Planning History Research Articles

Report from the 19th International Planning History Society Conference: July 5–6 2022, Delft, The Netherlands

Report from the 19th International Planning History Society Conference: July 5–6 2022, Delft, The Netherlands

‘Captains of industry’ of the metropolitan nexus: private mass housing development in twentieth-century Belgium

ABSTRACT This paper focusses on the production of the two major commercial residential developers, Jean-Florian Collin (Etrimo) and François Amelinckx (Amelinckx N.V.), who constructed over 70,000 apartments in the metropolitan agglomerations of Belgium between 1924 and 1985. Their short-lived, but large-scale, production defines an ‘invisible city’ of which we know very little but can be used to analyse key aspects of the process of twentieth-century metropolization in Belgium. Both developers were ‘champions of a game of their creation’, as they applied precise strategies in constructing specific circumstances that seized the latent potential of development (that hovered over the capitalist metropolitan landscape) into concrete, often opportunistically defined, built commodities. By applying a production perspective on planning history, it is possible to look at the processes of metropolitan expansion and twentieth-century planning in Belgium from a different angle, starting from the actual built reality and the ‘captains of industry’ 1 1 Dixon, “Retrospectives, Captains of Industry”. that this urban reality was grounded upon. A perspective which has been little-applied in the Belgian case, and is particularly pertinent for interpreting development patterns in a context like Belgium that lacks a strong planning culture and is historically compromised the absence of an emancipated scene of developers ready to take on the urban agenda.

19th IPHS Conference, 5–6 July 2022 (Delft, The Netherlands) prizes and awards

ABSTRACT IPHS offers prizes and awards in urbanism, history, planning and the environment, mainly focusing on cities from the late nineteenth century. This year IPHS 2022 Prize and Award Winners were announced at the Awards Ceremony, which took place at the Delft Hybrid Format Conference on the 6th of July 2022. At the ceremony, IPHS Planning Perspectives Prize, IPHS Book Prizes, Anthony Sutcliffe Dissertation Award, IPHS Best Post-Graduate Planning History Paper Prize, Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Achievement, East Asia Planning History (EAPH) Prize, and Koos Bosma Prize in Planning History Innovation have found their owners. This document provides information about the Prize and Award winners and their award-winning works and includes commendations based on the Judging Panel and Committee Reports.

The reproductive climate concerns of young, educated Chinese: ‘when the nest is upset, no egg is left intact’

ABSTRACT An emerging area of research concerns the phenomenon of young people factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices, but existing scholarship and popular discourse have focused exclusively on Western and developed countries. This paper examines whether young people in China are also connecting their reproductive plans and choices to climate change, and why. Based on the quantitative and qualitative results from an exploratory survey of 173 young, educated, climate-alarmed or climate-concerned Chinese, we found that reproductive climate concerns are reported by many young Chinese. Respondents expressed deep and multi-layered concerns about the wellbeing of their (potential) children in a climate-changed future, though they did not rank climate change highly among other factors that might influence their reproductive choices. Climate-alarmed Chinese reported lower levels of reproductive climate concerns and more positive visions of the future than a similar group of US-Americans. We attribute these findings to China’s history of family planning, state-constructed climate discourse, stage of development, and hierarchical cultural worldview. As the first study on reproductive climate concerns in Asia, this research addresses a major gap in our knowledge, with implications for the sociology of climate change, the sociology of reproduction, environmental psychology, Asian studies, and demography.

A hole in the wall: French colonial planning approaches and the building of the Central Market in Rabat, Morocco (1922–1925)

ABSTRACT In 1925, the Central Market of Rabat was built at the outskirt of the medina (the old city) by French Colonial powers (1912-1956). Despite being the only element displayed in colonial maps of the medina, and one of Rabat's current landmarks, the history of the market is still unknown. Drawing on the National Moroccan archives and on colonial postcards, the article explores the historical and urban significance of the Central Market for Rabat colonial and postcolonial history. It argues that the market constitutes a unique architectural and urban case for Rabat as it both challenged and reinforced the colonial agenda. Planning principles like the policy of association, the ‘image of the city' and the ‘dual city' were not only defied by the market, but also by the demolition of the part of the wall in front of it. This revealed the inconsistencies and lack of homogeneity of the colonial approach. Moreover, without the wall, the medina became penetrable by the ‘Ville Nouvelle' (New Town). Engaging with the Central Market is significant for the history of colonial planning, but also for today’s Rabat identity construction, inscribed in 2012 in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites and elected cultural capital in 2022.

About the Contributors

Blu Buchanan is a university fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at University of North Carolina Asheville. Their academic writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and PUBLIC: A Journal of Imagining America as well as in edited volume chapters in Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis and Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era.Ryan Lee Cartwright is associate professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. Cartwright's research focuses on disability, gender, and sexuality on the social and spatial margins. Cartwright's first book, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (2021), maps racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural United States, throughout the twentieth century, spanning genres from popular science to documentary photography to horror film. Cartwright's second book will examine how chronic illness came to be understood as a gendered, racialized “social burden” in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States.Juno Jill Richards is assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in women, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. They are the author of The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (2020) and a coauthor of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (2020).Tanya L. Saunders is an associate professor in language, literature, and culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Saunders is a sociologist interested in how the African diaspora throughout the Americas uses art as a tool for social change via decolonizing affect. They are also the director of the film project titled “Afro Feminismos em Cuba,” which is currently streamed on YouTube. They have published and lectured extensively throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. They are currently writing a book about Black Brazilian artivism and politics of liberation as a spring 2022 Mark Claster Mamolen Fellow at Harvard University.Marisa Solomon is assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her work focuses on how Black improvisation with waste's form and meaning upends environmental paradigms. She has published on the materiality of waste and anti-Black histories of urban planning and gentrification in the Journal of International Labor and Working-Class History. She is the codirector of the Black Atlantic Ecologies project at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Social Difference, where she is affiliated with the Earth Institute.Jennifer Tyburczy is associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display, won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies. Her scholarship can also be found in Women and Performance, Radical History Review, QED, Signs, Feminist Formations, Text and Performance Quarterly, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and the anthology Queer Nightlife. Tyburczy is currently completing her second monograph, “Queer Traffic: Sex and the Performance of Free Trade.”

Path dependency in aesthetic control management within Turkish planning history

ABSTRACT This article examines the effects of socio-economic and political events on the control and management of aesthetics by analysing Turkey’s urban planning process using Istanbul as the case study. The external events were analysed in Istanbul by exploring the historical patterns of Turkey’s urban planning and development history. The urban aesthetics concept, characterized by different periods from the late Ottoman era until today, includes the involvement, development, and continuity of different concepts of aesthetics in the planning process. In this study, the path dependence concept has been used as a methodology, which reveals that critical junctures or major changes have happened by changing economic and political conditions at the national and international levels. Five critical junctures were identified. The findings indicate that path dependence and trajectories revealed different institutional structures without any integrity for aesthetic control under planning regulations.

Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great RecessionCapitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies

Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great RecessionCapitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies

The Origin of the Crisis in the Spatial Development of Contemporary Cities: A Review of Selected Historical and Modern Mechanisms

The presented research is a review containing an original synthesis on some of the causes of urban development problems. The article covers historical and contemporary aspects of selected phenomena since the end of the 19th and 20th centuries in cities with patterns of European and American structures. The research background focuses on issues related to morphology, function, and form. The aim of the research is to present the results of the review, mostly canonical publications surrounding the history of architecture and town planning, grouping them according to the observed regularities. The research thesis assumes that the observed trends that are present in today’s discussion on urban development stem from some phenomena that appear in both selected urban patterns. The research methods are based on the literature query on the development of cities and the issues raised in the articles. The results are combined with a discussion and focus on the author’s synthesis of the observed trends, and they are divided into historical and contemporary groups describing selected causes of the current crisis.

Working-class suburban housing, homeownership and urban social movements during Francoism in Barcelona, 1939–1975

ABSTRACT The issue of homeownership in the working-class peripheries of post-war Europe has received little attention in planning history. The main reason is probably that public housing built at the time of massive operations of constructing Modernist housing estates in Western and Eastern Blocs adopted tenancy as the predominant form of tenure in almost all cases. In the context of widespread growth of urban homeownership during the second half of the twentieth century in European countries, this paper addresses the singularities of ownership in Francoist Spain. In this case, the main peculiarity is that the working classes that flocked to inhabit the new outskirts were the main protagonists of the intense process of the spread in homeownership. First, the article discusses the ideological roots of the spread of homeownership in Spain as a singular phenomenon. Second, the spectacular growth of homeownership in the peripheral working-class districts of Barcelona and in the municipalities of its metropolitan area is analysed. Then, the paper considers the relationships observed between ownership in the new peripheries and the development of powerful urban movements. A final epilogue places such movements in the Western European context.

Eating disorders among middle school students in a Chinese population: Prevalence and associated clinical correlates

IntroductionEating disorders are regarded to be associated with many psychological and behavioral problems. Moreover, adolescence has been reported to be the key period for developing eating habits, and eating disorders typically emerge in adolescence and early adulthood. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of eating disorders and explore the associated factors among adolescents in Hunan province, China MethodsA total of 1610 middle school students from Hunan province, China, were enrolled in this study. The participants were aged from 11 to 16 years old. The following data were collected: demographic variables, Body Mass Index (BMI), suicidal behaviors, non-suicidal self-injury, depression, anxiety, stress (depression - anxiety - stress scale, DASS-21), childhood trauma (Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, CTQ), symptoms of social anxiety (Social Anxiety Scale-Adolescents, SAS-A), and eating problems (Eating Attitudes Test, EAT-26). ResultsThe estimated prevalence of eating disorders was 8.9%. Compared with participants without eating disorders, participants with eating disorders were more likely to be at a younger age, obese and overweight, and have a history of non-suicidal self-injury, suicidal ideation, suicidal plans, suicide attempts, emotional abuse, physical abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect; more likely to experience stress, anxiety or depression as well as have high scores of social avoidance and distress related to general social contexts. Anxiety, emotional neglect, physical neglect, obesity, and overweight were still significant in the binary logistic regression model after controlling for confounding factors. Additionally, younger age, emotional abuse, physical abuse, stress, anxiety, depression, social avoidance, and distress related to general social contexts were significantly correlated with the EAT-26 scores in correlation analysis ConclusionsEating disorders are quite common among middle school students. Moreover, eating disorders are associated with younger age, non-suicidal self-injury, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, stress, anxiety, depression, emotional abuse, physical abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, social avoidance, and distress related to general social contents and BMI. This study provides a reference for school counselors and clinicians in the prevention and treatment of eating disorders.

Researching the 1980s competitions in Kyiv – preconditions of the After Socialist Modernism

The 1980s recently became a contested period in the architectural and urban planning history of Eastern Europe and the FSU countries. Situated within the Socialist Modernism timeframe, it at the same time forms a link to the manifold political and economic change happening in 1989\1991. While professionals posed radical questions about the core issues of the Socialist socio-spatial development and acquired new sensibilities towards history and locality, their influence on decision-making often remained seriously restrained by the construction industry.In Kyiv as well as in most of the big cities of the USSR, however, a change in the approach towards areas in the city center was visible – competitions, discussions, and iterative design were becoming a new norm for the architects and planners. In this paper, three projects on the block scale are reviewed in detail. These chosen competition projects became the watershed between modernist and after-modernist approaches to planning, showcasing new contextualized spatial solutions. What standards had been formed and what were the long-term impacts on the planning processes are the issues given the first attempt to answer. The intention of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the recent past towards intensifying the discourse about the sources of the present of urban development in Kyiv and beyond.

Deconstructing Cerdá: historical approaches in his three urban planning theories (1855–1867)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to contribute to the current debate on the interest in history shown by the early town planning literature and to extend it to Spain. It focuses on the most important theoretical works of the urban planning pioneer Ildefonso Cerdá (1815–1876): the well-known Teoría General de la Urbanización (1867), Teoría de la Construcción de Ciudades (1859) and Teoría de la viabilidad Urbana (1861). Throughout the analysis of these three major publications and their heterogeneous sources, this paper discusses the role and relevance of different planning history approaches in Cerdá’s theoretical work. It highlights his ways of handling information about historical urbanism in the process of theorizing urban planning, as well as the sense he gave to history in each of his three theories and in his theoretical work as a whole. Finally, the paper outlines some comparative elements resulting from current international research. The paper concludes that though many of Cerdá’s approaches to history in his theoretical work match the general trends in European early town planning literature, some originalities arise, notably its pioneering character and the method conceived for analysing the historical urban evolution of a city throughout its plan.

FROM CONFLICT TO INTEGRATION: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL CHANGES OF MANCHU URBAN PLANNING AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION IN THE QING DYNASTY (1644-1911)

FROM CONFLICT TO INTEGRATION: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL CHANGES OF MANCHU URBAN PLANNING AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION IN THE QING DYNASTY (1644-1911)

Revisiting the green geographies of welfare planning: an introduction

ABSTRACT The history and legacy of green planning of the welfare era have largely been overlooked within research, or critiqued due to its limited urban qualities and poor design. This omission has left its role in the development of the Welfare society largely unexplored. Therefore, this special issue revisits the green geographies of welfare planning, to reveal its importance as a matter of welfare and as a set of geographies that goes beyond the contemporary norm of the compact city. The revisits take two forms: historical studies to elucidate the original ideas and geographies of the planning, and revisits to sites currently challenged by new urban or planning ideals. This introduction presents the papers, reflects on previous research, and concludes with a few comments on the need for further studies on green planning and the landscape legacy of the welfare era.

Upadok i vosstanovlenie: problema gorodskogo razvitiya Harbina i ego reakciya posle Russko-yaponskoj vojny

The power of Russia in Northeast China had been greatly weakened along with the end of the Russo-Japanese war, and the cities and towns under its control had been decaying. In the face of such a series of problems as a capital loss, population reduction and economic recession, the Russian Empire had to make a timely adjustment to consolidate its dominance for the regions under its control. With the Grand Central Station of Chinese Eastern Railway, Harbin, as an example, the paper replays the recovery process of the township under control of the Russian through interpreting urban construction and planning history, such as urban economic recovery, urban population growth, public utility development, regional planning scheme and land transaction, trying to conclude the context and characteristics of urban development under this special historical background and enrich the research content of modern Chinese urban history, so as to provide a reference for relevant research.

Contemporary Decentralized Development of a Centrally Planned Metropolis: The Case of Budapest

This study examines the changes undergone by urban centers within Greater Budapest’s extension area, which was annexed to the capital of Hungary in 1950, and which is, with minor modifications, equivalent to the outer zone today. The article compares the development methods of two different political systems: state socialism (i.e., the communist regime) between 1950 and 1990, and post-socialist capitalism after 1990. Over a longer period, the urban development of Budapest has made a long but circular journey from decentralized to a decentralized–disjointed socio-spatial development system, passing through a centrally-planned communist era between 1945 and 1990. Nevertheless, closer examination of this process reveals that several paradigm shifts took place in the design methodology, which was strongly influenced by socio-economic changes. These shifts, layered upon the inherited structure, as well as the neglect or preference of different systems, caused great differences in the development histories of centers on the outskirts. Therefore, we have set up a development typology for the centers on the outskirts by summarizing the planning history at the city level. Based on how well the center was able to incorporate itself into the larger metropolis since 1950, we have distinguished the following development models: the metropolized, the transcript, the rehabilitated, and the urban village model. This typology is extended to include new urban centers that formed during state socialism (between 1950 and 1990) and post-socialist capitalism (since 1990).

Negative relationship between woody species density and size of urban green spaces in seven European cities

Urban green spaces (UGSs) are important elements of urban landscapes. Woody vegetation is a key component of UGSs, providing many socio-ecological benefits such as habitat provision and human well-being. Knowing plant diversity and vegetation configuration that underpin urban ecosystem processes and functions is critical to maximize nature contributions to city dwellers. Here, we present a well-replicated multi-city study showing a detailed description of taxonomic and structural diversity of woody vegetation in 225 UGSs distributed across seven European cities along a NE-SW gradient. Our aim was to understand how UGSs attributes, including size and fragmentation, influence woody vegetation features. A total of 418 woody species belonging to 76 families were identified. UGS size displayed weak positive correlations with woody species richness, but a strong negative correlation with woody species density. Alien woody species were abundant in all cities (from 40% of all species recorded in Antwerp to 64% in Lisbon and Zurich). Among the native tree species we found a predominance of Pinus spp. in southern cities and Acer spp. in cooler climates. On average, tree canopies extent was 56% of UGSs. This paper provides insights on the plant diversity and woody vegetation composition in UGSs of different size, climate and urban planning history. Our results encourage and contribute to future urban ecology studies involving different taxa and ecosystem services as well as support effective urban planning and management practices.

US urban and regional planning history, theory and partnerships for a new century

Planning history reflects the major social, economic and political events that shape a society. Planning has been variously defined by scholars and planning practitioners alike. This paper presents a set of definitions of urban and regional planning (URP) in order to create a common ground with which to analyse planning’s history and theories of urban revitalisation and partnership collaborations at the turn of the 20th century. The planning history includes the City Beautiful movement, the Urban Renewal period and the City Enterprise. The planning theories range from rational planning, incrementalism and advocacy to communicative and collaborative planning. Finally, partnerships refer to collaboration and cooperation among businesses, non-profits, government agencies, education institutions and community leaders with a certain set of aims and goals. The takeaway points are that a partnership’s success depends on the scale and scope of the arrangement, and the type and number of actors. Furthermore, urban revitalisation partnerships should be built on shared interests, reciprocal support and mutual benefit, with partners contributing according to their respective resources, strengths and areas of expertise.

"They are Coming in So Fast That if We Had Publicity About the Clinic We Would Be Swamped": Edris Rice-Wray, the First Family Planning Clinic in Mexico (1959), and the Intervention of US-Based Private Foundations

Population growth in the so-called third world countries became a cause for international concern at the dawn of the Cold War era. In this scenario, Mexico, whose total population doubled every twenty years, became one of the main preoccupations for the emergent global population control movement. While most accounts on the history of family planning in Mexico have tended to focus on the mid-1970s, when the government abandoned its pro-natalist stance, this article demonstrates that, by that time, American and Mexican actors had already launched a systematic effort to implement family planning programs. This work explores the history of the creation of Mexico's first family planning clinic, founded in 1959 by American doctor Edris Rice-Wray, and the subsequent development of national associations and programs that, with the support of the Population Council and the Ford Foundation, provided family planning services throughout the 1960s.