Joseph Hudnut and the unlikely beginnings of post-modern urbanism at the Harvard Bauhaus

Between 1937 and 1952, from his post at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius successfully promoted a modernist urbanism based on the principles of CIAM (the Congrès Internationaux d‘Architecture Moderne). With the help of his Harvard students and colleagues, especially Martin Wagner (Berlin's city planning director during the Weimar Republic), Gropius’ approach to urban design played a key part in shaping the post-war American landscape. In an unlikely twist, Joseph Hudnut, dean of the Graduate School of Design, who had brought Gropius there, became a fierce opponent of Gropius' plans for the modern city. Though he lost the battle he fought with Gropius for the direction of city planning, Hudnut did plant the seeds of a new post-modern urbanism that took root two decades later.     

An ‘ordinary modernist’? Empire and nation in Ariel Kahane’s large-scale planning

ABSTRACT

The article explores mid-twentieth century professional transnationalism by highlighting the crucial role of lesser-known planners – ‘ordinary modernists’ – in disseminating, negotiating, and ultimately shaping the modern built environment. It focuses on the work of Ariel Kahane (1907–1986), a mostly unknown German-Jewish senior planning officer under both the British Mandate and on the Israeli ‘New Towns’ team of early statehood. It examines Kahane’s critique of British imperial planning’s betrayal of the emancipatory values of large-scale planning, and shows how, while drawing on planning innovations from the British metropole, he produced his own, self-contradictory, planning vision. Kahane’s planning ideas advanced notions of Jewish exclusiveness, an orientation expressed ever more explicitly after 1948, when he became a high-ranking planning officer in Israel. His work as a senior state planner illuminates aspects of continuity across the divide of 1948, which is typically viewed as a moment of rupture with respect to Israeli state planning and the formation of ethno-spatial structures.     

Thomas Sharp as a figure in the British planning movement

The planner, Thomas Sharp, has often been portrayed as an outsider in the wider British town planning movement. In part this reputation reflects his prickly personality and a widespread professional perception in the 1950s and 1960s that he was a quirky individualist at odds with the mainstream of town planning's evolution. This paper argues, however, that in the 1930s and 1940s Sharp was central to British planning history. In part, the marginalisation of Sharp reflects the tendency to write the story of British planning in terms of two visionary movements – the garden city and modernism – with neither of which he felt comfortable. Often dismissed by his critics as a traditionalist, he actually sought physical modernisation that cherished and reproduced in new development, without imitating, what he saw as the best of what already existed. From this perspective and his unique insights on the depressed north east of England, Sharp made seminal contributions to the growing anti‐suburban and rural preservationist movements and fed the arguments for a national policy for more balanced regional development. All were central strategic priorities of post‐1945 planning policies. His pre‐war writings and 1940s plans were also seminal to all townscape analysis.     

Gordon Culham: living a ‘useful life’ through the professionalization of Canadian town planning and landscape architecture

Gordon Joseph Culham (1891–1979), a landscape architect and town planner, was instrumental in the professionalization of both his disciplines in Canada. He helped lead the disorganized practitioners of the 1930s into the modern age and enabled them to assume their professional role in the improvement of Canada's urban centres. The discovery of an archive of Culham's papers provides a previously unavailable insight into the conceptualization and creation of the professions of landscape architecture and town planning in Canada. Culham characterized this as leading a ‘useful life’. He prepared, practiced and enjoyed the power associated with the professions he helped found in leading this useful life. He was a Harvard graduate who worked with the greatest landscape architectural firm in America, the Olmsteds and with the premier British town planner, Thomas Adams. Culham returned to his homeland on the eve of the Depression with an unrivalled reputation. He brought with him a strong sense of professionalism and helped elevate a small, dispirited community of Canadian landscape architects and town planners into one united organization for almost two decades. Professional specialization was an inevitable outcome but Culham continued to bridge the divide between his chosen fields throughout his ‘useful life’.     

Lewis Mumford and Norman Bel Geddes: the highway,the city and the future

Lewis Mumford’s life spanned the era in which American cities were rebuilt for the automobile and his writings addressed that theme from the 1920s to the 1970s. Norman Bel Geddes achieved fame during the 1930s for his imaginative evocations of future urban and regional landscapes designed for high‐speed auto travel, culminating in the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. Both of these men were influential figures during the period (1935–45) when the basic contours of American urban highway policy were codified. Mumford advocated a careful integration of street, highway and landscape in order to tame the destructive impacts of the automobile. By the 1950s he had become a fervent opponent of both central city freeway building and auto‐dependent suburban sprawl. Norman Bel Geddes embraced the emerging world of automobiles and freeways, and poured his energies into the creation of exhibits, models, plans and books showing how high‐speed motorways could shape a new metropolis. This paper compares these two men along multiple dimensions and argues that the contrasting styles of Mumford and Bel Geddes embody a recurring split in the American attitude toward cities and urban planning.     

Town planning versus urbanismo

The point of departure of this article is the contrast drawn by Giorgio Piccinato between ‘Anglo‐Saxon’ town planning and ‘Latin’ urbanism, one based on rational method and theory of planning as intervention, the other on architecture, urban morphology and project‐based action. Gordon Cherry and Oriol Bohigas represent the two poles of the dichotomy – Cherry because of the emphasis he placed on separation from architecture in the professional emergence of the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute, Bohigas because of his equally insistent emphasis on reintegrating planning with its mother discipline. The paper sets Bohigas and the regeneration of Barcelona into the wider context of a postmodern urbanism troubled by the neighbouring internecine rivalry between modernist and traditionalist architects. It is argued that Barcelona’s most distinctive contribution is less the replacement of ‘plans’ by ‘projects’ than its reconciliation of modernism and contextualism, a lesson duly acknowledged in the Anglo‐Saxon planning world through an award of the RIBA Gold Medal. This narrative of the triumph of urbanism ends with the RTPI’s acceptance that making place and mediating space are at the heart of town planning.     

Town planning and radicalism in the progressive era: the legacy of F. L. Ackerman

Frederick L. Ackerman, the well-known American architect and town planner, was a pivotal figure in the progressive movement for housing and planning reform during the first half of the last century. Active at many levels of this movement, he worked with many of its major figures. This paper provides an overview of Ackerman's rich legacy of town planning and urban design, but deals most directly with Ackerman's radical political views. In particular, ittraces the formative influences on his views and analyses how these views influenced his career. It makes the case that Ackerman stood in sharp contrast to the leading lights of modern American planning who supported the capitalist system.     

Shan-shui myth and history: the locally planned process of combining the ancient city and West Lake in Hangzhou, 1896–1927

In early modern China, several modern construction plans were carried out in Hangzhou's ancient city centre and West Lake, leading to the formation of a lake-city combined urban form, which is now valued for its uniqueness and characteristically Chinese cityscape aesthetic. The catalyst for this process of combining the ancient city and West Lake was a plan titled ‘Building a New Market’ (1914), developed on the basis of a draft presented in the Zhejiang provincial assembly during the late Qing Dynasty, striving for urban renewal by promoting West Lake. After the Xinhai Revolution, seizing the opportunity of physical and temporal changes, local officials successfully implemented this plan by using pioneering planning methods to strengthen the link between the ancient city and West Lake. The steps of this plan's implementation, namely ‘pull down the city wall – build roads – construct new market’, widely influenced other cities in the early 1920s. Also, this plan led to two subsequent projects, the Circling Road plan (1920) and West Lake Expo (1922/1927), furthering the urbanization reform of West Lake aimed at making it part of the city.     

Developing and financing the ‘garden metropolis’: Urban planning and housing policy in twentieth‐century America

This article examines the evolution of garden city ideas in the United States during the twentieth century. It distinguishes between four sets of goals: environmental reform; social reform; town planning, and regional planning. Much of the literature on American garden city movements focuses on the general political failure of its advocates to achieve key social reforms and regional planning objectives. By contrast, the accomplishments in environmental reform and town planning have been far more successful. Though Ebenezer Howard's proposals did not lead to widespread adoption in their purest form, urban decentralization and sub‐urbanization have produced significant improvements in the building of higher‐quality and lower‐density housing and in providing more open space and greenery for a large segment of the population. This pattern of planning and development may be viewed as ‘the garden metropolis.’ Its relationship to garden city ideas is best symbolized by the central role of Thomas Adams, the British planner who served as a leading proponent of the garden metropolis in the United States. Many of Adams’ policy recommendations, including his strong support for mass home owership initiatives, were later implemented by the Federal Housing Administration beginning in 1934. The FHA, through its mortgage insurance programs, its property and neighborhood standards, and its Land Planning Division, was extremely influential in shaping the growth of the garden metropolis, especially during the 1940s and 50s.     

My 60 Years as a Planner

This article is a continuation of JAPA’s “Perspective” series that provides a view of the 60-year career of Richard S. Bolan. In those 60 years Bolan experienced four different career phases beginning with eight years of practice experience, followed by a period at the former Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. From there he joined the faculty of Boston College, where he published numerous contributions to planning theory. In 1985 he moved to the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, where he engaged in international work focusing on Central and Eastern Europe and wrote about the failed role of planning in the fall of communism and essential works in environmental remedial work for an extremely polluted region. He has continued teaching since officially retiring in 1988 with current responsibilities teaching planning theory at the doctoral level. He has just completed a book being considered for publication, titled Urban Planning's Philosophical Entanglements: The Rugged Dialectical Path from Knowledge to Action.     

沈理源:摆荡于“古典”与“折中”之间

小盐官家庭出身 沈理源,1890年出生于浙江杭县,今余杭区,为浙江省杭州市下管辖的一个区.余杭中的“杭”,实为地名;“余”,则是古越语中“盐”的意思,没有任何的含义.而沈理源,诞生在清光绪年间的一个小盐官家庭,家里终年负责盐铁的销售,并回收废铁,而家里面从盐铁专卖中所获得的巨大利润,全都需上交给中央政府.     

Transfers and exchanges: the role of Léon Jaussely from a transnational perspective

Léon Jaussely (1875–1932) was considered by his contemporaries as a forerunner and one of the most outstanding French planners of his time. He had a remarkable professional career in France and took part in several important international planning competitions. Jaussely’s work, in many respects, is central to better comprehend both the evolution of urban planning and planner’s exchanges at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, his significant role can only be fully understood from a transnational perspective. This paper aims, first, to analyse Jaussely’s distinctive approach to cities and urban planning. Secondly, it intends to place his ideas within the transnational debate and examine his connections with British, American, and German planning. His role as a passeur culturel in the diffusion and adaptation of planning international principles in France is then discussed, showing how this study can contribute greatly to the research on cross-national exchanges and the transnational circulation of planning models at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, insights on Jaussely and the French town planning movement can provide a deeper understanding about historical alternatives to modernist architecture, and therefore highlight continuities between nineteenth and twentieth century practices.     

Searching for effective and democratic town planning: the international travels of Sir Ernest Simon, 1936–1943

This article examines the international journeys made during 1936–1943 by Sir Ernest Simon, the prominent Manchester reformer and businessman, to investigate urban planning in Moscow, Zurich, Stockholm, and across the United States. The research uses Simon’s own handwritten notes and other archival sources, together with subsequently published material where he drew lessons from these places for Britain. It is a detailed case study of ‘policy tourism’ and ‘cross-national learning’ by an individual important in the town planning movement who was also part of a wider demand for economic and social planning being influentially promoted at the time by cross-party ‘middle opinion’. The visits formed part of his personal search for a form of town planning that was both as effective as that in the Soviet Union but also democratic and consistent with British political values. Switzerland and Sweden were judged as successful democracies, able to plan their most important cities effectively without recourse to totalitarian methods. The United States he approached with suspicions of its tradition of pervasive city corruption. However, he returned heralding the Tennessee Valley Authority and New York City’s express highways and parks as the world’s most outstanding examples of democratic planning.     

Interpretation of Simon Stevin's ideas on the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East Indies Company) settlement of Malacca

Simon Stevin's (1548–1620) treatises had an influence on the construction of settlements in Southeast Asia as well as on the settlement of Malacca. In the treatise ‘Ideal Plan for a City’, published in 1649, Stevin developed a city design in which he was influenced by ideas of an ideal town according to the principles of the Italian Renaissance (fourteenth century until the sixteenth century). This treatise had an influence on the development of settlements in Southeast Asia. The settlement of Malacca was influenced, apart from the Dutch, by Portuguese design and architecture. The influence of Simon Stevin's treatise was also noticable on the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East Indies Company – VOC) settlement of Jayakarta (Batavia). VOC architecture and town planning in general was influenced by the ideas of Simon Stevin. The findings are that the three requirements, defence, agriculture and location, are met as mentioned by Stevin in ‘Ideal Plan for a City’. The other requirements of design (as mentioned in his treatise Vande Oirdeningh der Steden of 1599) – arithmetic, symmetry, placement of buildings and a system of streets – are not met.     

Communitarian regionalism in India: how lessons from the New Deal Greenbelt Town programme translated to postwar India

This article examines transnational planning history following the Second World War with a focus on the diffusion of Western planning principles to postwar India by US architect-planner Albert Mayer. Specifically, Mayer’s role as a foreign advisor to the Indian government from 1946 to 1958 and the application of a US communitarian regionalist planning ethos to rural village improvement and town planning at Cawnpore (Kanpur), Greater Bombay (Mumbai), and Chandigarh is explored. Using the stages of transnational planning flows as a framework, we review the foundations of communitarian regionalism in American planning practice and Mayer’s participation in the New Deal Greenbelt Town programme to inform his translation, in partnership with American and Indian planners, of these town planning principles to suit postwar Indian planning needs. This comparative assessment allows us to present a re-examination of the transfer and adaptation of Western planning as well as exchanges of knowledge and practice within very disparate contexts.     

城乡统筹规划编制体系的转型探索——基于新型城镇化背景下的思考

新型城镇化战略的提出为我国城乡统筹提供新的契机,带来了城乡统筹规划理念与思路的转变,同时也对城乡统筹规划提出了更高的要求。本文以我国新型城镇化与城乡统筹关系分析为线索,阐述了新型城镇化背景下我国城乡统筹规划的基础与约束因素,对我国城乡统筹规划的编制体系、形式,编制内容与技术体系的调整进行了学术探讨,旨在为我国城乡统筹规划体系的完善与规划实施提供依据。     

Is Planning ‘Secular’? Rethinking Religion,Secularism, and Planning

ABSTRACT

Responding to the call for a deeper understanding of the religious phenomenon in planning – advanced, among others, by Leonie Sandercock and June Thomas in this journal – this paper argues that understanding religion in planning entails understanding religion’s constitutive other: secularism. This position draws on the burgeoning field of secular studies as well as examples of entanglement of religion, secularism, and planning in the United States and France. It problematizes a long-held assumption that good planning is based upon the notion of ‘religious indifference,’ for the assumption is conceptually anachronistic and practically untenable. This paper offers a set of methodological considerations as to how planners can radically rethink this assumption while effectively attending to the religious subjectivities of their constituencies and actively working through the structures of the modern state. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this analysis for planning practice against the backdrop of recent improvements fostered by the American Planning Association as well as the relevance of this analysis across international contexts.     

David Godschalk

David R. Godschalk, professor emeritus in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, passed away in early 2018. In this essay we reflect on Dave’s planning scholarship and practice. We discuss his main contributions in 4 prominent areas. First is the importance of public participation and collaboration for the planning and governance of communities. He argued for democratizing and recasting public participation, with planners working alongside community members coproducing plans and incorporating uncertainty, new information, and different viewpoints. Second is Dave’s focus on the tenets of the comprehensive plan and its core element, the land use plan. In the plan, central principles of livable urban forms and model planning processes can be integrated and translated to practice. With academic collaborators and practitioners he pioneered theoretical and empirical research on what constitutes a high-quality plan, a fundamental question at the heart of planning. Third is his research demonstrating how spatial planning can be used for hazard mitigation and urban resilience. This work forged a new generation of planning academics and practitioners who focused on hazard plans for predisaster mitigation and postdisaster recovery at multiple governmental levels. Finally, fourth is his personal involvement in planning-related institutions that he helped create, lead, or steer. In his various roles as scholar, teacher, mentor, collaborator, supervisor, planning director, and elected official, Dave touched the lives of many who now build on his contributions in creating better communities.     

Planning southern Iraq: placing the progressive theories of Max Lock in Um Qasr,Margil, and Basra in the context of Iraqi national development, 1954–1956

ABSTRACT

Between 1954 and 1956, the architect, educator, and planner, Max Lock (1909–1988) produced a trilogy of plans to modernize the historical city of Basra and create new areas at Margil and Um Qasr in the south of Iraq. The New Basrah Plan was heavily inspired by the works of Patrick Geddes and aligned with contemporaries such as Lewis Mumford, Lock’s planning was progressive in scope and looked to differ from the planning of post-war principles in Britain through his notions of ‘civic surgery’. Contrary to this, his plans for Um Qasr and Margil focussed on infrastructure and the creation of more industrial areas not prioritizing people and place as highly as he did in the New Basrah Plan. Lock’s ‘Civic Surgery’ offered an alternative to mainstream thought by attempting to create usable, humanistic spaces, which hampered by politics and legislation, resulted in the plan’s shelving and were contradicted by his other works’ philosophies. New retrospective analysis of his underappreciated career reveals the complexities of his planning which this article demonstrates through the ‘failure’ of the New Basrah Plan and his plans at Um Qasr and Margil.