Abstract
The late Sir Peter Hall’s fourth edition of Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design since 1880 is the author’s literary monument to the official narrative of planning history. The new edition includes the thirteen chapters published in the third edition, with new contributions highlighting recent conflicts and their roots in the inequality of the built environment over more than a century in Europe and the United States. The fourth edition of Cities of Tomorrow retained the large arc of planning history that has defined it as an important resource for the study of the ideas of planning.
His book traces the traditional story of planning history from tenement reforms in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century to the riots in London in 2011 after the shooting by police of a West Indian man suspected of a crime. Using detailed analysis of maps, transcripts, previous research, and policy documents, Hall shares the stories of the people (largely male) who defined the historic eras of planning in the global north. He presents the information through quotations, direct prose, and images that give readers a window into the past and present of the theory and practice of planning. The protagonists in his stories are ideas of planning and urban design and the men who create them—the locations and contexts generally act as minor set pieces added to illustrate the ideas themselves. The true practice of planning, Hall argues, is about having vision for social betterment rather than a “bureaucratic routine and technical exercise which has little in common with reform” (463).
Framing the book in terms of problem identification and problem solution, the book chapters follow the expansive ideas of planning, most of which follow in a general chronology of the change in the urban growth boundary. He begins with the state of cities in the midst of the industrial revolution using four major cities: London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. He presents the parallel problem identification and social reform movements that evolved before highlighting the divergent solutions each city chose to address the poverty, infection, and overcrowding of the tenements. This chapter is one of the few where he acknowledges the role of women’s contribution to planning in his discussion of Jane Addams and settlement houses in the United States. After addressing the challenges directly facing the poor, he moves to the development of transit-based suburbs from the turn of the century to 1940. Parallel to the tenement reform movements, this market-based solution, he argues, ameliorated “the worst evils of the slum city through the process of mass suburbanization, though only at the expense . . . of creating others” (7).
Much of the book addresses the conflict between best-laid plans of planning thinkers like Ebenezer Howard, Raymond Unwin, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright and the implementation of their solutions to the problems they identified in the city. The first response presented to the problem of the city is the garden city concept embraced throughout the west as the answer to the poverty of the cities—envisioned as densely built villages away from the city. However, in many cases, the garden city ideas were implemented as exclusive suburbs based on the growing market for upper-middle-class housing to escape the poverty and minority concentrations of the central cities. Moving from the local context, Hall presents regional planning ideas of the environmental and regional thinkers like Frank Geddes and Lewis Mumford in the United Kingdom and United States, respectively. Once again, Hall champions the visions of great planners and vilifies the politics of liberal democracies that ultimately challenged the implementation of the ideas.
Returning to the city limits, Hall introduces readers to the boosterism and vision with the City Beautiful movement, which touched not just US and European cities but cities such as Delhi where colonial powers used the built environment to project the idealized city. Perhaps best defined through Daniel Burnham’s plan and belief that one should “make no little plans” (202), Chicago, Delhi, Berlin, and Moscow are used to illustrate the efforts made to “overcome collective inferiority complexes and boost business” (203). Hall continues to discuss the ways in which big investments changed the fabric of the city with Chapter 7 (“The City of Towers”) and the focus on the modern city of Corbusier and others in cities from Paris to Brasilia. These efforts to manage the urban population and promote the modernity of the city stand against the perceived failures of cities like St. Louis in its development of Pruitt-Igoe. Hall places these two sections of urban expansion and urban redesign in separate idea silos, connected only by the identification of the problem of poverty and slums identified before the turn of the twentieth century.
Hall uses chapter 10 (“The City of Theory”) as a transition between history and future by presenting the academics who have shaped modern planning theory, implicitly contrasting them against the practice-oriented visionaries of the early twentieth century. He illustrates the ways in which academics challenged the “rational-comprehensive model of planning” in the midst of the civil rights movement in the United States and the continued marginalization of the poor. During that time planners began to see themselves as advocates for marginalized communities. In describing the shift, Hall states that in contrast to the disconnected planners of the early to midcentury, planners by the mid-1970s were “talking late into the night with community groups, in the attempt to organize against hostile forces in the world outside” (400).
The final three chapters are devoted to the resultant modern trends of planning. Hall starts with the contrast of planning’s modern detractors—for stifling capitalism on one side and for stifling community-level agency on the other—in chapter 11 (“The City of Enterprise”). Illustrating the ways in which planners, stripped of power, and city governments enabled waterfront redevelopment such as the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Hall suggests that power and planning merely shifted from a top–down government apparatus to the entrepreneurial efforts of private sector actors. Chapter 12 (“The City of the Tarnished Belle Époque”) illustrates the opposite side of the coin: the contrast between the rapidly modernizing wealthy and the disconnected poor of metropolitan areas. With nods to Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, he uses competition and sustainability to illustrate the ways in which urban redevelopment defined the planning experience in the past quarter century. In his final chapter (“The City of the Permanent Underclass”), Hall wrestles with the fact that in spite of all the great efforts to plan, ameliorate, and redevelop cities, there remains a group—changing on its face, but not in substance—identified more than a hundred years ago, that remains stuck stubbornly in poor living conditions with limited agency.
At once disillusioned by planning’s inherently political nature and espousing planning’s ability to depoliticize action through rationality and creative thinking, Hall presents planning’s big ideas and, implicitly, the theories that underlie these ideas. His work focuses on the traditional sites of planning: that of the certified, educated planner, rather than the grassroots organizers, community development leaders, and others, including women and people of color. Although at times mired in the minutiae of projects, Hall rarely veers away from the larger conceptual framework of western planning over the past century. In spite of this top–down perspective on planning history, this book represents an important part of the canon of planning history literature.
Illuminating the challenge of “wicked problems” for planners, Hall presents the planning interventions and practices that have played a central role in the alleviation of human suffering, civic disorganization, and city degeneration since the late nineteenth century and contrasts them with persistent social exclusion. He ends his last edition of Cities of Tomorrow with a problem that ties together the threads of conflict between idea and practice: “why, despite all the massive intervening economic and social improvement, the underclass should appear so steadily to recruit members to replace those lost to it” (528).