Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century Review

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(More customer reviews)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.

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