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THE WHAT, WHY, AND HOW OF PLANNING HISTORY
Carola Hein
Planning is a complex discipline, with more than one body of terminology, multiple interpretations, and manifold applications through space and over time, and historians have commented on it from a variety of perspectives. Urban planning, city planning, town planning, urban designâpractitioners and scholars working in English use numerous terms to describe the design and regulation of spaces, their physical form, and their use, function, and impact. Other languages and traditions further describe and categorize these activities in various and often diverging ways. The variety of terms and concepts used to describe planning history and historiographyâcaptured in this book and illustrated in a word cloudâexemplifies the complexity of the topic and the multiplicity of approaches and disciplines (Figure 1.1). As diverse and multiple are the actors that contribute to it and the methodologies and the tools they use. Politicians, economists, planners, and urban designers have shaped physical spaces through many kinds of interventions, considering planning variously as an aesthetic, economic, political, or even engineering endeavor. Different planning approaches can coexist in a single city: whereas the design of ports can be the result of economic needs and engineering planning, the design of a representative government district might be the result of political interests and aesthetic planning, and revitalization of a former industrial site may focus on social needs and multifunctional use. Planning also varies in different national and cultural contexts, from Soviet-era five-year plans that translated into spatial development, to building plans from social engineers that resulted in urban forms, to City Beautiful-type New Urbanism. These contexts shape planning practice, as well as planning education and planning history.
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The different terms and disciplines are further complicated by change over time. The design of urban form has a much longer history than modern planning, including the four-thousand-year history of the Imperial Chinese cities, the plans of Hippodamus of Milet for Greek cities, the planned cities of the Mayas, Renaissance and Baroque planning, or the Law of the Indies. In all of these cases, national or local leaders put extensive funds and manpower into carrying out the plans. Many of these earlier interventions are still visible in our cities. They continue to shape practice in multiple ways, through governance structures or planning cultures, through inherent path dependencies of institutions or laws and regulations, as formal references, or as frameworks for design, transformation, and preservation. More concretely, multiple cities have copied them, and professional planners of later years have learned and borrowed from them.
In the late 19th century, one form of planning emerged as a discipline in England, continental Europe, and the United States. It was conceived as a rational, modernist pursuit for societal improvement in response to the urban ills produced by the industrial revolution. Planning practitioners tried to respond to rapidly transforming cities, to new forms of production and consumption, to uncontrolled population growth, and to new types of transportation and communication. In short, planning targeted hygiene, housing, and transportation. As industrialization and colonial empires spread, various models of planning followed colonial and postcolonial geographies of power, political allegiances, corporate interests, and professional networks of planners. The global spread of Ebenezer Howardâs 1902 garden city concept before World War I stands as an example, with German, French Japanese, or Russian writers making early references to Howardâs schemata and fully translating his work into their languages (Figures 1.2, 7.2, 11.3). The diffusion of these concepts has continued, with their translations into Czech, Polish, Chinese, or Arabic, opening up new research possibilities on border-crossing planning concepts.
The discipline and focus of planning has shifted in tune with political and economic developments as well as societal changes across the decades. Today, planning is primarily a forward-looking discipline, in which past developments and approaches play a limited but changing role. Over time, some architects and planners have looked to the past as a toolbox, while others cite prior plans only in passing, or ignore them altogether.
This change is also reflected in planning education. A brief look at curricula and their change over time indicates that planning schools increasingly prefer to teach planning theory rather than planning history, and most planning schools do not train planning historians. But discerning what planning is, and what the city is in time and place, planning history builds awareness of diverse ideological and theoretical positions. It also allows for new approaches to emerge that challenge ideas of modernity in urban form and function, and that call into question concepts of planning and representations of space.
Acknowledging these dynamics and their historical development, the Handbook starts with the assumption that planning is a flexible system rather than a fixed one. Taking a networked, cross-cultural, balanced approach, and writing from different vantage points, the Handbook explores spatial traditions and cultural landscapesâimagine folding and unfolding the world anew, as in the Dymaxion map made by the American architect Buckminster Fuller.
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Figure 1.2 The global spread of the garden city by Ebenezer Howard through time. Diagrams, 1, 2, 3 and 5, originally published in English, are shown here with their translations into German, French, Japanese, Czech, and Russian.
Source: from top line, left to right: Top line: Diagram No. 1, The Three Magnets in: Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd. 1898; Diagram No. 3, translated into Japanese in: NaimushĆ ChihĆkyoku, Denentoshi, Tokyo: Hakubunkan, Meiji 40 1907: Diagram No. 3, translated into Czech, in: Hruza, JirĂ, StavitelĂ© mest, Praha: Agora, 2011; Diagram No. 3, in: Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd. 1898. Second line: Diagram No. 2, translated into Czech, in: Hruza, JirĂ, StavitelĂ© mest, Praha: Agora, 2011; Diagram No. 3, translated by Alexander Block into Russian: in Goroda Budushavo , St. Petersburg, 1911. Center: Diagram No. 7, in: Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd. 1898. Third line: Diagram No. 2, GartenstĂ€dte in Sicht translated into German by Maria Wallroth-Unterlip, Jena: E Diederichs, 1907; Diagram No. 3, GartenstĂ€dte in Sicht translated into German by Maria Wallroth-Unterlip, Jena: E Diederichs, 1907. Bottom line: Diagram No. 2, in: Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd. 1898; Diagram No. 2, translated into Japanese in: NaimushĆ ChihĆkyoku, Denentoshi, Tokyo: Hakubunkan, Meiji 40 1907; Diagram No. 5, translated into Japanese in: âNishiyama UzĆ, âThe Structure of the Base of Life,â Kenchikugaku kenkyĆ« no. 110+111 (1942). Reprinted in Nishiyama UzĆ, ChiikikĆ«kanron, Tokyo: KeisĆ shobĆ, 1968: Diagram No. 5, in: Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1922.
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The Handbook further posits that planning history is an interdisciplinary field with contributions from multiple disciplines. Urban historians, economic historians, social historians, architectural historians, and historians of landscape and the environment have all tackled questions of plans and planning, including housing, construction, local government, social policy, utopianism, urban form, and so forth, as part of larger research projects. All of these fields are well established, with their own journals, conferences, and major publications, and they can advance research in the field of planning history. Given the existence of these fields, what then is the particularity and raison dâĂȘtre of planning history as a field, with specialized journals focused on histories of planning, plans, and planners, or on the history of city and regional planning, particularly in the Americas, as stated respectively in the mission statements of Planning Perspectives, or the Journal of Planning History? Why do we need planning history? And, how should it be done? This publication is conceived as a foundational publication for students from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as academics and professionals from around the world to understand the historical origins, the methodological practices, and the academic output of planning history.
What Is Planning History?
This handbook maps the range of what we mean by planning history. Some authors in this handbook define planning history as describing the formal, aesthetic appearance of the built environment, taking an architectural or urban design approach. For others, planning history comes out of the social sciences, and for yet other scholars it is the focus of urban geography, or is situated in political, social, and economic histories.
Planning History as a field has existed since the 1970s, and several institutions and journals focus on it, but this handbook is the first to provide a foundation for research in the field. It complements wide-ranging English-language books like Peter Hallâs seminal Cities of Tomorrow (Hall, 1988 [1996, 2014]). While being one of the first books to explore the history of planning, and its theory and practice, Hallâs work did not reflect on the field of planning history itself. Several readers present original texts of 19th- and 20th-century planning (LeGates and Stout, 2003; Birch, 2008; Larice and Macdonald, 2012; Wegener, Button, and Nijkamp, 2007). Broader questions of global planning cultures, as tackled in other works, also include reflections on historical trajectories and their relations to specific national and local traditions (Sanyal, 2005). But the Handbook is very different, composed of new and original work by leading scholars in the field, including pieces that will themselves become classics.
The Handbook first establishes the premises and achievements of interdisciplinary and international planning history, and the key players and institutions. It then goes beyond this established narrative by exploring new methodological, theoretical, and typological approaches. It posits that a wider range of narratives is important to the rewriting, rethinking, and reorienting of planning history itself. If Sub-Saharan African planning, for instance, has largely been left out of the canon of planning history, a more expansive understanding of these histories can prove transformative (Silva, 2015). Such a rethinking also involves acknowledging the places and languages from which planning history is written, and questioning underlying premises. It acknowledges the extensive historiography of planning, and that much of the important writing on planning history came out of England and the US first. It also emphasizes that these are in the end regional or national stories that need to be paralleled with other approaches guided by different language patterns and by different political, economic, social, and cultural approaches to planning. Reflecting on the multiple planning histories and historiographies of Southeast Asia and South Asia, for example, requires that authors understand planning in relation to the transformation of formality as an expression of state power. The Handbook sets the stage for expanding scholarship, encouraging scholars to ask what connections have remained unwritten, what networks unconsidered.
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The Handbook adds new perspectives to planning history. It builds on recent writing that has aimed to overcome the limitations of both discipline and geography. Research in planning history, including research by some of the authors of this book, has started to address the challenges of planning history writing, including the need to overcome national stories, and to go beyond empirical and narrative-driven research to develop theories (Ward et al., 2011; Nasr and Volait, 2003; Hein, 2014). While such an approach cannot be comprehensive, this handbook at least models new global planning histories, giving insights into different approaches, geographical patterns, languages, and principles. It aims to further open up the parallel worlds of academic planning history in different disciplines, and to facilitate the emergence of collective languages, terminologies, methodologies, and theories. A diversity of approaches enriches a discussion of planning history. It can also throw into relief the disciplinary logics involved in writing about planning.
Why Planning History?
Planning history helps us to understand planningâs past influence on our cities, regions, and nations, and to imagine the future of planning as a professional practice, as the past performance of the discipline is challenged and global challenges require comprehensive new measures. Planning has been called upon since the mid-19th century to propose interventions that would channel future development based on calculations, assumptions, and formal criteria from the past. Planners have taken up this complex challenge, often with the best of intentions. They have worked with national governments and local elites, occasionally involving civic society. They have responded to the needs of expanding cities and of transforming nations. They have provided new infrastructure and identified functional zones. They have projected urban futures in times of war and disaster as well as peace. They work to integrate existing (planned) spaces and established (planning) cultures into their interventions. At a time when informal urbanism is becoming more prominent, planning history provides an opportunity to understand the motivations for planned interventions and serve as a foundation for future intervention.
As a means to better understand the role of planning in the historical transformation of cities and regions, planning history can also help us understand the downsides or shortcomings of historic planning practice and the needs for novel approaches. For example, in some areas of the world, planning has created more economic, social, or ethnic inequalities rather than solving them, and a close analysis can help understand the reasons for these shortcomings. In other areas, attempts to undo former colonial planning practice can benefit from a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of colonial planning practice, ranging from legal practices to aesthetic and symbolic interactions. Furthermore, the emergence of informal settlements that in some areas of the world are more extensive than planned ones raises questions about the necessary flexibility of planning and the changing intersection between planned spaces and informal urban development. Many interventions have simply failed, or have been too inflexible to accommodate urban change. In short, not all blueprints established to guide urban development have succeeded.
Planning has shaped our environment extensively but it has also faced extensive criticismâand that at a time when it may be most needed. Over the last decade, cities and regions around the world have been facing increased challenges ranging from climate change and global water rise to migration and population growth, and comprehensive solutions are needed to create resilient systems. Planning history can be an important and valuable tool for conceptualizing resilient planning systems for the future, speaking to the challenges of the future, and integrating lessons from ...
