Exhibitions and the Development of Modern Planning Culture

Robert Freestone, Marco Amati

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351937849
• Subtopic: Architecture General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The evolution of city planning theory and practice in the first half of the twentieth century was captured and driven by a range of exhibitionary practices in a variety of settings globally, from international expos to local public halls. The agendas of the promoters varied, but exhibitions generally drew their social legitimacy from their status as 'appropriate educative agencies of citizenship'. Bringing together a range of international case studies, this volume explores the highly visual genre of public planning exhibitions worldwide. In doing so, it provides a unique lens on the development of modern urban planning and design from the late 19th century to the present day. Focussing mainly on the first half of the 20th century, it looks in particular at historic exhibitions which sought to transform urban society's understanding of the possibilities of planning as a force for social betterment. The visuality of presentation, contemporary reactions, and outcomes for the planning profession and the community are explored to make for a unique, innovative and attractive approach to the history of planning ideas. The five major themes are the visual representation of ideas and ideologies; institutions and individuals involved; the broader context of display; and the impacts and implications for the development planning culture. With contributors including Karl Fischer, John Gold, Carola Hein, Peter Larkham, Javier Monclus, and Mark Tewdwr-Jones, the dominant intellectual paradigm further unifying the collection is planning history.

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Town Planning Exhibitions

Robert Freestone and Marco Amati

London 1910

In a summary timeline of key events in the emergence of modern urban planning, if forced to select just one iconic exhibition the choice would surely be that held in London in October 1910 in association with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Town Planning Conference. The exhibition was staged in three different locations: at the Guildhall with a display of maps and plans of London, at the RIBA headquarters hosting an extensive collection of historic plans and drawings, and at the Royal Academy’s Burlington House in Piccadilly where the main international and contemporary material assembled under the guidance of Raymond Unwin was on view. This latter exhibition was organised into mostly national galleries – British, German, American, French, Dutch, Belgian, Scandinavian, Austrian, Italian – plus a Colonial exhibit and a special room devoted to Patrick Geddes’s civic survey of Edinburgh. The official opening attracted a veritable who’s who of the modern planning movement to a showcase of world’s best practice bridging technical interest and popular appeal. There was general consensus about the standout displays: the American material dominated by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s Plan of Chicago and the German regional and town extension schemes so boldly and confidently rendered. If the conference sessions proved challenging exercises in multi-lingual communication, the exhibition provided a forum for a language that everyone could speak.

British commentators were unanimous in their praise and estimation of the importance of the exhibition. One observer T. Alwyn Lloyd (1911: 14) was so impressed by how the exhibition made ‘a direct appeal to the popular imagination in a way that no amount of discussion at conferences and meetings can attempt to do’, that he enthusiastically endorsed a whole tranche of permanent and travelling exhibitions to spread the message of town planning. For William Davidge it was ‘an object lesson of what has already been accomplished in the field of town planning’ (Davidge 1910: 775). The Architect and Contract Reporter stated that ‘If the RIBA had done nothing more than organize the Exhibition now on view … a great and beneficial work would have been accomplished’ (quoted in Moore 1921: 138). Stanley Adshead declared it ‘the best International Town Planning Exhibition which we have as yet seen’ (Adshead 1910: 182). The voluminous proceedings which included extensive documentation on the exhibition became a standard international text for many years. The Exhibition was a critical component of an obviously seminal event which is now regarded unequivocally as a pivotal moment in the internationalisation and diffusion of modern planning theory and practice (de Oliveira 2012, Hall 2002, Miller 1993, Ward 2002).

Its importance lies also as a pivotal moment in a chain of such events. Important exhibitions had immediately preceded it the same year in Berlin and Dusseldorf. More were to follow, especially in Britain where the demands and opportunities presented by the pioneering Housing, Town Planning Act 1909 were being encountered. And Patrick Geddes’s touring Cities and Town Planning Exhibition was a notable spin off (Chabard 2009).

There are also revealing stories behind the scenes. Lanchester and Unwin (1910: 734) provided a frank confession that preparations for the exhibit were far from smooth, and ‘left something to be desired in the matter of arrangement’, producing uneven results, notably with a poor showing of modern French initiatives. Adshead (1910) also felt that the Italian work on display was scrappy and candidly admitted that the British material based around garden suburbs – however interesting for international visitors – was arguably not quite up to the benchmarks of excellence evident elsewhere.

Digging deeper we find even more interesting ideological currents. Whyte (2011, 2012) and others have shown how the event was underpinned by three strategic political agendas. One was to showcase the British contribution to town planning and especially what it could offer the world in terms of garden suburb and village planning. A second was to assert the leadership of the architecture profession in practical planning matters in Britain. And a third was to represent the centrality of the RIBA as the peak professional voice of British architects. The Exhibition and the Conference were criticised in some quarters – notably by progressive surveyors and engineers – as events promoted by and for architects. The RIBA would soon leaven its claims to town planning as an essentially architectural activity from start to finish as other professions exposed this hubris (Hawtree 1981).

This single event thus conveys how the exhibition can be a rich lens on the nature, construction and development of town planning thought. The aim of this book is to capture stories from other such events that together offer new perspectives, insights and reflections into the history of and reception to town planning ideas and practices.

The Literature

Casting the net widely, the literature on exhibitions generally is incredibly rich, robust and expanding. Numerous sub-genres are evident encompassing a range of disciplinary contributions. Influential strands include the history of museums and other cultural institutions inspired by Bennett’s (1988) notion of the ‘exhibitionary complex’, studies of industrial and social exhibitions as showcases of regional and national progress (Conekin 2003, Mitchell 1989, Morton 2000, Proudfoot et al. 2000), the international expositions movement from the mid-nineteenth century (Geppert 2013, Gold and Gold 2005, Greenhalgh 1988, 2011), design and display in art museums (Greenberg et al. 1996), decoding exhibitionary practices (Macdonald and Basu 2007), and architectural and housing innovation (Gaskell 1987, Gronberg 1998). By contrast, planning exhibitions as a genre in their own right have attracted much less attention.

Exhibitions are frequently mentioned in passing in the planning literature – rivalling London 1910 for prominence would be the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in heralding the City Beautiful Movement (Rydell et al. 1993) and the New York World’s Fair of 1939 with its vision of cities and regions structured by motor vehicles (Fotsch 2001). But more forensic studies are limited. As a collective phenomenon, Meller (1995) has deduced how early exhibitions drawing on themes of urbanism and planning intersected with wider notions of world peace and global citizenship in striving to elevate the search for a better urban environment above national politics. Welter (1999) recreated Patrick Geddes Cities and Town Planning Exhibition – one of his principal ‘educative agencies of citizenship’ (Geddes 1915: 253) – which travelled through Britain, France and India in two versions into the 1920s. In revealing why this Exhibition never toured North America, Chabard (2009) reveals ideological and logistical cleavages within the ranks of early planning leaders. Geddes’s eccentricities are well known (Hysler-Rubin 2011, Meller 1990) but his great rival as exhibition aficionado Werner Hegemann proved better connected to the world of professional practice and had the greater impact in the United States and on the Continent (Collins 2000, 2005). The global revival of the exhibition as a showcase of progressive planning ideas through the 1930s after the dampeners of war and depression is captured in studies by Bokovoy (2002), Gold (1993) and Udovicki-Selb (2001), among others. The 1940s witnessed a vigorous renaissance of exhibitions varying widely in scale and so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 Town Planning Exhibitions
• 2 Imagining the Future of Cities through Exhibitions 1851–1914
• 3 The Science and Art of City Making: The Model Street at the 1904 World’s Fair
• 4 Latin American Reverberations from the Universal City Planning Exhibitions of 1910
• 5 The 1919 New Zealand Town Planning Conference and Exhibition: A Public Declaration for Town Planning
• 6 New Architecture and the Search for Modernity: Exhibiting the Planned City in 1930s Britain
• 7 The 1938 Johannesburg ‘Town Planning Exhibition and Congress’: Testament, Monument and Indictment
• 8 Promoting the New City: Ludwig Hilberseimer at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1944
• 9 Exhibiting Planning in Wartime Britain
• 10 Engagement and Exhibitionism in the Era of High Modernism: Otto Neurath and the Example of 1940s Bilston
• 11 From Town Hall to Cinema: Documentary Film as Planning Propaganda in Post-war Britain
• 12 A Model for the Nation: Exhibiting Post-war Reconstruction at the Festival of Britain 1951
• 13 Visualizing the Core of an Ideal Democratic Community: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Post-war Planning Exhibitions
• 14 Post-war Reconstruction, Planning Promotion and the Australian Government 1944–45
• 15 International Exhibitions and Urban Design Paradigms
• 16 The New York Museum of Modern Art: Engagement in Housing, Planning, and Neighbourhood Design
• 17 Berlin’s International Building Exhibitions 1957 and 1984/87
• 18 Displaying Urban Agriculture: From Garden City to Carrot City
• Index