Planning the Twentieth-Century City: The Advanced Capitalist World

Abstract

This book examines the innovation and diffusion of modern urban planning ideas in Western Europe, North America, Japan and Australia during the twentieth century. It charts the creativity of the early twentieth century, the broader national agendas for social improvement of the interwar years, the destruction of war and the high hopes for reconstruction after 1945. The reader subsequently learns about the zenith of comprehensive urban modernisation in the 1960s and 1970s and the weakening of urban planning as market-led political ideologies gained ascendancy in the 1980s. Finally, the book discusses the world-wide emergence of the new planning ideology of sustainable urban development during the 1990s and considers the prospects for the new century. Drawing on a huge volume of recent international research, this book is richly detailed, with examples from many different countries.