Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction

Creating the modern townscape

John Pendlebury, Erdem Erten, Larkham Peter, John Pendlebury, Erdem Erten, Larkham J Peter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317698647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The history of post Second World War reconstruction has recently become an important field of research around the world; Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction is a provocative work that questions the orthodoxies of twentieth century design history.

This book provides a key critical statement on mid-twentieth century urban design and city planning, focused principally upon the period between the start of the Second World War to the mid-sixties. The various figures and currents covered here represent a largely overlooked field within the history of 20th century urbanism.

In this period while certain modernist practices assumed an institutional role for post-war reconstruction and flourished into the mainstream, such practices also faced opposition and criticism leading to the production of alternative visions and strategies. Spanning from a historically-informed modernism to the increasing presence of urban conservation the contributors examine these alternative approaches to the city and its architecture.

Part I
Introduction

1
On “Alternative Visions”

Erdem Erten, John Pendlebury and Peter J. Larkham

Introduction

The twenty-first century is often characterized as “the urban century”, as for the first time more than half of humanity – 52 per cent by 2011 – is living in urban areas.¹ However, the foundations for the urban century were very firmly laid during the twentieth century, as processes of rapid urbanization, experienced in some countries in the nineteenth century, became established as a global phenomenon. This brought an unparalleled increase in the outward expansion, and in the building, demolition and rebuilding, of cities. Approaches and attitudes to managing this rapidly developing environment also underwent remarkable changes during the course of the twentieth century, with accompanying major changes in and redefinitions of the professional disciplines that shape the city. Thus, whilst the planning and design of towns and cities remains an activity that transcends an urban history of several thousand years, it was during the twentieth century that a profession of town planning emerged, having split from the older established professions of architecture and surveying, and incorporating other developing social sciences, such as sociology.

There is a historiographic consensus that periodizes planning into roughly five distinct periods, typically the pre-industrial revolution (that is before planning per se, although there were many examples of conscious urban layouts in the classical, medieval and Renaissance periods), from the industrial revolution to 1900, from 1900 to the Second World War, from the Second World War to the early 1970s oil crisis, and from then to the present.² Within this periodization, the most dramatic turning point is the Second World War, which brought an unprecedented scale of destruction, the impact of which was most manifest in cities. It was a catalyst for change even in countries suffering relatively little direct war damage (for example Australia) and in non-combatant countries (such as those of South America). The principal aim of this book is to provide a critical account of mid-twentieth-century urban design and city planning, focused principally upon the period between the start of the Second World War and the early 1970s, when the term “urban design”³ began to be adopted and to incorporate themes from an earlier urbanism. Surprisingly, this important period is understudied. This is perhaps a controversial assertion as much has been written since Diefendorf’s pioneering edited volume on European bombed cities.⁴ This work has included studies of individual planners and their plans,⁵ of processes of planning and administration,⁶ of the politics of people and processes⁷ and of the communication of planning ideas.⁸ Newer perspectives to emerge include more consideration of those affected by the replanning and rebuilding⁹ or of the link between reconstruction and culture.¹⁰ Comparative work remains relatively scarce,¹¹ and, to our knowledge, little has been published in English on reconstruction in countries such as the former USSR, China and those in North Africa.

Precursors: the late nineteenth to early twentieth century

Early-twentieth-century urban visions were largely characterized by a demand for the radical transformation of the nineteenth-century post-industrial revolution city, which was often seen as something to be obliterated instead of rehabilitated. Such cities were thought to be no longer comprehensible as a totality and were frequently described as unhealthy bodies requiring radical surgery, by means almost completely linked to advances in transport and other infrastructure. Haussmann’s Paris boulevards are a seminal early example. The end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries brought more radical, largely unbuilt reimaginings, such as those of the Italian Futurists or the ideas for linear cities proposed alternatively in Spain and, later, the Soviet Union. Volker M. Welter has illustrated how influential writers such as Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion and Arthur Korn self-consciously analysed the evolution of cities as part of a platform for arguing for radical urban change.¹² The faith in such restructuring and the rise of planning largely stemmed from belief in the progressive ideals of the Enlightenment and the ensuing modernism, and from the conviction that the urban environment and the social life it housed could – and indeed should – be planned. Planning was invoked to harness the apparently unstoppable growth of urban agglomerations, not only metropolises but also small towns, in response to perceptions of the declining quality of life in the city and the urban, and the suburbanization of the countryside through the impact of sprawl in various ways, such as ribbon development and planned suburbs.

In addition to the separation of engineering from architecture, and its institutionalization in the late nineteenth century, the turn of the twentieth century coincided with the further advance of specialization within the disciplinary structures that shape the built environment. The most famous British vision of planning as reform, Howard’s Garden City, always had a strong social dimension, and this was true for other important pioneers of the profession, such as Patrick Geddes. However, in the demands for the recognition of planning as a separate profession and academic discipline, with its own institutional bodies, the discipline came to be focused on the physical planning of the built environment and the macroform of the city. This is typified by the foundation of the UK’s Town Planning Institute and the beginnings of the separation of planning activities from the Royal Institute of British Architects.¹³ Framed in this manner, planning was seen more as a largely beaux-arts architecture-driven art, with its social dimensions marginalized. This began, particularly after the First World War, to give way to a more structured, ‘scientific’ attitude. Throughout the 1930s, as the canonical historiography of planning narrates,¹⁴ the dominant responses of architecture and planning were CIAM’s (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne’s) functional city and versions of the Garden City, together with urban utopias that turned away from the complexities that paralysed the metropolis, as well as de-urbanist schemes that looked towards its dissolution in the countryside. The visions of the principal members of CIAM, and Le Corbusier in particular, came to hold a particularly strong grip on the modernist-focused histories of the mid-twentieth century.¹⁵ CIAM did, of course, partly exist precisely for the purpose of “creating a unified sense of what is now usually known as the Modern Movement in architecture”.¹⁶ It was trying to create a party line, even if its chroniclers now acknowledge that CIAM overstated its claim to be the representative organization of modern architecture¹⁷ and that the existence of a party line was, in practice, illusory.¹⁸

The post-Second World War period

From one point of view this period is seen as an interlude between the rise of CIAM and the ultimate collapse of modernist narratives and the rise of postmodernism, but from another it represents an extended but productive crisis that led to the emergence of various operative responses based on a critical re-evaluation of modernism. As recent research (some already cited) has indicated, this period has a complex and rich history that cannot be reduced to the ascendancy of particular modernist urban visions such as the Garden City and its suburban variants, the zoned offshoots of Athens Charter urbanism inspired by Le Corbusier’s obsession with mobility and speed, or the sprawling expanses of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City in the North American context dispersed for the nuclear age. In this period, while certain modernist practices – impelled at least in part by the exigencies of wartime mass production¹⁹ – assumed an institutional role for post-war reconstruction and flourished into the mainstream, such practices also faced opposition and criticism from within the disciplines. Although in many places the professional planners, architects and surveyors were seen as the experts, their visions also began to generate adverse public responses. These trends led to the production of alternative visions and strategies, sometimes arising from members of the public, press campaigns or pressure groups, as well as from re-evaluations within the professions themselves. Spanning from a historically informed modernism to the increasing influence of urban conservation, this book aims to cover a range of these alternative approaches to the post-war city, its redevelopment and its architecture. The various individuals, organizations and trends of thought and practice investigated by the contributors represent an under-researched field within the history of twentieth-century urbanism despite the attention paid in recent years to a small number of these figures, such as Thomas Sharp, or the idea of Townscape that developed around the Architectural Review’s editorial campaigns.²⁰ This volume seeks to extend consideration to some of the wider issues within which contemporary design and planning operated, thus (for example) extending Whyte’s related collection of papers on aspects of design education in this period.²¹ It is also true that some of the familiar key players have been treated only very partially by the existing literature, and we shed new light on some of their individual and collective activities. Some of these alternative visions have now become part and parcel of mainstream urban design practices after a lengthy process of absorption and appropriation, although their histories are still being written.

Alternative visions

The alternative visions cited in this book belong to thinkers and practitioners who were acutely aware, and critical, of the problems and deficiencies of planning and of its importance for post-war reconstruction, and who, whilst often “modernists”, remained largely outside the mainstream of modernist planning and architecture. We argue that these protagonists, consciously or unconsciously, effectively laid the foundations of what came to be termed “urban design”. This book therefore focuses on the birth of urban design, via the critique of urban planning and the revival and reinterpretation of themes of an earlier urbanism when planning and architecture were more unified.

The period from the end of the Second World War until the late 1960s or early 1970s might be thought of as the heyday of physical planning. In simple terms, whilst there is no clear East–West dichotomy, in much of the ‘West’ (or the post-Second World War Western bloc) the welfare state – which became the dominant governmental model – relied heavily on comprehensive planning, and in the ‘East’ (the Eastern bloc) the state assumed more or less complete control. However, physical planning was largely abandoned in favour of policy planning towards the end of the 1970s. This was accompanied by the gradual emergence of urban design as a semi-autonomous field of activity connecting planning and architecture. Although this transition from the abandonment of physical planning to the turn towards policy and advocacy planning catalysed the emergence of urban design as a distinct epistemology and field of practice, it is not the sole explanation. Chronologically, and perhaps also functionally, the decline of civic design and its inherent visual dimension is closely associated with the rise of physical planning – technocentric and data-driven and, in the post-war replanning context in Britain, for exam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Imagined townscapes
• PART III Townscapes in practice
• PART IV Townscapes in opposition
• Index