Planning the Twentieth Century City: The Advanced Capitalist World. - Brief Article - book review

Architectural Review, The, May, 2002 by Colin Ward

By Stephen V. Ward, Chichester: John Wiley. 2002. [pounds sterling]29.95

We have already seen several global surveys of twentieth-century town planning, and Professor Ward (who is no relation, but has been a valuable president of the International Planning History Society) is aware of the limitations of the 'grand narratives' approach to the chronology of attempts to manage city growth and to cope with the inheritance of sub-standard housing as well as with the management of urban growth.

In a well-illustrated international narrative, he traces innovations in changing trends in planning ideology, and their diffusion round the world. To select just one aspect of recent history, he is particularly sensitive to the changes in the climate of ideas in the Reagan/Thatcher era which appeared to demand 'a wholesale rejection of twentieth-century planning' in favour of 'a much older style of rampant, free-enterprise capitalism'. Out then the ideological innovation of a quite different and contradictory ideal, that of sustainability, formed the basis, he notes, for 'a new self-confidence amongst western urban planners,' which in Britain, at least, was vitiated by the way Thatcherism had established a pattern of chronic under-investment in all public services.

And Ward suggests that too often British planners have been working with at least one, and sometimes both, 'hands tied behind their backs.' He is equally shrewd and frank in his judgements on the evolution of planning policies in all the other advanced economies, concluding that the next series of planning innovations will emerge from the 'great inchoate cities' of the emerging world.