Planning History Research Articles

20th Biennial Conference of the International Planning History Society 2–5 July 2024 (Hong Kong) prizes and awards

ABSTRACT The winners of the IPHS 2024 Prize and Awards were announced at the Awards Ceremony at the Hong Kong Conference on 4 July 2024. This year, the recipients include the Planning Perspectives Prize, IPHS Book Prizes, Anthony Sutcliffe Dissertation Award, IPHS Best Postgraduate Planning History Paper Prize, Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Achievement, the East Asia Planning History (EAPH) Prize, and IPHS Professional Commendation Award. However, the Koos Bosma Prize in Planning History Innovation was not awarded as no submission met the criteria. The Judging Panel Reports provide additional information and commendations.

Regulating capital investment in urban property: towards comparative-historical research in planning history

ABSTRACT This paper makes three main contributions: First, we argue that spatial planning institutions have become fundamental ‘rules of the game’ regulating development and defining urban property rights, and that the differences of approach between places can best be explained as a product of historical processes of institutional development. Second, we introduce a historical institutionalist theory of contested institutional development based on concepts of critical junctures of major institutional change followed by reactive sequences of institutional contestation in strategic action fields. We outline a methodologically institutionalist research method designed to produce replicable comparative research of long-run processes of institutional change, based on historical narratives employing process-tracing of institutional change and examination of permissive and productive factors structuring such change. This approach generates clear research questions and supports causal analysis of processes and mechanisms of change in urban property systems to explain why current institutions take the form they do. Third we illustrate the theory and research method with the case of Toronto, a fast-growing city where property rights and obligations and development control regulations have been vigorously contested. The conclusions explore the implications for planning theory and for comparative-historical research of this analysis of institutional change processes and mechanisms.

80th anniversary of NIITIAG

The article is dedicated to the anniversary of the Scientific Research Institute of Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning (NIITIAG), which the Institute celebrates this year.

Re-arquitecturar los territorios, un desafío ineluctable para la sostenibilidad compartida

The dynamic - historical reading of the planning, andthe balances of what we consider as a structural “bad urbanrural development” of the territories (at least since the 60s), is essential. This position, although open to debate, has become evident taking into account the also dynamic reading of the great challenges of sustainable transitions and "resilience”, that have marked planning and management intentions in Central American planning history. This statement necessarily leads torethinking global architectures inherited (built form, forms of management and planning, governance) to define the intensities of the changes. Moving towards this, implies to define the method and the transition system to be implemented, and to define the instruments that allow rehabilitating, reconstructing,remodeling, “re-architecturing” territories and institutions inherited. However, the re-architecture proposed will depend on the collective clarity, first of the pasts carried over, and second the desired futures. Accounting for the "arts" or the "politicalsocialinstitutional techniques" that created (and continue to do) the "metropolitan areas", is today an essential stage to be able to move towards new development models. Indeed, many local and metropolitan challenges, such as the “right to sustainable housing for all” (which has a high component of physicalconstructive design), contain high probabilities of never being effective in the current and trending context. Given that the current political, institutional, economic and social capacities, to make considerable changes in the management of the territories, seem to be compromised. Forging new capabilities and new abilities (financial, environmental, social, and including technical-constructive) is a collective challenge. And collectively conceiving a new urban planning and territorial planning (corrective – preventive and collaborative) is an urgency. ILIA: Investigaciones Latinoamericanas en Ingeniería y Arquitectura, No. 01, 2024: 167-173.

Spatial Expansion, Planning, and Their Influences on the Urban Landscape of Christian Churches in Canton (1582–1732 and 1844–1911)

Canton (present-day Guangzhou, China) has a long history as a trading port and serves as a window for studying the history of Sino-Western cultural exchanges. Canton was a city built under Confucian orders, leading to significant differences (when compared to Christian cities) in urban functional zoning, layout, urban landscape, and methods for shaping spatial order. Therefore, the churches constructed by Christian missionary societies in Canton merit particular attention in missionary history research and urban planning history. Based on local gazetteers, historical maps, export paintings, Western travelogues, and archives at that time, from a cultural landscape perspective, this article compares and analyzes the spatial expansion of Christian churches and their influences on the urban landscape in Canton in two stages. In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the spatial layout of the churches indicated an active integration into Canton City. After the Opium War, churches were not only used for religious purposes but also served as symbols asserting the presence of Christians and Western powers (which made the situation more complicated). Missionary societies attracted believers through the construction of public facilities, building Christian communities centered around churches, thereby competing with authorities for spatial power and influencing the urban functional system and spatial layout controlled by the authorities. Comparatively, the Roman Catholic Cathedral has profoundly changed the traditional landscape order in Canton, while the Protestant Dongshan Church interacted more closely with the city.

Real estate agency: land, housing and finance in urban and planning history conference

ABSTRACT This report provides an overview of the 17th meeting of the Australasian Urban History/Planning History Group, held on Gadigal Country at the University of Sydney from 11 to 13 July 2024. The 2024 conference welcomed papers on diverse topics, but particularly encouraged contributions relating to possession and dispossession, housing histories and FIRE (Fire, Insurance, Real Estate). Over 60 papers were presented. The use of real estate, and the delineation of property as a tool of dispossession was a theme that ran through many of the papers, as was the unbuilt theme, which serendipitously threaded through presentations focused on many different cities.

Novo-Nikolaevsk (Novosibirsk): Planning Solution of the Future Siberian Metropolis Late in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

The paper studies the urban planning of future Novosibirsk in the period of formation of its general plan late in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The initial structure of the city as Central, Railway and Zakamenskaya parts with their orthogonal scheme of blocks, streets and alleys is investigated.The urban planning phenomenon of pre-revolutionary Novo-Nikolaevsk is of great interest for the history of national and world urban planning. The urban planning is considered and evaluated as well as the use of other planning concepts and new techniques available in those years.The necessity of preserving the existing historical urban structure in the central part of modern Novosibirsk is substantiated, the possibility of its practical use in reconstruction and development of historical quarters of the city is considered.

President’s address*

ABSTRACT Delivered at the 20th IPHS conference in Hong Kong, this President’s Address explores the role of society and of planning history in a changing world. It argues that the society has a long history of international, innovative, and inter-generational engagement. It proposes that planning history can help promote ecosystemic thinking, facilitate understanding of historic path dependencies and their impact on contemporary spaces and planning, and provide a foundation for activating for planning societally just futures. Together, the members of the society can help explore the role of history for future planning.

Architecture between empire and revolution: housing and the shaping of Soviet Leningrad

ABSTRACT This article traces the planning history of the first major housing projects built in Soviet Leningrad: the Traktornaya Ulitsa and Serafimov site housing estates. Initiated by municipal authorities in 1924, they were built according to the designs of its own Design Buro and the architects Aleksandr Nikolsky, Aleksandr Gegello, and Grigorii Simonov in 1925–1926. Spearheading the reconstruction of a large industrial suburb, these projects offer an original example of the role of housing in urban development in the Soviet Union and in one of Europe’s largest cities. The planning history of the projects illuminates the way urban development unfolded in the early Soviet context: through practice and negotiation with multiple contexts, both the historic, imperial city and the revolution. The article shows the exemplary quality of these projects and their power and means to reinvent the historic forms and meanings of the city, and reconfigure its spatial hierarchies. It analyses the sources and means at play from revolutionary ideals and avant-garde ideas on form to western models of housing, the surrounding classical city and Byzantine and Russian vernacular architecture. It thus delineates the means through which architecture acts as an instrument of social and cultural change.

Beyond Chinatown: Chinese diaspora, the transition of power, and the planning of the City of Medan in Dutch East Indies

ABSTRACT Medan is a port city in Sumatra, Dutch East Indies, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A special case among colonial cities, it featured a large number of Chinese migrants – a third party in addition to the colonizer and the colonized – who played a key role in its urbanization process. Highlighting a trichotomous power framework formed by the Dutch colonizer, the indigenous people and the Chinese diaspora, this paper argues that the Chinese diaspora, with the arrival of commercial elites, obtained opportunities to shape the backbone of the city through skilfully transforming their economic power into political and spatial power. Chinese economic activities such as property investment and co-development not only led to unconventional Chinese quarters but shaped the zoning and axiality of the whole city. The Chinese diaspora also shaped Medan’s streetscape and architecture through individual building design, which, in turn, strengthened their economic power by the careful manipulation of architectural elements from various sources to suit different purposes. The planning history of Medan represents an alternative trajectory to colonial urbanization often led by Europeans, highlighting an ambiguous and shifting power relation among three parties in a transforming colonial society.

What changes over time? Planning history and institutional change from a policy design perspective

ABSTRACT Since the call to take the analytical and theoretical values of historical institutionalism seriously, planning history research has emphasized the enduring legacies of critical moments that structure the developmental pathways of urban institutions, whose changes tend to appear incremental in the long run. Yet, most of this work is less conscious about deliberate – although not always successful – considerations by policy actors in formulating policies and conflates changes in institutional arrangements with changes in policy effects. This article fills these gaps from a policy design perspective, explaining the changing policy effects of the same institutional arrangements over time through design processes such as layering. To this end, it introduces Vienna's participatory urban renewal model, Soft Urban Renewal, highlighting its context-bound design space in which policy actors choose and rearrange existing instruments according to shifting policy objectives and circumstances. Two cases of Soft Urban Renewal from two different points in time are chosen to cross-compare their varying capacities to influence its real-world effect under different contextual constraints. It concludes with some final remarks on the ways in which a policy design perspective can contribute to the current debate on planning history research and comparative-historical analysis of cities and their institutions and policies.

The Protestant Origins of the German Garden City, 1848–1910

Abstract The garden city is one of the most enduring concepts in the history of modern urban planning. At the beginning of the twentieth century, garden city movements emerged in Britain, France, the United States, and Japan—and in Germany. While the German garden city is often viewed as a later adaption of the British type, its real origins are more complex. This article situates the genesis of the German garden city project within the larger framework of nineteenth-century Protestant thought and practice. It places the intellectual, institutional and legal innovations that prefigured the twentieth-century garden city in Protestant social reform, providing a longer-term perspective on its rich and diverse intellectual origins. The German garden city, it is argued, should be considered on its own terms, rather than merely as a derivative of the British type.

Proposing an ethics of care: Tracing Victoria's transport planning history

AbstractThis paper examines the question what kind of ethics prevail in contemporary urban transport planning and what potential does an ethics of care hold for practice? Researchers have given ample attention to the need for better governance and coordination, and despite acknowledging the need to reduce reliance on private cars, little has been said by them about what ethics can or should guide planning to bring about such frameworks for caring. This area of research merits urgent work given our collective need to address the socio‐spatial, climate, and health impacts of car dependence. Taking as our focus transport planning in Victoria, Australia, we consider how an ethics of care could open new ways to redress how transport planning has perpetuated injustices in metropolitan Melbourne. We draw on secondary research to consider both the conditions that cultivated the current transport planning landscape and pathways for possible change that lie ahead. The research highlights opportunities to consider care as an ethical framework for transport planning that could amplify justice and equity claims in urban transport planning for Australian cities and that has salience for other cities elsewhere.

Spatial informality, urban regularization, and social resistance: Tianqiao as a public space for the poor, 1911–1937

ABSTRACT This study examines Tianqiao, the largest commercial and entertainment centre, which underwent a significant transformation into the most popular public space in Republican Beijing. Spatial informality has often been overlooked in planning history, due to its deviation from traditional disciplinary norms, tools, and materials, yet it can offer valuable insights into Chinese urban public spaces and their social values. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including government documents, newspapers, social surveys, and personal records, this paper elucidates how everyday life and popular culture emerged as effective strategies for the poor population to exert their political power and passively resist the state's incomplete urban regularization efforts. This exemplifies a distinct type of Chinese public space that acts as a mediator between the state and society, particularly from a bottom-up perspective of urban modernization.

Shifting Gears: A case study of bicycle planning and decision-making in Tucson, Arizona

Planners face a complex process from planning projects to final construction and evaluation in cycle planning. Planners tend to coordinate with peers in neighboring cities, advocates, politicians, other policymakers, and researchers to implement cycling plans. Documenting this decision-making process and the sources of information that guide decisions can provide insight into creating better cycling planning research and fostering stronger collaborations. We first provide a brief history of cycle planning in Tucson, Arizona, to demonstrate the current issues and efforts. Then, we present findings from interviews with Tucson planners and an advocate to explore information sources, collaboration, barriers, and opportunities for action for bicycle planning. Our results highlight the need for research presented in consumable ways, particularly through professional networks, and the potential for university outreach offices to assist in public participation and outreach, professional education, and collaboration on data collection and analysis on cycling projects. Focusing on these avenues can strengthen the science to decision-making pipeline. These lessons can also help improve bicycle planning in other communities.

Utility of Single Items within the Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised (SBQ-R): A Bayesian Network Approach and Relative Importance Analysis.

The Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised (SBQ-R) comprises four content-specific items widely used to assess the history of suicide-related thoughts, plans or attempts, frequency of suicidal ideation, communication of intent to die by suicide and self-reported likelihood of a suicide attempt. Each item focuses on a specific parameter of the suicide-related thoughts and behaviors construct. Past research has primarily focused on the total score. This study used Bayesian network modeling and relative importance analyses on SBQ-R data from 1160 U.S. and 1141 Chinese undergraduate students. The Bayesian network analysis results showed that Item 1 is suitable for identifying other parameters of the suicide-related thoughts and behaviors construct. The results of the relative importance analysis further highlighted the relevancy of each SBQ-R item score when examining evidence for suicide-related thoughts and behaviors. These findings provided empirical support for using the SBQ-R item scores to understand the performances of different suicide-related behavior parameters. Further, they demonstrated the potential value of examining individual item-level responses to offer clinically meaningful insights. To conclude, the SBQ-R allows for the evaluation of each critical suicide-related thought and behavior parameter and the overall suicide risk.

Variations of the Traditional Life Care Plan

A staple in assessing and valuing injury and related monetary damages claims, life care plans have traditionally encapsulated damages computations associated with present and anticipated future rehabilitation interventions related to contested events, the most common involving personal injury, medical malpractice, and product liability. The needs and sophistication of the injury claims assessment process have continued to evolve since the inception of life care plans and accordingly affect the services life care planners contribute to resolve disputes over the need for and value of litigated future rehabilitation interventions. After a brief history and overview of life care planning, this article describes how the discipline evolved to its current state. The authors then discuss how lawyers’ discernments in prosecuting cases have led to the need for three variations/derivatives of the traditional life care plan: the life care plan cost comparison, the interpolated life care plan, and the international life care plan. Standards of practice considerations follow. According to the Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification (CRCC), life care planning is a career pathway for certified rehabilitation counselors (CRCs). Rehabilitation counselors encounter a myriad of physical and psychosocial factors that affect the rehabilitation process. CRC certification and training prepares counselors to holistically address complex areas of rehabilitation following a catastrophic illness or injury. According to the CRCC Code of Ethics, CRCs have a responsibility to the public to engage in practices that are based on accepted research methodologies and evidence-based practices. They need to remain current with developments in evidence-based practice. Notably, the three variations/derivatives of the traditional life care plan presented in this article address pertinent standards of practice considerations.

The Olympic gap: planning and politics of the Helsinki Olympics

ABSTRACT The Olympic Games of 1940 were due to be organized in Tokyo, Japan, but because of the Sino-Japanese war, the event was hastily re-scheduled to be organized in Helsinki, Finland. The Second World War however interrupted the preparations. Instead of 1940, the Games were organized in Helsinki in 1952. It thus became necessary to prepare twice for the same event. During the 12 years that had passed, the political situation had become significantly different, while also views concerning architecture and urban planning had changed. The postponed Helsinki Olympics represent an intriguing case in the history of Olympic Games, that has remained relatively little researched. This paper proposes that this 12-year ‘Olympic gap’ brings to view on one hand the need to prepare twice, and on the other hand, the processual, slow nature of building and planning, which continued almost uninterrupted. A close reading of period newspaper articles, history of urban planning and architecture, as well as studies of the Olympic Games reveals tensions between architecture, planning, and politics on local, national, and international level, as they unravel in the context of preparing for the Helsinki Olympics.

Innovatory Kharkiv Mass Housing Estates in Urban Planning of the 1960s-1980s

The destructions of the Russo-Ukrainian war are leading to a rapid loss of cultural heritage in Ukraine, including contemporary 20th century monuments in Kharkiv, the cradle of Ukrainian modernism. At the greatest risk are the sites, which were complex and not well understood heritage before the war - mass housing estates of 1960s-1980s. In view of the postwar reconstruction, there is a great need to analyze mass housing estates in Kharkiv as potential objects of preservation. The purpose of this article is to reveal the architectural and historical value of the first Kharkiv mass housing estates in terms of their innovation, which might be the basis for further preservation steps. The article focuses on the three earliest areas of mass housing estates of the city - Pavlovo Pole, Novi Budynky and Saltovsky mass housing, which were designed and built during the period of the transition to rapid and large-scale pre-fabricated industry in the late 1950s - early 1960s. It is namely during the design and construction of these estates that innovatory technologies and approaches were developed and tested, which were later used in the construction of new housing estates both in Kharkiv and in other cities of Ukraine. These innovations included the system of microdistricts, the staggered system of services for the population, and the method of focusing in urban planning. The creation of a number of standard series of pioneering residential buildings for mass industrial development by the “Kharkovproject” and “Ukrmistostroyproject” design institutes. The study is based on the reconstruction of the historical chronology of design work of 1960’s - 1980’s in the history of Ukrainian city planning; a comparative analysis of the first-erected housing estates, and the definition of the unique solutions of Kharkiv city planners that were implemented in the development of the first housing estates in Kharkiv.

Embodied cognition and urban design: Thoughts through epigenetic advances

IntroductionIn the history of urban planning, the cognitive trend has been a well-established entity since the work of the American urban planner during the mid-’90s; Kevin Lynch. However, for a long time, urban planning has been deprived of the contribution of scientific knowledge from cognitive neurosciences, with a lack of operational recommendations for urban projects.ObjectivesThis study aims to reveal the role of embodiment theories in the revolution of urban design and urban projects through emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology.MethodsWe conducted an exhaustive review of the scientific literature to establish the relationship between embodied cognition and urban design through advances in epigenetics as well as potential applications of such finding. Our inquiry was to find out whether there was a scientific way to measure and quantify the performance of urban spaces.ResultsOur review revealed that, epigenetics and epigenomics have provided new explanations and perspectives to certain debates on the theory of embodied cognition and that of enaction. Epigenetic marks constitute a bodily memory that enables cognition to emerge as a function of the level of adaptation to the environment. In fact, embodiment refers to thoughts, emotions and behaviors based on sensory experiences and bodily positions, while the enaction is a way of conceiving cognition that focuses on the way in which human organisms and minds organize themselves in interaction with the environment.ConclusionsCognition is the result of a level of adaptation to the environment determined by physiological parameters that confer possibilities of action depending on previous interactions with the environment. The regulation of epigenetic marks which are technically quantifiable is now recognized as the fundamental mechanism involved in the brain’s ability to create, dismantle or reorganize neural networks throughout life depending on various experiences including environmental ones.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared