All Books
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...
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 o f housing: at New Earswick from 1902, Letchworth gard en c ity from...
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...
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 onto the re-planning bandwagon, there was a clear imperative to reconstruct. But Birmingham was atypical in how it went about this. The...
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...
The Skeffington Committee was appointed in 1968 to look at ways of involving the wider public in the formative stages of local development plans. It was the first concerted effort to encourage a systematic approach to resident participation in planning and the decision-making process, in...
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...
This short account of the planning of Lusaka as the new capital of Northern Rhodesia, written for its offi cial opening in 1935 as part of jubilee celebrations for King George V, was printed in a limited edition specifi cally for that event, and is now very scarce and diffi cult to obtain, but...
Rodrigo Pérez de Arce’s essay Urban Transformations and the Architecture of Additions was published during the formative stages of postmodernism, at the point where theory was becoming seriously established. Jencks’ first essays formalising the term postmodernism in architecture and the...
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...
Europe Rehoused was one of the most influential housing texts of the 1930s, and is still widely cited. Written by the housing consultant Elizabeth Denby (1894–1965) it offered a survey of the nearly two decades of social housing built across Europe since the end of World War I, with the aim of...
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...
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’...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905–83) was a British town planner, editor, and educator. These four key Tyrwhitt texts 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...
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...
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...
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...
Nishiyama Uzo-, educated as an architect between 1930 and 1933, was a key figure in Japanese urban planning. He was a prolific writer who influenced a whole generation of Japanese urban planners and his interpretations of foreign planning and local practice still influence Japanese planning...