Studies in International Planning History – serie

In his 1912 pamphlet for the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, Raymond Unwin set out in detail the lessons learnt from his formidable practical experience in the design and layout of housing: at New Earswick from 1902, Letchworth Garden City from 1905, and most significantly at Hampstead Garden Suburb, where the `artisans’ quarter’ 1907-9 was probably his masterwork of spatial design. His interest in minimising the length of paved road to number of houses served, and `greening’ the ubiquitous mechanistic bye-law suburb of the late 19th century provided motivation for defining a general theory of design, which under pinned Garden City principles. Nothing Gained by Overcrowding emerged as a principle which was to have a revolutionary impact on housing and urban form over the next 50 years.Unwin's theory had developed with his work, but the origins can be found in two earlier and less well known publications. On the building of houses in the Garden City’ was written for the first international conference of the Garden City Association, held in September 1901. The following year he published the Fabian Society Tract Cottage Plans and Common Sense, in which he took first principles, `shelter, comfort, privacy’, and drew out general criteria and specific standards. Housing had to be freed from the bye-law strait jacket. This would sweep away `back yards, back alleys and abominations … too long screened by that wretched prefix back’.Republished here for the first time together, with an introductory essay by Dr Mervyn Miller, these three papers make clear the development of Raymond Unwin's theories of planning and housing, theories which were among the most influential of the 20th Century.

Thomas Sharp was a key figure in mid-C20 British planning whose renown stems from two periods in his career. First, he came to attention as a polemical writer in the 1930s on planning issues, including as a virulent opponent of garden cities. His prose tempered over time and this phase perhaps culminated in Town Planning, first published in 1940 and reputed to have sold over 250,000 copies. Subsequently the plans he produced for historic towns in the1940s, such as Oxford, were very well known and were influential in developing ideas of townscape. Started as an official manual on village planning, The Anatomy of the Village followed on from the Scott Report, for which Sharp had been one of the Secretaries. When the Ministry decided not to proceed with the publication, Sharp himself published in it 1946. It became one of Sharp's best known works, with lucid prose and generous illustration by photograph and beautiful line-drawings of village plans. The aim of The Anatomy of the Village was to set out the main principles of village planning, especially in relation to physical design.Anatomy became a key text in thinking about villages in the post-war period; a period when there was great concern that settlements should develop in more sensitive ways than inter-war ribbon and suburban development patterns. The problems of poor quality development, unrelated to settlement form, was to continue to stimulate books such as Lionel Brett’s Landscape in Distress and campaigns from the Architectural Review. Reading the text today it still has much to offer: while some of its assumptions about the level of services a village might support clearly belong to another era, its beautiful and simple typological analyses of village form continue to be of relevance.

The UK's largest new town, Milton Keynes, is the product of a Transatlantic planning culture and a plan for a relatively low-density motorised city generously endowed with roads, parklands, and the infrastructure of cabling for communications technology. At its heart was the charismatic and influential Richard (Lord) Llewelyn-Davies. A Labour Peer with various personal and professional interests in the USA, he drew upon the writings of American academics Melvin Webber and Herbert J. Gans, who were also invited to advise on social trends in relation to the urban context in the preparation for the Plan. The Plan bristled with an understanding that motorised transport and communications technology would shape the city of the future, and influence the nature and reach of `community’ and social interactions beyond the localised realm.Prepared by Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker and Bor, for Milton Keynes Development Corporation, and presented to the Minister for Housing and Local Government in 1970, the Plan for Milton Keynes is a vibrant expression of Sixties’ idealism and forward-thinking. In creating the `Little Los Angeles in North Buckinghamshire’, a low-density city whose citizens mostly rely upon the private motor car for their mobility, the Plan has become increasingly unfashionable as agendas for sustainability have called motorisation into question. Yet the gridroads and the gridsquares within them have been very popular with the people of Milton Keynes.The expansive thinking behind the Plan has important lessons for the limitations of current urban transport policy, and that cosy notions of neighbourhood and locally-driven community have little resonance for understanding the character of social relations in the twenty first century. The planning of Milton Keynes was more realistic and nuanced than much urban policy formulation today.

Tropical Architecture, although now a highly contested and debated term, is the name given to European modern architecture that has been modified to suit the climatic and sometimes cultural context of hot countries. These hot countries were labelled `the tropics’ and were often European colonies, or countries that had recently won their independence. Fry & Drew’s book, written on the threshold of the end of the British Empire, was one of the first publications to offer practical advice to architects working in `the tropics’, based on the empirical studies they conducted whilst based in British West Africa during the Second World War. The book with its numerous illustrations, plans and easy to follow explanations became a key manual for all architects working in hot climates, and in particular those tasked with designing dwellings and small town plans. Although the Royal Engineers and Schools of Tropical Medicine had long been designing and campaigning for better planning, improved sanitation and had for example developed methods of cross-ventilation, this book became an instant hit. `Tropical Architecture’ suddenly bloomed into its own distinct canon, and by 1955 the Architectural Association had set up a course specialising in tropical architecture, led for a short time by Fry. Village Housing in the Tropics had a significant impact when it was written on a profession that had had little guidance on working in hot climates and on architecture students and universities who began to modify their courses to accommodate different conditions. Although from a post-colonial perspective many scholars now associate this architecture as being a continuation of the Imperial mission, this does not reduce the significance of the publication. Indeed, Tropical Architecture is regarded as being the forerunner to `green architecture’, developing passive low energy buildings that are tailored to suit their climate and built with local materials.

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905-1983) was a British town planner, editor, and educator. This book includes four of Tyrwhitt’s key texts to illustrate how she forged and promoted a synthesis of Patrick Geddes’ bioregionalism and the utopian ideals of European Modernist urbanism, which influenced post-war academic discourse and professional practice in urban planning and design internationally. The key texts reprinted in this book are contributions from the Town and Country Planning Textbook (1950) which was published as an outcome for the Correspondence Course in Town Planning for members of the Allied Forces, which Tyrwhitt ran. It was designed to meet the requirements created by passage of the 1947 Town and Country Act and helped to shape a generation of planning practitioners in the UK and commonwealth countries.

By 1900 the British had undertaken various types of urban planning in their colonial territories, but the early twentieth century brought new ideas and the birth of the modern planning movement. In India these new planning ideas inspired several specialized reports after 1900, most of which drew explicitly on British, or occasionally German, ideas. The most complete of these studies was the Richards Report on Calcutta, prepared for the Calcutta Improvement Trust and published in 1914.Its major concerns included the building and widening of roads, slum clearance and improvement, legislation, and suburban planning. As background, it included written and visual documentation of living conditions, through charts, photographs, and maps. Richards emphasized that conditions in Calcutta differed greatly from those in urban Britain, and made some allowance in that regard. In general, however, his report exemplifies the attempt by British planners, along with Indian elites, to impose their vision on colonial cities.Richards’ report was well-received by leading British planners of the day. A notice in Garden Cities and Town Planning claimed that it was "the most complete report on town conditions and possibilities which has yet been issued". While the immediate impact of the report in Calcutta is moot - Richards was highly critical of the past practices of local officials, and his views were unpopular with his superiors - the Richards Reports remains a crucial insight into both the development of modern town planning and the colonial period in India.

Between the World Wars the talent of Dutch town planner J.M. de Casseres (1902-1990) found expression in two visionary books and a clutch of influential articles. In an in-depth article published in February 1929 in the magazine De Gids under the title 'Grondslagen der planologie' (Principles of Planology) he invented a term for the new social-scientific discipline that would eventually enter the Dutch language. De Casseres made it his life's work to elevate the art and craft of town planning to academic status, classifying the international planning body of knowledge and making it accessible and applicable. The results of this internationally supported body of knowledge are reflected not only in de Casseres's publications but also in a string of urban design proposals for towns across the Netherlands. This republication of the De Gids article alongside five other influential de Casseres articles in translation and their original Dutch language form brings this key thinker into reach for a wider research audience.

This book, published in 1937, reported on a four week visit to Moscow in 1936 to study the making of Moscow as a showpiece Soviet capital. At its core was the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow but the book was a study of planning in the Soviet rather than the Western sense. Thus it covered many aspects of the city’s social and economic life including industry and finance, education and housing production as well as governance and town planning. Much first hand detail is included, based on the visit and the authors’ meetings with Soviet officials and citizens that illustrate various points, usually in praise. The book made a significant contribution towards the growing arguments in 1930s Britain and other parts of the Anglophone world for a bolder, more comprehensive and more state-led approach to planning. In turn these arguments had an important impact in shaping the policies adopted in the 1940s.

This work was written and compiled by the then Secretary of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association in 1913. It shows just how much the conception of the garden city had been broadened from Howard’s original texts. Indeed the Association’s own name had been broadened to add the newly emergent practice and theory of town planning to the original focus. Alongside the garden city, recognition is now given to the burgeoning numbers of garden suburbs and garden villages. Many examples of these are identified and briefly described, including many which are small and now little known, greatly adding to the interest of the publication. Even the underlying arguments for such developments differ. Alongside the more altruistic arguments in favour of reform, there are now those which explicitly emphasise the need to ensure a healthy race to maintain the Empire.

Like many UK cities Birmingham was heavily bombed during the Second World War and as with so many bombed British cities, and many un-bombed ones that jumped on to the re-planning bandwagon, there was a clear imperative to reconstruct. But Birmingham was atypical in how it went about this. The city had begun planning in the mid-1930s, principally to replace vast quantities of slum housing – and there had been suggestions about ring roads even from the time of the First World War. So plans were available virtually ready to go, and were approved by a private Act of Parliament in 1946.Yet within Birmingham there were individuals and organisations with a great interest and influence in planning matters. This followed a significant and long-standing local tradition from the Chamberlain family to Nettlefold’s pioneering work on planning and housing at the start of the twentieth century. Prominent amongst these was the Cadbury family and the Bournville Village Trust, and one of its immediate responses to bomb damage was the book, When We Build Again.This was immediately influential in several respects, as contemporary reviews and ongoing citations demonstrate. It highlighted some less-palatable truths about conditions in the city and more widely, with ideas about what might be done. To modern eyes some of these are radical – for example the wholesale redevelopment of the Jewellery Quarter – an area which was recently proposed for World Heritage status. The origins of the derided post-war comprehensive clearance approach lie in these papers. Further, it used innovative and striking graphics to communicate statistical information to lay readers, including the use of striking photography of places and, particularly, people.Also included in this volume is a facsimile of a second Bournville Trust publication from 1955, Birmingham - Fifty Years On. This less famous but equally important publication grew from a frustration at the slow pace of post-war reconstruction, and envisaged what the city would look like half a century later.

The Ghent congress on town planning was the first genuinely international conference to address all aspects of civic life and design. Attended by representatives of 22 governments and 150 cities, as well as by hundreds of architects, planners, politicians, and scientists, it marked the culmination of a series of events which helped to form the world of town planning at the start of the twentieth century. Ghent illustrates three key themes for the history of town planning. First, the transactions of the congress include papers from some of the most significant theorists and practitioners of the period, such as Patrick Abercrombie, Augustin Rey, Raymond Unwin, and Joseph Stübben. Secondly, the congress as a whole reflects just how global the business of town planning had become by 1913: papers and exhibits included studies of colonial projects as well as European designs. The delegates themselves provide wonderful evidence of a transnational process at work. Finally, the text brilliantly illuminates the way in which town planning was critically linked to other reformist movements of the era. The whole event, like the International Union of Cities that it spawned, was the product of the peace movement. Even as war draw nearer, the International Union was being spoken of as a future world government. Significantly, one of the organisers of the event – Henri La Fontaine - won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913.The Premier Congrès international et exposition comparée des villes is a major publication, but it is one that is now almost impossible to obtain. This republication, a century after this seminal event, will be considerable interest not only to those who work on town-planning, but also transnational historians and writers on the peace movement more generally.

Rodrigo Perez de Arce's essay Urban Transformations and Architectural Additions was published during the formative stages of Post Modernism, at the point where theory was becoming seriously established. Jencks' first essays formalising the term Post Modernism in architecture and the revised Learning from Las Vegas were published the previous year. In planning terms, modernism had become associated with comprehensive redevelopment and forms of urban organisation that ignored context, history and any sense of tradition. De Arce considered the essential nature of buildings and the richness of historic urban form and explored how robust that essence was over time. He looked at the value of essential remnants and rich complexities in maintaining a sense of continuity and relevance. Having explored the adaptation process in history, de Arce went on to see how such a process might be simulated in contemporary cities with modern buildings, using additions and layers to change them from objects in infinite windswept space to being part of a rich urban fabric which described urban place. To do this he used concrete examples; housing schemes by James Stirling, new government centres in Chandigrah and Dacca and more prosaic 60's housing blocks.The paper had a fundamental influence on the way that architects and planners thought about the nature of cities: as dynamic organisms that were tangible to human beings, completely opposite to the systems thinking of the time. It contributed to ideas about the importance of street, place and city block which influenced so much recent regeneration practice. As we enter a phase of development where the reuse and adaptation of existing buildings is becoming paramount from both an economic and sustainable point of view, Perez de Arce's paper gives important insights into how to think about the process positively.

John Nolen’s New Ideals in the Planning of Cities, Towns, and Villages is the most thorough assessment of city planning written by an American practitioner before 1920. It records the interplay of urban reform in Europe and the United States, the rise of the planning expert, the design of new towns, and the technique for directing urban expansion on systematic lines. Most important, it documents the blueprint for investing the "peace dividend" of the Great War to make urban life "more fit for democracy".Written for men fighting to make the world safe for democracy, New Ideals revealed how the domestic part of the peace program could justify their sacrifice. The wartime housing initiative had improved the living conditions of industrial workers and the same public regulation and control of the layout and character of residential neighbourhoods could provide what "men of service expect to find on their return, a new and better type of workman’s home." While New Ideals strained towards the utopian, experience tempered Nolen’s expectations and the high aims of the book were not immediately realised in a post-war society seeking a return to pre-war normalcy. However in the last decade, Nolen’s planned communities have been closely studied as the demand for pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods set on sustainable lines has moved from novelty to policy. New Ideals is an important text not only for its design template, but also its aspirations. Nolen’s call to "make cites that will serve the needs--physical, economic, and spiritual-- of all people" lays at the heart of the city planning profession and the lessons Nolen imparted inform a new generation planning cities to be both resilient and just.

The publication of The Planning of a New Town in 1961 aroused remarkable interest. Its pages described a private new town, sponsored by the London County Council (LCC), to be built at Hook in Hampshire; a scheme that innovatively combined Garden City/New Town traditions with sensitivity to modern design. At its heart lay a multilevel and megastructural town centre intended to serve as a genuine focus for the gathering community, featuring shops and amenities placed on a pedestrian deck with cars and servicing beneath. The report itself proved extremely popular even though the New Town had fallen foul of political opposition at local and national levels and had been abandoned before any construction took place. It offers an insight into the flux of ideas that surrounded New Town development in the early 1960s. Analysing the world as it might have been not only identifies choices that were once available for shaping the built environment, it also often reveals once-cherished hopes and aspirations about how people might live in cities.

George Taylor's Town Planning for Australia was the first dedicated book on the subject of urban planning published in Australia. Journalistic and ideological in style, it sets out a robust vision for a specifically Australian approach to planning and development of towns in a young country. Taylor was a controversial figure, a political activist and publisher who brought the NSW Town Planning Association into existence and played a key role in publishing and promoting planning into the 1920s.His wife Florence Taylor was the first female qualified architect and trained engineer in Australia, and an important figure in the history of planning and publishing in Australia.

This book, published in 1937, reported on a four week visit to Moscow in 1936 to study the making of Moscow as a showpiece Soviet capital. At its core was the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow but the book was a study of planning in the Soviet rather than the Western sense. Thus it covered many aspects of the city’s social and economic life including industry and finance, education and housing production as well as governance and town planning. Much first hand detail is included, based on the visit and the authors’ meetings with Soviet officials and citizens that illustrate various points, usually in praise. The book made a significant contribution towards the growing arguments in 1930s Britain and other parts of the Anglophone world for a bolder, more comprehensive and more state-led approach to planning. In turn these arguments had an important impact in shaping the policies adopted in the 1940s.

The Festival of Britain is perhaps best known for its South Bank Exhibition promoting British science and art to the post-war world, but one of the most important elements was the Architecture Exhibition, based in Poplar in East London. This exhibition was used to demonstrate the principles of modern town planning that had been laid out by Abercrombie, in particular in his County of London Plan. The project was named after George Lansbury, the Labour MP, London County Council (LCC) member and Poplar councillor. It was an effective demonstration of planning ideas adopted since the 1930s by influential planners, taking the village as a model and retaining the terraced house as a housing option among medium rise flats. Small squares and open spaces were favoured, with paved pedestrian spaces, all at lower than pre-war densities.The guide is revealing of the broader thinking in English planning in the mid century. It provides an opportunity for looking at conflicts among advocates of different planning ideas in the period of reconstruction and the move by architects to regain control of LCC housing from the Valuer’s Department. It offers the model of integrated professional specialisms that was seen as central to Modernism’s mission. It is also an opportunity to describe in more detail the interaction of different professions, including, for example, a sociologist, employed by the LCC in the creation of a model for reconstruction.

Traffic in Towns, also known as the Buchanan Report, is regarded as one of the most influential planning documents of the twentieth century. The report reflected mounting concern about the impact on Britain’s towns and cities of rapid growth in the ownership and use of motor vehicles. Its purpose was to evaluate policy options for reducing the threat of traffic congestion to urban circulation and quality of life. Two main conclusions were drawn from the report: firstly, the need for large-scale reconstruction to make Britain’s cities fit for the `motor age’, including split-level megastructures and urban motorways; and secondly, the simultaneous need to preserve parts of the city, especially residential areas as car-free zones or `environmental areas’.In Britain, successive governments drew back from implementing the full recommendations of the Study Group, despite initial cross-party support. The prohibitive cost of city-centre redevelopment and motorway construction meant a `comprehensive’ solution to the problem of urban traffic on Buchanan lines was never attempted. However, local authorities in a variety of British cities, such as Glasgow, Leicester and Leeds took up aspects of the Report. Internationally, too, the Report had a major impact in countries such as Sweden, Italy and Australia. In the longer term, the influence of the Report may be best judged by the incremental changes it set in train such as pedestrianization of city centres, traffic calming, and other measures linked to Buchanan’s concept of `environmental areas’. In focusing attention on the effects of mass motorization on the urban environment Traffic in Towns set the terms of debate for a generation, pre-figuring recent discussion about the car and urban sustainability.

Unlike European countries where the consolidation of town planning was based on legislative reforms, Latin America’s urbanismo mainly stemmed from urban plans for national capitals and metropolises. Austrian academic and planner Karl Brunner was hired in Chile, Colombia and Panama from the late 1920s to advise in the professional and academic domains, marking a shift from the so-called École Française d’Urbanisme (EFU) of Haussmannesque descent towards the Austrian-German Städtebau, While coordinating the municipal office and plan for Bogotá, Brunner translated his Manual de Urbanismo – the first textbook published in Latin America about the new discipline and the first to incorporate examples from local cities. Based on his 1924 course at Vienna’s National Faculty of Architecture　Brunner’s Manual emphasized the `scientific system’ of the discipline. Brunner was the most influential figure of his time in the urban planning of the region, but has become overshadowed by Le Corbusier's and CIAM’s prevailing influence after the Second World War.Complete with a supporting introduction written by Arturo Almandoz, this volume includes the full copy of the original Manual de Urbanismo with an English translation of the synthesis. Further materials, including an extract of Karl Brunner's "Problemas actuales de urbanización" and an accompanying English translation of the text can be accessed at www.routledge.com/9781138778573

During World War II, many European government authorities and planners believed that the damage caused by bombing constituted a great opportunity to transform their cities. Even as the fighting continued, a great many plans were drawn up, and this has been the subject of much scholarship. However, what is often overlooked is wartime planning in cities not damaged in the war. United States cities were not bombed, but in Boston, one of its leading cities, the last years of the war brought a major effort to encourage both new plans to modernize the city and also means of implementing those plans.The wartime initiative to transform Boston had several sources. Both the Great Depression and the war had led to major measures by the federal government to try to deal with fiscal challenges and the need for new housing for the many people who relocated during the war because of the creation of new industries to help the war effort. Boston hoped it could benefit from these measures. Moreover, in the late 1930s, Harvard University had become a key residence for figures important in modernist planning, including Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius and Martin Wagner. These factors combined in 1944 to inspire what was called The Boston Contest. Its goal was to suggest solutions to many problems found in the metropolitan area. These issues included commercial and industrial developments, housing, transportation, education, recreation, welfare, urban finances, metropolitan government, and citizen participation in solving problems. This book, published in 1945 contains the top 3 prize winning entries and excerpts from 9 of the other nearly 100 entries. It gives a fascinating insight into the developing ideas of urban planning in the United States at a critical juncture.

Patrick Geddes is one of the most important figures in planning history, variously presented as an inspiration to regional planning, environmental planning and sustainability, grass-roots planning, citizen democracy, historic preservation, neighbourhood upgrading, university–community partnership, lifelong learning, and co-operative housing. Though well-known and often praised by planning historians, his scholarship extended across a much broader range of disciplines, with extensive publication on biology and on civics, and significant contributions to sociology, economics, geography, education, and the arts and humanities. With the exception of his plan of Dunfermline, published in 1904, his plans are very hard to find. Most of his plans were prepared in India between 1915 and 1923, but beyond brief extracts from four of them included by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt in the book Patrick Geddes in India, they are very difficult to obtain. Some are lost altogether and the remainder are available in a handful of libraries, often held in Archives. Of all the plans prepared after Dunfermline, the most extensive is for the city of Indore, originally published in two volumes that combine a comprehensive scheme for the urban development of the city with a detailed plan for the proposed University of Central India.