Rethinking postwar planning history

Abstract

This article discusses the impact of global transnationalism on postwar planning and considers the questions planning historians should address in future research. The topics assessed are planning and cosmopolitanism, the plurality of local planning practices, the stream of transnational influences on planning, and the modalities of power. The article considers comparative and transnational methodologies, and how they can best be applied to the postwar era.

Keywords:

• postwar
• transnational

Notes on contributor

Rosemary Wakeman is Professor of History and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Fordham University.

Notes

1 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, Prologue, 7.

2 Bullock, Building the Post-war World, xi–xii.

3 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 446.

4 Saarinen, The City, vii–viii.

5 Wagenaar, Happy Cities and Public Happiness, 79–80.

6 Domhardt, The Heart of Our City.

7 Harvey, “Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographic Evils,” n.p. davidharvey.org/media/cosmopol.pdf. See also Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom.

8 Goldhagen and Legault, Anxious Modernisms, 319.

9 Crane, Mediterranean Crossroads.

10 Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities, 18, 21.

11 DeHaan, Stalinist City Planning; Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street; and Meng, Shattered Spaces.

12 Urban, Tower and Slab.

13 Ward, “Global Intelligence Corps.” See also Ward, “Re-examining the International Diffusion of Planning,” in Freestone, Urban Planning in a Changing World, 40–1.

14 Vanderbilt, Survival City; Brown, Plutopia. Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters.

15 Beauregard, “Writing Transnational Histories”; Ethington, Reiff, and Levitus, “Transnational Urbanism in the Americas.”

16 New York Times, 24 October 1963. “The City: Starting from Scratch,” Time, 93(3 July 1969).

17 Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City, 175.

18 Ibid., 241.

19 King, “Writing Transnational Planning Histories,” 5–6.

20 Ibid.

21 Ward, “Transnational Planners in a Postcolonial World.”

22 Friedman, “Global Postcolonial Moment and the American New Towns.” Shoshkes, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt.

23 Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal.

24 Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City; Sonne, Representing the State; Scott, Seeing Like a State.

25 Ryckewaert, Building the Economic Backbone of the Belgian Welfare State.

26 Peter Hall's classic Cities of Tomorrow (1988, revised 1996) is one of the best examples of this earlier, great Euro-centric planners and great ideas approach.

27 Wirka, “Social Movement”; Spain, How Women Saved the City.

28 Smith, Transnational Urbanism and Smith and Eade, Transnational Ties.

29 Benmergui, “Alliance for Progress and Housing Policy.”