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The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) comprised a core group of experts on urbanism, design, economics, housing, and planning throughout its ten years of advocacy and implementation from 1923 to 1933. A lesser-known subsequent organization, the Regional Development Council of America (RDCA), was founded twenty-five years later in 1948 in recognition of the 50th anniversary of Howard's To-morrow. Primed for a postwar development surge, the RDCA's ambitious agenda ranged from federal planning to urban renewal to community building for 'productive defense'. This study applies a comparative analysis of archival materials, including review of efforts to sustain the RPAA mission during the bridging period when neither organization was active. While the RDCA only functioned for four years, the core membership consistently advocated for the regional city as the solution to a wide range of postwar challenges at the federal, state, and local levels. In doing so, their strategies addressed the increased professionalization and institutionalization of planning. At the same time, their sustained focus on communitarian regionalism diverged from the growing emphasis on economic development through expansionism that came to dominate the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the initiative of Clarence S. Stein, they founded the Regional Planning Association of America in 1923. Following the preliminary studies of Benton MacKaye, Henry Wright pioneered in developing the basic conception for the first state plan put forward by any public body in America; that of the New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission, of which Clarence Stein was chairman. This is the story of the Regional Planning Association of America: of its active leadership in the development of a new background in the fields of housing, city building and regional planning; of its dormant period during which its past thinking formed the basis for much forward moving activity; and finally of the reasons why it is now being revitalized and rejuvenated. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the American-Yugoslav Project in Regional and Urban Planning Studies (AYP) to explore the Ford Foundation's role in the international circulation of urban planning expertise during the Cold War. In operation in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1966–1976, AYP was a foundation-funded collaboration between Ljubljana's Urban Planning Institute of SR Slovenia and a succession of American universities: Cornell, Wayne State, and Johns Hopkins. Its goal was to bring the American regional planning expertise to Yugoslavia and Europe. Using the lens of network-building, the article highlights the geopolitical motivations of Ford's presence in socialist Yugoslavia before tracing the professional trajectories of AYP's founding members, American geographer Jack C. Fisher and the Slovenian architect Vladimir Braco Mušič. It then analyzes the project as an exemplary 'networking instrument' that connected numerous urban planners across Europe, in turn facilitating the transfer of American cybernetic techniques to Yugoslavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The General Urban Development Plan for Lourenço Marques (today Maputo) was approved on 25th April 1955. Coordinated by architect João Aguiar, director of the Colonial Planning Office. it was developed based on the first urban plan for the city, which had been drawn up by Joaquim José Machado and António José de Araújo in 1887. A further new Master Plan for Lourenço Marques was drawn up between 1967 and 1969. This new one was the last before Mozambique gained independence in 1975 and it was drafted by a specialist team coordinated by the engineer and urbanist Mário de Azevedo. The orientations applied in Aguiar's Urban Plan were quite distinct from those of Azevedo's Master Plan. The innovative element was that it opposed the 'conception of a city closed in on itself, limited in size and structure'. Azevedo's plan furthered a regional interpretation of the territory and placed the emphasis on the provision of an entire transport infrastructure network by land, sea, and air. This paper seeks to throw light on the evolution of Portuguese urbanism in the Portuguese African colonies in the last years of colonization with a view to highlighting the different approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By revisiting its history from 1870 down to the present, this essay examines the role played by the figure of the parkway – both as idea and as object – in the urban development of the New York metropolitan area. It is the 'Odyssey' that interests us here: from the emergence of the Brooklyn parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, to the invention as a total project of the first modern parkway along the Bronx river, from the deployment of a system of regional parkways planned by Robert Moses in the 1930s to its obliteration in the face of the prominent development of highways, followed by the first attempts to rehabilitate historic parkways in the 1970s, when the city was going through a major crisis. Today, the renewed interest of designers and historians has made the parkway an important part of the heritage of urban planning, confronted with major projects and operations that mobilize different scales, uses and disciplines, between conflicting urban policies and temporal shifts. By looking back on its past and projecting its future, the inventory of the New York Parkway history provides valuable lessons with regard to the global changes affecting the contemporary city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how governmental power in the emerging Danish welfare system operated through transformations to the urban geography. The focus is on two concrete cases, namely two regional plans for the Greater Aarhus Area published in 1954 and 1966. By functionally dividing the city into spaces for work, housing, consumption, transportation and recreation, these plans aimed to knit certain behavioural patterns into the everyday life of the urban dwellers and thereby promote the becoming of a particular social order and subjects. This demonstrates how the emerging welfare state worked proactively in these decades, reconfiguring urban space in the nexus between welfare, modernism and affluence. Moreover, the article addresses the outcome of the plans, seeking to explain their unsuccessful trajectory by approaching them at the intersection of the local, national and transnational. In order to approach the complex relationship between welfare and urban space, the article proposes 'welfare geography' as the primary analytical category. Bridging perspectives from governmentality-studies and critical human geography, this category is designed to study how welfare as a 'dispositif' is geographically assembled from multiple perspectives, comprising planned, imagined, material as well as lived dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The green belt, without question the most well-known and influential legacy of town and country planning in the UK, continues to attract interest from a wide range of interested parties – from those eager to maintain the protection it offers to the countryside, to others more concerned at the negative impacts it is argued to have on housing supply and consequently prices. In this paper we explore how the arguments for a green belt around a particular city in the UK – Liverpool – were built up over the middle years of the twentieth century, in particular through three important (sub-)regional plans. Analysis of those plans is situated within national policy and nationwide rhetoric to illustrate how perfectly justifiable arguments about the need to limit urban sprawl "baked in" resentment and opposition to much-needed housing growth. A situation which, as the final section of the paper briefly reflects upon, not only contributed to the wide-scale construction of high-rise flats in the city from the 1950s onwards, but continues to resonate today through the objections lodged against attempts to enhance the spatial footprint of the city through development on the green belt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 AESOP conference took place in Venice, on 9–13 of July. This year's conference consisted of five intensive days that included more than 100 different panels, which consisted of thematic and special sessions, roundtables, discussions and poster presentations. Overall, more than 1000 scholars attended the 2019 AESOP, representing almost 100 different institutions word wide. The 2019 conference was overall a stimulating and intriguing event, which was further enhanced by the city of Venice, the chosen venues and the evident organization. One could only hope that future conferences will continue to embrace the same level, depth and diversity of topics, while encouraging a wider and more critical approach to the question of planning history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial regimes used urban planning regulations as a tool to control and dominate other people and natural resources. Since the beginning of the past century, Palestine represented a good example of where urban planning regulations played a major role in urban transformation and development. The Israeli regime has been using old regional plans that were prepared by the British Mandate, and issued many others to achieve its aim of establishing settlements and dominating the West Bank. Consequently, this study explores how urban planning regulations can become a tool for controlling and dominating people and natural resources. This study investigated how these tools were used by controlling authority during the past century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in 1945, Pedro Bidagor, the National Chief of Urban Planning in Spain, attempted to replicate the British regional urban model based on Abercrombie’s proposals of the County of London Plan and the Greater London Plan. The Greater Valencia Administrative Corporation, with its supramunicipal approach, was the principal representative of this urbanistic transposition. This article analyses the transmission of British planning ideas and practices in the years following the Spanish post-war period, and the important role that the architect Pedro Muguruza – key figure in early Francoism – played in it. The study also demonstrates the influence that the contemporary British urban models based on neighbourhood units had for the satellite town centres projected in Valencia (Burjasot and Manises, 1952). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several scholars, including Pierre-Yves Saunier and Renaud Payre, have studied how the members of the various networks of the ‘urban internationale’ attempted to overcome professional and political cleavages throughout the twentieth century. In contrast, only a few scholars have scrutinized the ways in which international professional institutions sought to prevail over interlingual difficulties. Although various institutions restricted communication to English, French, and German, many members had only a limited command of foreign languages; additionally, amateur interpreters further impeded multilingual conversation. Resulting language difficulties worsened professional and political conflicts within the urban internationale. Charting the attempts of the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning (IFHTP) to establish an international notation of town plans and an interlingual glossary for urban planning, this essay studies attempts of the urban internationale to facilitate communication across borders during the interwar era. Through the example of the IFHTP, this article studies how planners within this international network organized transborder expert cooperation. It focuses on the debates surrounding the creation of a notation system and a glossary, designed to facilitate communication between planners from Western industrial societies while largely excluding connections to the Colonies and other parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Finland the construction of post-war neighbourhoods started in 1950, but its ideological background was in the planning of the 1940s. As has been shown, the principles of Anglo-American neighbourhood unit planning and regional planning influence the structural principles that were adopted for neighbourhood units. This paper presents another narrative for the period by analysing the work of the architect Alvar Aalto, who was a pioneer of Finnish regional planning and was significantly active in community planning. After having established good relations with Finnish industry, he got the chance to develop his own community planning principles. They became close to the principles of neighbourhood unit planning but, at the same time, were personal and extended beyond them. This paper examines in closer detail three of Aalto's plans and the way he combined planning and building design. In this way it is possible to better understand the ideas of the 1940s and the importance of Finnish industry during this time. Aalto's activity during the 1940s also explains his success in later decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A number of studies explore the urban structure of the city of Tehran; however, little has been done in regard to its interconnectivity with the surrounding settlements and current challenges at the regional scale. This article investigates the making and current unsustainable condition of the Tehran-Karaj Urban Region arguing that it took shape passively in the absence of any structural framework. To tackle these problems, it is essential to formulate a regional sustainable comprehensive plan, one in which the interrelatedness across the entire region is observed, and which takes appropriate account of current international understandings regarding sustainable urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over a period of three decades, from 1928 to 1959, the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) formed an unconventional working team and a complex laboratory of progressive ideas for designing the city. During the founding years of the organization and the transatlantic emigration of many of its major figures during the second half of the 1930s, a profound engagement with the most important trends in the European and North American debates on planning had become the critical foundation for their common task. The organization's consequent basic convictions and demands summed up the most effective maxims of the discipline since the turn of the century. Officially, CIAM tried to distinguish itself from traditional urban planning and instead advocated modern urban planning as the antithesis to everything that existed previously. Seen from a historical perspective, however, numerous points of connection – in particular to the garden city movement – become very clear. The various members of CIAM were deeply influenced ideologically by Ebenezer Howard's visions for urbanism. Personal contact to representatives of the garden city movement, active involvement in its institutions, and broad implementation of Howard's ideas in the context of European and North American planning led CIAM from the analysis of the functions of the existing city to a comprehensive design of the modern city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines commitment to the regional development of London as it emerged among individuals and groups interested in urban planning in the early twentieth century. Following a brief account of growth and reform in the capital during the nineteenth century, this article focuses on the development of debates about planning the metropolis in the first two decades of the century, exploring practical initiatives such as the Town Planning Conference held in 1910 and the production of The London Society's Development Plan for Greater London during the years of the First World War. London's associational culture was central in generating and hosting discussions about the future of the city during this period and the article provides an indication of the extent of overlapping memberships between groups such as the Royal Institute of British Architects, The London Society and the Town Planning Institute. In conclusion, this article suggests that the regional imagination, central to the later development of planning, was clearly visible in the programme of work undertaken during the First World War and that associational networks were an important part of early professionalization in planning in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses contemporary sources to trace the recurrent ways in which the British planning movement has drawn on its German equivalent from the early twentieth century to the present day. As with most such European links, the resultant learning has varied. In some cases British references to German planning have been merely to inform or more generally to inspire emulation or occasionally avoidance. But often the learning has provided specific ideas, practices or techniques that have been directly adopted or more usually hybridised or synthesised into the British planning repertoire. German influences have been apparent in aspects of British planning such as land use zoning, city extension, regional planning, housing design, motorways, pedestrianisation, traffic calming and sustainable eco-suburbs. What, however, has made the British planning movement's long-term and mainly admiring engagement with German planning so intriguing is that it has evolved alongside major conflicts and long term suspicion of the German nation itself. The prevailing popular and political imagination within Britain has seen Germany as an especially problematic country from which to learn, more so than, for example, the USA or Scandinavia. This makes British planning's German connection an instructive case study of cross-national learning and lesson-drawing and the factors shaping these processes. It shows the limitations of more conventional conceptualisations of them as rational searches for 'good practice'. This article shows that they also must be seen as explorations in imaginative geography, concerned with real places, ideas and practices, but viewed through particularly powerful ideological and cultural lenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing upon a period during which the planning discipline emerged and was consolidated in Latin America from the 1920s through the 1950s, this article aims to identify some of the impulses behind the widening of the scope of planning activities undertaken by planners of capital cities, from the local and urban to the regional and territorial. The author uses a comparative perspective to analyze this tendency toward the enlargement of the territorial extent of the plan, interpreting it as part of the process through which Latin America's urban modernization proceeded while also relating it to the epistemological and professional shift from urbanismo towards planificacion and planejamento. While factors such as the emergence of planning offices in some capital cities and the emergence of the first courses in planning in university curricula are considered, the article focuses mainly on the the approaches of pioneers in Latin American planning to this transition, in particular Carlos Contreras and Hannes Meyer in Mexico City, Carlos della Paolera in Buenos Aires, Karl Brunner in Bogota and Santiago de Chile, and Maurice Rotival in Caracas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A member of the Regional Planning Association of America and architect on groundbreaking projects such as Sunnyside and Radburn, Henry Wright affirmed a communitarian regionalism that advocated new town development in a balanced region as an alternative to sprawling suburbs and congested cities. In his collaborative designs with Clarence Stein, he explored efficiency, aesthetics and quality of life issues, integrating superblock, hierarchical street systems, clustered housing, mixed uses and connected park systems. Yet Wright's subsequent adaptation of the Radburn idea offered a more complex, urban vision than the greenfield, suburban alternative. Reviewing archival material, journal articles from the period and more recent assessments of Radburn, this paper is a comparative study of Wright's interpretation of the regional city. Examination of this relatively little-known alternative vision offers new insights into the planned community and communitarian regionalism, which are of particular relevance given renewed interest in these concepts, most notably among the new urbanists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban planning in many Western cities in the period 1945–1970 has been defined as modernist. Although this is generally true, it is an oversimplification. This paper presents a more complete picture by identifying urban ideal images in the public debate in Rotterdam in 1946 and comparing them with popular international ideas about the ideal city at the time. Several groups of participants are identified on the basis of their urban ideal images. Both within and between these groups there was great variation in the number and character of modernist elements used, derived from various international urban developers and as a result of the differences between their urban ideal images. It seems, however, that these images did not influence the final plans. Had the planning authorities been aware of these ideal images, they could have not only improved the quality of their urban planning, but also increased public support for their plans. In order to extend the knowledge about urban modernist post-war planning, this paper identifies different urban ideal images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a century, town and country planning has been an important field of public endeavour. Now more commonly known as urban and regional or urban and rural planning, its names have recognized its concern for non-built-up as much as built-up areas; i.e. the countryside. Notwithstanding, little effort was expended there until about half way through the century. This has changed. Rural planning has burgeoned, barely reflected, however, within planning history in Australia. This article addresses this by examining how land-use planning for the countryside has evolved in South Australia since the introduction of the modern form of statutory planning in 1967. It traces the evolution of statutory policy and how it has been informed by concepts such as nature conservation, landscape maintenance, environmental protection and ecological sustainability. It underlines the tensions inherent in a system created primarily to deal with the slower changing urban conglomerate of built form when applied to the countryside where the dynamism of the seasons requires an ongoing land management approach. Experiments in policy planning and legislation are examined and it is concluded that, as in urban planning, ideas of innovation and diffusion are valid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development control was not an original feature of British statutory planning as first enacted in 1909. It was conceived from expediency as builders and others sought indemnity for their development on the adoption of schemes. 'Interim development control', as it came to be known, grew in extent and complexity in the inter-war period as more and more of the country was covered by resolutions to prepare schemes, yet few were approved and adopted. During this period, many of the administrative processes of development control took shape, as did its language; indeed much of the practice of this period survived the 1947 Act. Despite its being regarded as the foundation of British planning, in fact it made few changes to the statutory processes of development control. Just as important was a little known piece of legislation enacted in 1943, in which the control of development was extended to the whole of the country. However, throughout this period the practice of development control was scarcely noted in higher professional circles, and its practitioners were treated with scant respect. For this reason, development control may with justification be called 'the child that came in from the cold'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]