Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century
By:
Peter Hall
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Description:
This is a history of the ideas, events and personalities that shaped the cities of the world during the twentieth century. Peter Hall shows the benevolent influence of the anarchist ideals of Reclus and Kropotkin in the work of Howard, Geddes and Lloyd Wright, which found expression in garden cities and community planning. He contrasts this with the totalitarian vision of Le Corbusier which, spurned by Mussolini and Stalin, was enthusiastically taken up by countless city authorities in Europe and America. He explores the nightmare cities of Brasilia and Chandigarh and seeks the origins of the high-rise slums and vandalized spaces that afflict the lives of so many people. Planners have become the handmaidens of business, architects the designers of spectacle: both have retreated from any active interest in real, social achievement. Meanwhile the threat to civilized life represented on the one hand by the despair and resentment of the urban underclass and on the other by uncontrolled demolition and development, remains as real and as intractable as ever. Peter Hall is author of over 20 books on planning and related subjects including "London 2000", "The World Cities" "Great Planning Disasters" and "High Tech America". He has been credited with the invention of the "urban enterprise zone" concept. He is widely known throughout the west for his contributions both to the practice and to the theory of city and regional planning.
Publisher: Blackwell*publishers
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A MAGNIFICENT HISTORY OF VARIOUS "NEW CITIES" MOVEMENTS - Peter Hall (Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley) has written many books on urban planning, and this 1988 book is a wonderful summary and history of various progressive "new cities" movements from 1880 to the present.
Hall includes chapters on such subjects as "Cities of Imagination," "Reactions to the Nineteenth-Century Slum City," "The Garden City Solution," "The Birth of Regional Planning," "The City Beautiful Movement," "The Corbusian Radiant City," "The Automobile Suburb," and more.
He begins by noting that "The really striking point is that many, though by no means all, of the early visions of the planning movement stemmed from the anarchist movement, which flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth."
Hall opines that "despite doughty competition, Ebenezer Howard (inventor of the "Garden City" concept) is the most important single character in this entire tale." He also observes that "The Stein-Wright Radburn cities are unquestionably the most important American contribution to the garden-city tradition. True, on strict criteria, like their European counterparts they fail to qualify; all three are now long since submerged in the general sprawl of suburbia, and to seek them out on the ground demands a good map and some degree of determination. But as garden suburbs, they mark perhaps the most significant advance in design beyond the standards set by Unwin and Parker."
Despite his enthusiasm, Hall is capable of objectivity: "the new towns are self-evidently good places to live and above all to grow up in; they do exist in harmony with their surrounding countryside and the sheer mindless ugliness of the worst of the old sprawl has been eliminated. But it is not quite as rich and worthy and high-minded as they hoped: a good life, but not a new civilization."
This book will be of considerable interest to persons interested in urban planning, the New Urbanism, Garden Cities, Ecocities, Village Homes, etc.
Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Not a smooth reading and only about american/british cities - This book is just a bunch of papers about planning history gathered together. Even worse, it talks only about american and english cities, what is only a fraction of it could be.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Nice book. - You should read this book with the book "Twentieth Century Architecture" and it will give you more clear impression.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Essential Planning History - A reference classic to approach with a critical eye the history of urban planning. Probably what Peter Hall is most recognized for...
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
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