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.     

The Point is to Change It

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how planning practices contribute to the reification of the ‘state’ through the case of Singapore’s new urban waterfront, Marina Bay. Instead of assuming Singapore’s state-led planning model as inherently ‘top-down’ and ‘long-term’, it disaggregates the planning process into three specific modes of abstraction – calculation, historicity and imagination – and analyzes the role of each in reifying the ‘state’ as the singular author of history and development. The case contributes to the literature by illuminating how ‘states’ can appear to have different forms, spatialities, agencies and ultimately consequences, without compartmentalizing planning models based primarily on ideological or geopolitical divisions.     

Planning,Policy and the Public Interest: Planning Regimes and Planners' Ethics and Practices

A substantive Public Interest criterion promotes planning area residents' welfare, absent countervailing public policy considerations. This criterion is applied to appraise planning practices in two planning regimes in the West Bank of Palestine: the British Mandate and the Israeli occupation. Detailed analysis of these planning systems' institutions, land policies, statutory plans and development control shows that planners in both regimes acted in the Public Interest as they saw it. But under the British Mandate there was no conflict between the two considerations, while the Israeli occupation policy promoting Israeli interests overrides the welfare of the Palestinian population. This conclusion invites reflection on the interaction between planning regimes and the ethics of planners' practices.     

The ‘desiccator difficulty’: surprise,indignation and the local politics of planning for sanitary technology in nineteenth century Melbourne

ABSTRACT

‘Desiccators’, large machines that used steam and beaters to reduce waste into powder that could be sold as fertilizer, were one solution put forward in response to late nineteenth century Melbourne’s sanitation problems. Despite some initial enthusiasm for them, challenges with finding locations for desiccators were soon dubbed the ‘Desiccator Difficulty’. The ‘Desiccator Difficulty’ is one, all but forgotten, story of the fragmented governance contributing to Melbourne’s delays in coordinating a metropolitan sewerage system. This paper examines desiccators as a story with parallels in and legacies for planning today. It focuses on the role of local property-based conflicts – arguing these constituted emergent forms of planning, underscoring an increasing urban separation and control later embodied in metropolitan planning and infrastructure. Fragmented standoffs and bylaws also rationalized spatial disparities – with suburban municipalities refusing to house desiccators, nightsoil was sent to outer shires for decades. The paper argues Melbourne’s socio-technical transition to metropolitan sewerage and governance occurred not because water-borne technology was necessarily superior, but because legal assumptions and property interests made alternatives difficult to maintain. Desiccators are examples of ‘muddling’ details that belie simple narratives of technological change, and which have implications for how wider urban environmental change occurs and is understood.     

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: a founding mother of modern urban design

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905–83) was a town planner, editor and educator who was at the centre of a group of people who shaped the post‐war Modern Movement. Tyrwhitt’s great contribution, especially to the planning arm of the Modern Movement, the new field of urban design and the new science of ekistics, is under‐recognized, largely because she worked willingly as the ‘woman behind the man’ – notably as a disciple of Patrick Geddes, translator and editor of Sigfried Giedion, and collaborator of Constantinos Doxiadis. In doing so she extended their influence greatly and shaped the work of many people. Histories of planning lose much by omitting the contribution of collaborative, catalytic actors such as Tyrwhitt, whose career serves as a touchstone for this era, considered to be a watershed in the history of planning as an intellectual and professional movement. This paper sheds light on Tyrwhitt’s contribution through a chronological narrative, interweaving the biographical facts of her career with the larger themes her work engages in the broadest sense: the globalization of planning and urban design as an intellectual and professional movement as part of the larger civilizational transformation – the emergence of countervailing, ‘postmodern’ globalism, a humane, ecological world view very much like Geddes’ Neo‐Technic Era.     

Politics,planning and the protection of nature: Political abuse of early ecological ideas in Germany, 1933–45

This paper has three objectives. First, it illustrates how the theme of rationality, so important for a country's artistic culture and for studies in the positive sciences, is present both in modern Italy and the field of town planning. Second, it examines the ‘limits’ of town planning: a sort of set of ‘commandments’ which establishment culture has formulated in order to test and institutionalize planning projects. Third, it attempts to demonstrate how one of the peculiar and conditioning features of town planning in Italy is the importance attributed to history (the history of the city, the history of planning schemes and procedures) in justifying decisions which result in urban transformation.     

From the Cold War to the warmed globe: planning,design-policy entrepreneurism,and the crises of nuclear weapons and climate change

Faced with two existential threats – nuclear war and climate change – planners have responded by proposing sweeping reforms for city-regions, often deploying the newfound rationales to re-package earlier ideas about ‘the good city’. This paper analyses how mid-twentieth-century planning discourses regarding Cold War urban dispersal in the USA might help us understand contemporary conversations about urban climate change adaptation. We apply Kingdon's Multiple Streams Analysis and his concept of policy entrepreneurs to show how planners frame problems and shape policy agendas. We propose a subtype of ‘design-policy entrepreneurs’ who use the spatial and visual tools of planning and design to advocate for preferred policies. By analysing the rhetoric and visual representations made by planners and designers from 1945 to 1965, we examine how they repurposed long-standing ideas about urban deconcentration into ‘dispersal for defence’ proposals. Such proposals for dispersing urban settlements into separated and ‘self-contained’ units received a dysfunctional partial acceptance: housing and transportation legislation embraced the dispersal part but resisted the complementary elements aimed at limiting damages from nuclear attack by concentrating development into distinct nodes. We conclude by asking how the perils of such partial policy-making success might play out on the terrain of climate change adaptation.     

The architecture of the British Mandate in Iraq: nation-building and state creation

This paper seeks to examine and contextualise the architecture and infrastructure projects developed by the British during the occupation of Iraq in the First World War and the Mandate period that immediately followed. Relying heavily on military-political events for its structure and underlying narrative, the paper demonstrates how architecture, planning and ‘development’ were integral to the act of creating the new state and were very much part of the colonisers’ vision to create a nation in their own image. Works were deployed to imbue a sense of collective belonging and national identity through the creation of new town plans, as well as through institutions such as museums and universities. A certain dissonance emerges between the infrastructure and prestige projects, with the latter presenting an imagined and fabricated notion of Iraqi history, blended with a grandiose colonial style imported from India, and designed predominantly by James M. Wilson. The infrastructure projects began with sanitation improvements, road and rail installation, and expansion of the Basra docklands to attract international shipping and for the export of oil. Further building projects undertaken by the Public Works Department included a large number of administrative buildings called serais. Built at strategic locations, they were deployed as multi-functional centres for justice, taxation and land registration as well as places where local devolved empowerment was instigated. Iraqi architecture from this period has been largely overlooked in the emerging global histories of architecture, yet it offers an important view of the quandaries that faced late British colonial architecture in its attempts to respond to, and reflect changing and hostile political conditions.     

Planning history: Recent developments in Britain

This paper is a ‘state of the art’ review of planning history in Britain. It outlines some of the main reasons for the expansion of the field of study towards the end of the 1960s. It then describes and accounts for planning history achievements since that time. It concludes with a balance sheet of successes and opportunities not yet grasped, and an assessment of progress to date.

Over the last 20 years there has been a marked upsurge of interest in the historical development of the industrial and post‐industrial city from the point of view of the planning and conscious regulation of the built environment. The field of study, which has attracted the term ‘planning history’, represents a fresh, additional perspective on urban affairs, to go alongside the insights gained from art history, urban history, historical geography, industrial archaeology, construction history and the study of urban morphology. Significant academic results have ensued in terms of research and publications, and there have been important consequences for the profession of town planning, which has benefited from a new historical depth and analytical judgement over processes of environmental change.

The planning history movement—we must speak of it in those words—is now thoroughly international; in Britain at least it has been captured by the Planning History Group, a world‐wide network of scholars established in 1974. It publishes its own in‐house Bulletin, now called Planning History, and it organizes International Conferences. Operating also from Britain is the publication of an international journal Planning Perspectives. The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) is a vigorous newcomer in the USA, building on the earlier work of the American Planning History Group.

This paper seeks to describe and account for the achievements in British planning history over two decades: the lines of development and where they have taken us in our understanding of (particularly) urban change. By way of introduction it is necessary to set the scene and outline some of the reasons for the emergence of the new field of study at the end of the 1960s. To conclude, we may consider some of the gains for scholarship arising from this new academic concern.     

Historical continuity and post‐1945 urban redevelopment: the example of Lee Bank,Birmingham, UK

The reconstruction of British cities following World War II is characterized by a marked gap between the rhetoric and the reality. Visions for ideal cities, in particular those growing out of the modern movement in architecture, were diluted and warped by the ‘messy’ business of reconstructing actual cities, filled with real people whilst operating within democratic structures. This paper examines elements of this confrontation of the ideal and the real, by looking at the context for changes to the urban fabric within a single housing estate in Birmingham, self‐nominated ‘second city’ of Britain. The overarching theme is of historical continuity and change – the extent to which the urban fabric has been destroyed and remade. As such, the paper examines not only the nominally ‘modern’ post‐war reconstruction, but also how a contemporary, ‘post‐modern’ phase of redevelopment is dealing with the city form created in the 1950s and 1960s.     

The camouflage of war: planned destruction in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, 1948

The massive destruction of historic city centres during the Second World War was used, first in Britain and then in the rest of Europe, by contemporary architects and planners for justifying a modernist ‘clean slate’ approach to urban reconstruction; for them, war was ‘a blessing in disguise’ that could be exploited for adopting revolutionary planning concepts. In 1948 Tel Aviv, similar justifications were used for the total demolition of Manshiya, a centrally located ‘slum’ neighbourhood which allegedly suffered extensive and irrecoverable war damages during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. This article argues that contrary to common perceptions, the 1948 Manshiya demolitions were not a ‘complementary’ act obligated by the destruction of war, but rather a deliberate exploitation of wartime confusion and misinformation in order to launch an ambitious (and illegal) ‘modernization’ project for the whole area of southern Tel Aviv. Unlike European post-war urban reconstruction, in Manshiya, war was deliberately used by Tel Aviv’s leadership as a camouflage for a large-scale planned ‘civilian’ destruction that realized town planning ideals in their most radical form. This made the events exceptional not only in the backdrop of the 1948 War, but also in the local history of urban planning as a whole.     

‘Why Can’t the Future be More Like the Past?’ Planning History Track,Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), Annual Congress,Department of Civic Design,University of Liverpool, 15–18 July 2009

AESOP’s 2009 Congress was hosted by the University of Liverpool as part of the centenary celebration of its Department of Civic Design, the world’s oldest university planning school. ‘Why Can’t the Future be More Like the Past?’ was the conference title on all the banners and conference bags – an oddly querulous question, nevertheless it did the trick in getting participants to think historically throughout AESOP 2009. Michael Hebbert and Dirk Schubert ran a planning history track for six of the conference’s seven parallel session slots. Their call for papers elicited 30 abstracts which reduced to 17 papers, a comfortable quantity allowing good time for presentation and discussion. The track had the fortune to be allocated a wood‐panelled Architecture lecture theatre with superb projection facilities – more than one speaker gasped at the glory of their own PowerPoint images.     

Avoiding white elephants? The planning and design of London’s 2012 Olympic and Paralympic venues, 2002–2018

ABSTRACT

An issue commonly identified with the vast and costly developments that cities produce to host the Olympic Games is that they are prone to becoming ‘white elephants’ – obsolete or underused constructions that become cost burdens for cities. White elephants are particularly associated with some of the most recent Games of the twenty-first century, as reflected in accounts of ‘limping’ or obsolete venues in Sydney, Athens, Beijing, Rio and Sochi. This paper begins with a review of issues associated with spatial planning, architecture and planning process in the production of white elephants in Olympic history. It goes on to provide an historical account of London’s efforts from 2002 to 2012 avoid attracting a repetition of the critique that followed earlier Olympics. Finally, it assesses its ongoing efforts and record over the six-year period from 2012 to 2018.     

Drawing white elephants in Africa? Re-contextualizing Ernst May’s Kampala plans in relation to the fraught political realities of late-colonial rule

In 1945/1946, the Colonial Administration in Uganda commissioned Ernst May – planner of Das Neue Frankfurt (1926–1930) – to design the Kampala Extension Scheme and the smaller Wandegeya Development Scheme. The past decade has seen increasing scholarly interest in the neglected ‘African’ episode of Mays planning oeuvre, but this literature has not explicitly examined how May’s planning articulated with the fraught political realities of late-colonial rule. Utilizing previously undocumented archive material and a theoretical frame informed by governmentality studies, this paper examines these articulations, particularly those relating to tensions and contradictions in Colonial government arising from the would-be turning-point from indirect rule to a bio-political rationality of development and welfare. It is shown that while May’s submitted plans spoke directly to the tropes of urban improvement, African detribalization and labour stabilization, which informed the ‘turning point’ in colonial policy, May’s elaborate socio-spatial interventions and the style in which these enunciated racial difference proved unpalatable to a colonial administration stifled by the rationality of the economic domain of government, by constraints on how difference could be enunciated and by African urban politics.     

Inventorying Armagh: Max Lock,civil society,and the diffusion of planning ideas into Northern Ireland in the 1960s

The cathedral city of Armagh is one of the most historically and architecturally significant on the island of Ireland. This article explores the preparation of an inventory of Armagh’s architectural heritage by the London architect-planner Max Lock in 1964, commissioned by the Northern Ireland Committee of the National Trust. The inventory represents one aspect of the initial response of civil society to impending change in the built environment in the mid-1960s and formed part of efforts to ensure parity with Great Britain in land-use planning legislation. The inventory facilitates a wider discussion on state-civil society relations in Northern Ireland, the values and ideas guiding change within historic settlements, and the place promotional advantage that the local council sought to derive from Armagh’s history and heritage. Utilizing Ward’s typology of diffusion, it is argued that Northern Ireland represents an unusual ‘within-UK’ example of the transference of planning ideas and practices, with its historical experience of devolution offering valuable contemporary insights into the increasingly diffuse and fragmented governance space within the UK.     

Houses of paper and brown cardboard: Neville Chamberlain and the establishment of the Building Research Station at Garston in 1925

Neville Chamberlain’s significance in the history of twentieth‐century planning is well known. One key episode, however, has been overlooked: his role in the 1925 expansion and transfer to permanent premises of the Building Research Station (BRS), later known as the Building Research Establishment (BRE). The BRS had been established originally in 1921 but with temporary staff in temporary premises. In its post‐1925 form, the BRS was to have a world‐wide impact, both as a model for similar organizations in other countries and in the development of building science as a discipline. The paper shows how the espousal of new methods of construction formed a key part of the new approach to housing developed by Chamberlain as part of the ‘New Conservatism’ in 1924; how the promotion of new methods was inserted by Chamberlain into the 1924 Housing Act (Wheatley Act) introduced by the minority Labour government in 1924; and how, following the Conservatives’ return to power in November 1924, the BRS was transformed into something much larger in order to deliver ‘the Chamberlain programme’ of research for municipal housing. As such, the paper suggests that state‐funded building research formed the talisman of the social‐democratic confluence over state housing that emerged for the first time in Britain in the mid‐1920s.     

Consortium Developments Ltd and the failure of ‘new country towns’ in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain

This article examines the attempt by Britain’s biggest house builders to launch a privately‐initiated programme of ‘new country towns’ during the 1980s. It was their response to the policy changes of the Thatcher governments, shrinking the state sector and deregulating private enterprise. Consortium Developments Ltd (CDL) was established in 1983, intending to develop up to 15 new country towns in the prosperous region around London, where housing demand was high but local planning very restrictive of developers. Each town would comprise around 5000 dwellings with social and physical infrastructure largely provided by CDL. The concept was a novel one in twentieth century Britain, where new settlements had been developed previously by philanthropic companies or by government agencies. Advised by planners associated with Milton Keynes, CDL effectively updated the Garden City–New Town tradition for the Thatcher era. However, despite pushing four proposals through the planning process, all failed. This largely reflected opposition of the government’s own party supporters, who did not want Thatcherism shaping their own areas. In the face of this, Thatcher’s ministers were ultimately unwilling to support CDL. Combined with the effects of the 1990s property slump, the volume builders withdrew and CDL was dissolved. Its failure partly reflects wider fracture lines in Thatcherism, compounded by the aggressive and very public campaigning style of its own operations which gave each proposal a very wide political resonance. Thatcherism gave way to a more restrictive planning climate in the 1990s. Paradoxically, a Labour government is now, from 2003, creating massive new opportunities for private house building and town development around London.     

Three performativities of innovation in public transport planning

The article scrutinizes planners’ stories of innovation in contemporary public transport planning in three Scandinavian contexts (Denmark, Sweden and Norway). This analysis is accomplished by adapting Judith Butler’s post-structural feminist critical theory on performativity to the planning context. This theoretical framework is used to illuminate how planning is dynamically renewed, revised and consolidated over time by the individual routine actions of planners. From this perspective, the research identifies a set of repetitive acts – as recognizing specific windows of opportunity, anticipate and respond to political signals and create arguments and means of communication and persuasion – that constitute the contemporary transformation of professional practice in relation to planning politics. This analytics of performativity reveals how professional planning practices engage with transformative capacities of reshaping, re-enacting and re-experiencing guidance for the future within a set of meanings and forms of legitimation. These findings are intended to contribute to present and future planning practice and education in Scandinavian countries and elsewhere.     

Wandel durch (Industrie) Kultur [Change through (industrial) culture]: conservation and renewal in the Ruhrgebiet

The Ruhrgebiet, the engine of Western Germany, constitutes a unique social, political and architectural landscape shaped by industry. In the 1950s, during Germany’s post‐war ‘economic miracle’, few people imagined that within 50 years, the region’s heavy industry would virtually shut down. Fewer still would have predicted that many of industry’s remaining structures would become monuments of the German nation. Effecting the transformation from industrial wasteland to European ‘Cultural Capital’ has required courage and creativity. This paper demonstrates that conservation of industry’s remains has been a creative tool for democratic and social progress, shaped as much by ‘bottom‐up’ initiatives as by ‘top‐down’ directives. Workers who took action to save their neighbourhoods and citizens who united to rescue factories sparked the democratization of conservation. In the ensuing decades, conservation created new philosophies for re‐imagining a landscape permeated with traces of industry. Ultimately, conservation became a key participant in regional planning through IBA (Internationale Bauausstellung) Emscher Park, which responded to industry’s decline with a comprehensive approach to attracting investment, providing better prospects for workers and solving social problems. In the Ruhrgebiet, conservation has not simply memorialized the past – by creating real social progress and democratizing the planning process, it has meaningfully shaped the region’s future.     

基于花园城市和城市化理论的英国新城公共服务设施规划探讨

中国正处于快速的城市化进程中,大量的居民从农村地区不断地涌入城市。这种现象导致了城市的公共服务设施供给的压力,并影响到了公共服务设施的分配问题。新兴城市公共服务设施资源的规划布局正成为解决这一问题的重要方法之一并逐渐受到人们的重视。在英国的历史中,英国政府同样曾经遭遇过中国如今面临的问题。在应对城市化进程导致的城市公共服务设施资源紧张和资源分配不均等问题的大背景下,英国产生了花园城市理论以及其后的英国新城运动。文章基于花园城市理论和城市化理论,对于英国新城的规划进行研究并试图探索其对当代中国的借鉴意义。