Undertows and evolutions

The 20th Biennial IPHS conference, held in Hong Kong during early July 2024, serves as a timely opportunity to appraise the contemporary condition of Planning History as a distinct branch of urban and historical study. The 2024 Hong Kong event, for many reasons, was timely; it is now fifty years since the establishment of the History of Planning Group,¹ soon to be renamed the Planning History Group and later the International Planning History Society.

During the past decades, akin to other intellectual domains, Planning History has evolved to embrace new themes, ideologies, processes, and methodologies. But, whereas in prior decades the demography of the Planning History community comprised a balanced mix of persons trained in Architecture, Geography, Planning, and History (Social, Urban, and Art), what is now apparent is the dearth of historians that are engaging with the discipline. Less than 5% of all abstracts submitted to the convenors of the 2024 IPHS conference emanated from persons employed by History schools.

From the 1970s to the present day, a fundamental strength of Planning History has been its capacity to investigate and explain past urban environmental occurrences (in settlements and countries) skilfully, to explore a range of urban-based themes, e.g. public health, housing, and so forth, and to show how urban design progressions aligned with societal dynamics during particular historical epochs. Accordingly, since the early 1970s numerous investigative approaches have been incorporated into Planning History’s sphere of working. As an upshot, not only has Planning History become a very broad church for urban thinking, but it has evolved in a manner whereby those who practice it seek to do much more than just describe urban morphology. Against the backdrop of the historian Anthony Sutcliffe remarking that ‘planning history has been around as long as planning’,² historians have been inspired to play a critical role in the discipline’s development. In particular, they have informed ways in which the urban past can be approached, and how past phenomenon concerning urban culture, governance, and design can be rationalized from a planning perspective.³ They, among other things, have informed too about how time and Zeitgeist act as agency upon the planning process.

The vital input of historians to Planning History was laid bare by Prof. Laura Kolbe (University of Helsinki) during her keynote paper at the 15th International Planning History Society Conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil.⁴ As an opening statement for her lecture, Kolbe informed that historians have supplied windows to help investigate and explain societal metamorphosis, and its relationship to the form and meaning of physical changes to the built fabric. Evidently though, other than aiding the explication of social evolution as a driver to/upon environmental transformation, historians have presented methods, beliefs, and paradigms to assist others, including geographers, planners and architects, as to how the past can accurately be understood. The historians’ approach to examining the urban past has accentuated the importance of widely gathering, and then accurately interpreting, primary source materials, e.g. government reports, personal papers and diaries. Indeed, the concepts, philosophies, and practices of historians within Planning History have been vital to emphasizing that to be truly historical the method of approaching the past is imperative. So, to refer back to a prior comment, what will happen to Planning History as a discipline if the Planning History community is in future years devoid of trained specialists in History?

Four outcomes may unfortunately transpire. First, Planning History will run the risk of eroding critical engagement with its disciplinary heritage. Second, the discipline might become a target for criticism from historians given insularity to discussing plans and planning exclusively rather than agencies and processes connected to contexts that shaped urban design ideas and exercises in the past. Third, Planning History will diminish attention to all but modern planning systems/the modern era because of vocational requirements in Architecture and Planning as to how contemporary urban design and urban planning systems have been formed. Plus, fourth, if the value of the historical milieu in itself becomes unappreciated then risk emerges as to the character of knowledge being formed with regard to how and why plans in the past were composed and, in conjunction, how and why planning was an act reflective of the nature of civilization. In other words, rather than presenting itself as accurately understanding planning and people in the past, Planning History will latch onto and propagate half-truths about life in history.

All in all, today, by the mid-2020s, Planning History is in good physical condition. Yet, this does not mean that those working within the discipline should relax and/or not question its past character and possible future evolution. If nothing else, urbanscapes in the past have changed and urbanscapes in the coming years will continue to do so too. Therefore, a comprehensive form of Planning History will be required as time unfolds.

Since its founding, and particularly in its early years under the influence of individuals such as Gordon Cherry and Anthony Sutcliffe, Planning History has sought to define itself by intellectual ambition, innovation, and discourse; in 2018 such issues were reiterated by contributions to Carola Hein’s The Routledge Handbook of Planning History.⁵ As such, from the outset under the guidance of Cherry and Sutcliffe, Planning History has sought to ‘shake it up’. In grounding itself to evaluate and question the physical settings humans made in the past, it has profoundly contributed to the long-term advancement of knowledge of urban layouts and planning methodology. As a result, it may be said that Planning History greatest success has been to replace planning myth with facts by means of situating design and environmental concepts within both a broad and long-term historical lens. The value of Planning History knowledge is, in consequence, now recognized by persons working within the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

In both conceptual and practical terms, historians have affected the generic process by which the discipline of Planning History has worked, i.e. the process by which ‘facts’ of urban planning have been gathered and presented. Historians, ultimately, have encouraged a comprehensiveness of thinking about how and why planning is practiced, and the need to know the nuances, conditions, and states of mind under which particular planning forms were created and implemented. Historians have helped to show that planning concepts and ideas are directly interconnected to the workings of societies. They have underscored that planning has never been, and never will be, independent from the operation of society. Their cognizance has helped forge the internal consistency that Planning History now has. But if Planning History is to continue to be truly historical then, as a discipline, there will be a need to continue to engage closely with the philosophies, theories, and practices of History. Thinking, speaking, and writing of the events in the past does not necessarily equate to being truly historical and truly knowing why people such as planners, politicians and social reformers do what they do.

Notes

1 The Group was founded in the United Kingdom in October 1974.

2 Sutcliffe, “Why Planning History?”

3 The matter of the perspective is reflected in the aims and scope of this journal; see https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rppe20.

4 The talk was given in mid-July 2012, at the University of Sao Paulo.

5 Hein, The Routledge Handbook of Planning History.