Making Cities Great Again

2005

Journal of Historical Geography, 1982

the handmaiden of private property interests. At the end of the book Sutcliffe points out that town planning provided a resolution of public and private interests that had counterrevolutionary implications : The years 1890-1914 were a time of growing social tensions in which the idea ofrationalizing the structure of cities acquired an unprecedented appeal. If lower rents, better housing and richer community facilities could remove the need for a major redistribution of income or wealth, then urban planning had a great deal to offer the middle and upper classes in addition to the simple creation of a pleasant urban environment. This is a provocative statement and an antidote to the complacency of much planning history but although implied in parts of the main text it remains a hypothesis tagged on to the end of the study not a conclusion to it. The issues Sutcliffe raises here about social and ideological control are clearly central to an adequate understanding of town planning and need to be argued through with close attention to particular planning projects, to details of economic and social developments and also to the current theoretical debate among historians on bourgeois hegemony. The theoretical implications of Sutcliffe's book are considerable, particularly on the question of the role of the State, but it is for others to pursue them. Sutcliffe's only theorizing-on the spread of planning ideas-is a mixture of art criticism, psychology and economic history and is the least convincing part of the book. But it did yield two delightfully absurd examples of international influence: the Teutonic turrets of Hampstead Garden Suburb and the "Beautify Bolton" movement. The originality of Sutcliffe's study is its international perspective. Its strength is a lucid and scrupulously researched reconstruction of the mentality of the early movement and here the author conveys something of the excitement of town planning before disenchantment and cynicism set in.

Journal of Urban History, 2018

Urban Studies , 2018

Urbanities-Journal of Urban Ethnography, 2017

Journal of Urban History, 2014

One decade into the twenty-first century, the present and future of the city is a great concern for scholars, policy makers, and citizens alike. The planet's urban condition evokes both anxiety and promise. Will the city of the future be an engine of deepening democracy and prosperity or marked by stark poverty and exclusion? With over 50 percent of the earth's population now living in cities, returning to the question of how best to understand, manage, and reimagine urban areas seems to be long in the making.

Planning Perspectives, 2012

At the end of the 1930s, Americans interested in the fates and futures of their cities had the opportunity to consider two new efforts to summarize urban problems and propose solutions. The first was Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy, published in 1937 under the auspices of the National Resources Board. The second was The City, a film sponsored by the American Institute of Planners for showing at the New York world's fair in 1939. The report and the film arose out of different analytical traditions, the first from the approach that embedded urban planning within a larger field of social science and policy making and the second from the physical planning and design tradition that had marked planning practice in the first third of the twentieth century. This article considers the origins of the two texts, compares their topical coverage and prescriptions for change, and argues that their differences encapsulated a deep tension that has continued to be manifest within urban planning in the United States into the present century.

2008

20th Century New Towns. Archetypes and Uncertainties. Conference Proceedings. , 2014

Since the early twentieth century, the history of the city and modern urbanism was particularly marked by ideas and projects for new cities with a strong utopian and paradigmatic character: - prototypes, unsuccessful or partially implemented, which unquestionably influenced the culture and practices of urban planning and architecture, achieving still to sensitize the collective imagination over the image of the cities of the future; - primordial archetypes, acting as true testimonies of concepts, intentions or ways to devise new dimensions and features of the urban environment and alternative and revolutionary ways to understand how would be the city of the future generations. The evolutionary path of these ideas or projects culminates, and in certain sense ends, with the new vanguards of the 50’s and 60’s, where the preconized concepts of town (unlimited) point to the dissolution of the architectural object and of the architecture itself. Becoming the latter and associated city models as the ultimate uncertainties, almost consecrating the other uncertainties that come together in an attempt to understand the phenomena and new trends of the real city. After these expressions, the visionary interest in the new cities of the future starts to fade, due most probably to a growing concern to understand the issues and the effects of the great dynamism of urbanization and the process of metropolis creation. Eventually, the analysis of this path will provide an opportunity to reinforce the importance and the contribute of ideas and major projects, that even today are considered as the most paradigmatic of the twentieth century, particularly those planned in the 20’s and 30’s. The value of these contributions as a methodological reference and a research base becomes even more evident under the latest developments, testing new urban models and planning new cities in emerging countries, which seem to point a return to the search of new visions and solutions for the city of the future. Keywords: New Towns, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, City Design.