at this time, at the behest of the International City Managers Association (ICMA), he compiled and edited the first edition of Local Planning Administration, (1941). This book, the “Green Bible,” is the work that is for many most associated with his name, and it made him known to all students and practitioners of planning. The book has been widely used, not only in virtually all schools of planning, but by local government administrators in all parts of the United States, and in many other countries as well, as a continuing guide to the complex problems of urban development. Its comprehensiveness and usefulness, as well as its traditional green cover, have led to its nickname. This book, one of the most important planning books of the twentieth century, remains a recognized basic planning text and is still in widespread use nationwide.