A Theosophical Garden City: designing household life in Bombay,circa 1924

Histories of the Garden City in the colonial world have brought attention to planning professionals, colonial officials, and native elites who instituted new economic and political practices through the construction of garden cities and suburbs. Less well known is that the Theosophical Society, a worldwide heterodox religious movement, appropriated the imagery and terminology of the Garden City to imagine a novel form of suburban living and political community in late colonial South Asia. Although Theosophists were among the earliest residents of Letchworth, in 1924 the Theosophical Society created a ‘Theosophical Garden City’ on the outskirts of Bombay that bore little resemblance to British garden cities and suburbs. Formed amid growing demands in India for national independence, this Theosophical Garden City envisioned India as a federation of localities within a polycentric ‘world-empire’. Examining architectural and town plans for the Theosophical Garden City, this article argues that the creation of a Theosophical community, and the imagining of India’s future place in a global union of nations, depended less on the display of esoteric symbols in communal gathering spaces and more on the design of household life.     

The history of planning for Kowloon City

This short paper identifies from archival and published materials plans for a place called Kowloon City which had an Imperial Chinese military purpose and is now a public park (officially called ‘Kowloon Walled City Park’) after a long period of dispute over its jurisdiction. These plans were mostly produced by the colonial Hong Kong government that made the first planned attempt to clear the place of Chinese residents for a public garden in the 1930s, but this garden could only be built after the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. They testified to the fact that the City has always been planned.     

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.     

The ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’: metaphors from The Great Gatsby in planning New York

ABSTRACT

Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular: the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406 New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.     

Brazilian city planners,American city planning? New perspectives on urban planning in Rio de Janeiro, 1930–1945

This article analyses the connections between the ideas and principles of American city planning from 1920 with those articulated by Brazilian city planners in the 1930s and implemented by the administration of the City of Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil, notably during the period of the Estado Novo [The New State] from 1937 to 1945. In a period characterized by the centralization of political power and the concentration of decision‐making in the hands of the president and the state, the City of Rio de Janeiro undertook a series of restructuring projects which utilized new forms of administration and organization. This article explores the links between urban planning in Brazil and the USA that were a notable feature of these projects. It examines particular requirements set down in city plans, city planning commissions and funding for urban activities, such as ‘excess condemnation’, by focusing upon articles and books written by four Brazilian engineers and proposals put forward by the American City Planning Institute, detailed in the proceedings of the National Conference on City Planning, in the periodical, City Planning and works by affiliated authors.     

马尼拉大都会的发展与挑战

对菲律宾首都马尼拉的城市演变、现状及未来城市发展所面临的挑战进行综合介绍和分析，主要包含两部分内容：一是马尼拉城市演变的5个阶段--16世纪中期被西班牙探险航行初次发现时的马尼拉、此后三百多年的西班牙殖民统治、至1898年成立亚洲第一个共和国、再到1901-1946的美国殖民时期以及当今的马尼拉大都会；二是从贫富差距与住房问题、自然灾害和城市环境问题几个方面分析马尼拉大都会未来发展面临的挑战及对策。     

城市文化与城市精神:规划中的辩证统一

城市文化是城市的气质,是一种具有独特性、空间性和综合性的文化形式;城市精神是城市文化主流意识的凝炼。随着城市社会经济的不断发展和全球化进程的不断深化,城市文化价值日益成为引导城市发展的主动力,具有地方特质、以传统的历史文化为核心的城市文化与城市精神是一个城市发展和参与竞争的关键,在进行城市规划时应首先进行基于城市文化的城市精神概念规划,两者是相互联系的辩证统一体。     

American planning in republican China, 1911-1937

This paper argues that in China, between the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the onset of the fullfledged Chinese war of resistance (Kanzheng) against Japan in 1937, American planners and Chinese municipal experts trained in American universities initiated significant planning schemes in several Chinese cities. This influence marked a crucial change in Chinese city planning because from the mid-19th century to 1911 it had primarily been British, French or German planners who had exerted foreign influence on Chinese urban form, particularly in the treaty ports of eastern China. Three of the best examples that demonstrate this shift of emphasis to American-based ideals of municipal progress are the plans for Guangzhou (Canton) in the early 1920s, the new capital plan at Nanjing (Nanking) and the greater Shanghai plan in the late 1920s. Although some scholars have analysed the Shanghai and Nanjing plans, few have explored the ways city planning during the republican period reflects a pattern of North American influence in the reshaping of Chinese urban form. In identifying this pattern, this paper will argue that Guangzhou was a first testing ground where Chinese politicians, within a decade after the first American city planning conference of 1909, consciously tried to apply up-to-date American planning principles associated with the 'city functional', the 'city scientific' or the 'city efficient' to a Chinese city that they perceived as inefficient. There were two initial spheres of influence associated with this American connection: (1) an institutional one, in which Guangzhou planners experimented with a commission form of American municipal government which, since 1900, had become popular especially in the American west and midwest; and (2) an influence related to urban space and form, as planners widened several narrow streets of congested Guangzhou and demolished its city wall, thereby following the gospel of Americans such as Benjamin Marsh who, since 1907, had been proselytizing about the ill effects of urban congestion. Guangzhou's planning experiments in the 1920s were at the forefront of further American planning connections, manifested in four ways: (1) through the actions of largely American-trained Chinese municipal experts, who studied in the US using scholarships from the Boxer Indemnity Fund; (2) through American planning advisors, such as Henry K. Murphy, who were hired by Chinese politicians to provide direct planning assistance; (3) through the formation of professional organizations, such as the Association of Chinese and American Engineers; and (4) through publications in English and Chinese that disseminated information about city planning, urbanism and architecture to a professional audience. This paper will discuss these trends as they apply to Chinese cities of the Republican period, with particular attention to Nanjing and Guangzhou. A fuller recognition of these Chinese cities' planning histories, as well as those of others such as Xiamen (Amoy), Shenyang (Mukden) or Fuzhou (Foochow) that followed their lead, demonstrates that American planning efforts in the western Pacific were far more pervasive than has previously been assumed. Although the initiatives of Daniel Burnham and William Parsons in the Philippines after the American military victories there in 1898 are well-established, and although Walter Burley Griffin's Canberra plan of 1913 is even more fully documented, the work of American planners in China, or of Chinese planners deriving their concepts from American practices, is less well understood. This paper clarifies the historical perspective associated with these planning tendencies.     

Names,norms and forms: French and indigenous toponyms in early colonial Dakar,Senegal

Research on street naming systems in general and on colonial street names in particular is not abundant. This article examines the French colonial policy regarding street names in Dakar, as well as the accompanying colonial terminology that was applied in Dakar’s quarters. With occasional references to the pre‐colonial and the post‐colonial periods, the main focus of this article is on street names in early colonial Dakar, as they were designated by the preliminary master plan of Pinet‐Laprade in the 1860s. While residential segregation was never a stated policy on the part of the colonial authorities there, who formally fostered assimilation, it will be shown that toponyms had a key role in the alienation of the indigenous population in the city centre. As Dakar’s city centre was considered ‘European’ and a chief lieu de colonisation in West Africa, its colonial urban toponyms reflected an official memory that excluded African histories and identities. Using original historical evidence, alternative naming systems of reference to certain urban areas on the part of the Dakarois will be discussed – systems that sometimes challenged and sometimes supplemented their French counterparts.     

Book Reviews

The landscape’s continuity makes it a most efficient means for shaping the cityscape. Contrary to architecture/planning periodical historical approach, it is argued that the urban landscape’s dynamic requires a fresh outlook in order to portray its time–space linear structure. The paper examines the city of Haifa in transition from colonial to the nation‐building era through the landscape production mechanism that this article calls erascape. The investigation shows how this mechanism arises from political agenda to become a powerful agent in constructing Haifa’s socio‐cultural relations. Examining the remaking of Haifa Old City enables one to understand landscape production strategies as interplay between professionals (architects and planners), administrators and politicians operating in the transformative making of colonial and national cityscapes. Landscape production, as embedded through design knowledge and planning procedures, is examined in maps, drawings, diagrams and sketches, in official and private correspondence, in laws and regulations, and as it appears in historical photographs and exists in today’s spatial experience of the city.     

Master plans and planning commissions in the 1920s: the Australian experience

Through the 1920s in the United States, the number of cities which had appointed planning commissions or secured comprehensive master plans increased significantly. This was the era of the ‘city functional’, with planning ideology focused on goals of order, efficiency, and growth through methodologies based on scientific data analysis. Australian cities in the 1920s were amenable to this approach. Though small in population terms, they confronted similar problems of sprawl, uncoordinated infrastructure provision and traffic congestion. Leading planning advocates turned away from small area planning schemes based on British precedents towards an American-style master planning approach. In the wake of the ill-fated Sydney Regional Plan Convention (1922-6), came two notable Town Planning Commissions in Melbourne and Perth. While obviously inspired by American models, the form and functioning of these organizations reflected the influence of distinctive governmental, financial and cultural conditions.     

Perspectives in planning history: planning and the dream of a better city in a global world – reflections on Helen Meller’s ‘Imagining Culture and the City in Planning History’

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Bombay City was rocked by a series of events that undermined the systems of rule patched together over the course of the preceding century and triggered a crisis of the colonial ‘information order’ on which these were based. Saliently, these developments led to significant changes in the modes of colonial urban governance, in which a new planning agency played a key role. Integral to this shift was a reappraisal, on the part of the colonial state, of its mechanisms of information gathering and the growing recognition of the need for more knowledge about the swiftly expanding city and its rapidly diversifying population. The census of 1901 reflected, to a large extent, these new imperatives of colonial governance.     

改革开放后上海城市总体规划回顾与展望

改革开放后,上海经历了二轮经国务院批准的城市总体规划。这两轮规划始终坚持1946年《大上海都市计划》所提出的"疏解城市人口与功能、形成多心多核的城市功能结构和环状与楔形绿地结合的城市空间形态"。同时不断完善,追求更高层次的社会、经济与环境的协调和可持续发展,贯彻公共政策的规划原则和价值观,并于2005年起谋划《上海市城市总体规划中期实施评估》。在后一轮总规编制时对总体规划编制方法的完善进行了探索与实践,对"战略规划"的一些核心思想从不同角度进行了研究与思考。     

Garden city versus green town: The case of Amsterdam 1910–1935

Has the garden city movement been a failure or a success? As in many other places, the attempt to create a ‘proper’ garden city near Amsterdam failed. The main reasons were the issue of land ownership and also the vested interests of Amsterdam as a municipality. A town extension outside its borders was rejected. The growth was organized within the borders of the municipality, thus creating a Compact City. Yet, this Compact City was created ‘on garden city lines’ and resulted in what was later named a Green Town.     

Sanitizing Jakarta: decolonizing planning and kampung imaginary

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical view of the water and sanitation sector within the broader trajectory of Jakarta’s spatial development and planning. Its territorial focus is on kampungs and it traces their historical journey from the periphery of the colonial city – Batavia and its modern planning domain – to the centre of the post-independence planning regime. ‘Kampung’ is an indigenous term for rural-agricultural settlements. In the colonial period, it was used to label non-European and non-Chinese settlements in and around the city. Colonial modernity created certain stigmatizations: kampungs came to be seen as undisciplined and insanitary communities, sources of insurgency and threats to public health. But the kampung realm was also (re)produced through practices of segregation within the colonial planning system. The imaginaries of colonial modernity linger on within today’s planning practices, resulting in a persistent failure to improve the environmental health of kampungs and the city as a whole. Postcolonial kampungs remain as a cosmopolitan enclave open to different cultures and socio-political contestations. The article argues that, given the kampung’s resilience in varying socio-ecological conditions, urban kampungs should be seen not as a problem, but as an opportunity for new planning approaches.     

Dabaodao: the planning,development, and transformation of a Chinese (German) neighbourhood

Dabaodao is an old city district located in the heart of the historical centre of Qingdao (north-eastern China). It was created over 100 years ago as a segregated ‘Chinese town’ under German colonial rule. This article embarks upon a journey into the past, reviewing the continuity and change of Dabaodao and its courtyard-style houses known as Liyuan over last century of socio-political turmoil. It discusses how they have evolved and transformed under different city administrations, beginning from the early colonial years, to the Republican era, the Maoist years, all the way into the reform period. Specifically, the article illustrates how city-planning, laws, and regulations as well as a general urban development ideology during one time period conditioned and shaped those of following periods, eventually turning Dabaodao into what it is today: a dilapidated and poor inner-city neighbourhood with an uncertain future whose historical significance and preservation value remains highly contested and under debate. This article reviews colonial city planning and its impacts in Qingdao, an under-represented city in the English language literature on colonial China; moreover, the article links Dabaodao’s diverse history to current contestations over urban renewal, hereby engaging the complex issue of using the past in the present.     

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.     

La Plata: an advanced nineteenth century new town with ancient roots

La Plata, the new capital of the Buenos Aires province was founded as a descendant of the rich and homogeneous family of new towns based on the Spanish American model. The Spaniards established hundreds of settlements in America according to the early rules that were soon officially acknowledged and imposed by the Crown. King Philip II established in 1573 his ‘Ordinances concerning discoveries, settlements and pacification’. This system worked for more than four centuries because the Spanish American countries accepted the colonial rules long after their independence. La Plata offered one of the last opportunities for the development of these ideas. The urban theories which were originated during the nineteenth century left clear traces in La Plata's layout. La Plata became one of the first cases in which the nineteenth century ‘progressist model’ – the hygienic city, as defined by Françoise Choay – was adopted and actually built. The fortunate combination of the two models turned La Plata, its qualities and elements into a complex and unique example in urban history.     

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.