The Visual Culture of Planning

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 300-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Shanken

Over the course of the twentieth century, American planners deployed an array of visual techniques to analyze, represent, and promote the American city. Early planners looked to maps of poverty, disease, ethnicity, war, and land use, as well as archaeology, world’s fairs, and the photography of social reform. They became adept at combining drawings, diagrams, and charts to map information and make visual arguments for urban transformation. These techniques were tools of cultural critique and anticipation that shaped American understandings and expectations of cities. This essay surveys the imagery of urban planning as a prompt to historians to pay close attention to the visual culture of urban planning.

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1435-1449 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES

AbstractThis review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers’ neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as ‘patched-up societies’ whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change.


2016 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-189
Author(s):  
Angela Sirna

This article uses Catoctin Mountain Park as a case study to chart the evolution of social policy on a national park landscape. It places these changes in the larger context of economic, social, and land use policies throughout the twentieth century. These policies and programs often created complicated relationships between the park and certain groups. It is essential for the National Park Service to understand these complexities in order for it to be a good steward of the agency’s own history and provide new opportunities for visitor engagement.


2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE WILDMAN

ABSTRACTLiverpool and Manchester have come to typify twentieth-century urban decay and their demise is strongly associated with the perceived decline of local government after 1918. By the 1930s, contemporaries had stereotyped northern cities as places of poverty and deprivation, in comparison to the prosperous south. The divide was reinforced by economic historians who focused on regional variations in unemployment and economic depression. This article challenges stereotypical images of interwar Liverpool and Manchester by illustrating the ambitious programmes of urban redevelopment implemented by their Corporations in response to political and economic instability. Grandiose projects such as the Wythenshawe Estate, Mersey Tunnel and Manchester Central Library aimed to stimulate employment and to boost local economies and morale. Redevelopment was promoted heavily to present new images of Liverpool and Manchester. Crucially, urban transformation was marketed as a way to communicate with the newly enfranchised, classless citizen and suggests similarities with broader strategies employed by the Conservative party to engage with the mass electorate. The level of ambition and innovation demonstrates that local municipal culture thrived and Liverpool (with close American links) is shown to have been at the forefront of innovations in civic design and urban planning.


2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-79
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Nikorowicz-Zatorska

Abstract The present paper focuses on spatial management regulations in order to carry out investment in the field of airport facilities. The construction, upgrades, and maintenance of airports falls within the area of responsibility of local authorities. This task poses a great challenge in terms of organisation and finances. On the one hand, an active airport is a municipal landmark and drives local economic, social and cultural development, and on the other, the scale of investment often exceeds the capabilities of local authorities. The immediate environment of the airport determines its final use and prosperity. The objective of the paper is to review legislation that affects airports and the surrounding communities. The process of urban planning in Lodz and surrounding areas will be presented as a background to the problem of land use management in the vicinity of the airport. This paper seeks to address the following questions: if and how airports have affected urban planning in Lodz, does the land use around the airport prevent the development of Lodz Airport, and how has the situation changed over the time? It can be assumed that as a result of lack of experience, land resources and size of investments on one hand and legislative dissonance and peculiar practices on the other, aviation infrastructure in Lodz is designed to meet temporary needs and is characterised by achieving short-term goals. Cyclical problems are solved in an intermittent manner and involve all the municipal resources, so there’s little left to secure long-term investments.


Author(s):  
Olha Dorosh ◽  
Iryna Kupriyanchik ◽  
Denys Melnyk

The land and town planning legislation concerning the planning of land use development within the united territorial communities (UTC) is considered. It is found that legislative norms need to be finalized. The necessity of updating the existing land management documentation developed prior to the adoption of the Law of Ukraine "On Land Management" and changes in the structure of urban development in connection with the adoption of the Law of Ukraine "On Regulation of Urban Development" was proved as they do not ensure the integrity of the planning process within the territories of these communities through their institutional incapacity (proved by the example of the Palan Unified Territorial Community of the Uman district of the Cherkasy region). The priority of land management and urban planning documents as the most influential tools in planning the development of land use systems in UTC is scientifically grounded and their interdependence established.


Author(s):  
Thomas H. Reilly

This book is a history of the Chinese Protestant elite and their contribution to building a new China in the years from 1922 to 1952. While a small percentage of China’s overall population, China’s Protestants constituted a large and influential segment of the urban elite. They exercised that influence through their churches, hospitals, and schools, especially the universities, and also through institutions such as the YMCA and the YWCA, whose membership was drawn from the modern sectors of urban life. These Protestant elites believed that they could best contribute to the building of a new China through their message of social Christianity, believing that Christianity could help make Chinese society strong, modern, and prosperous, but also characterized by justice and mercy. More than preaching a message, the Protestant elite also played a critical social role, through their institutions, broadening the appeal and impact of social movements, and imparting to them a greater sense of legitimacy. This history begins with the elite’s participation in social reform campaigns in the early twentieth century, continues with their efforts in resisting imperialism, and ends with their support for the Communist-led social revolution.


Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland

Chapter 1 explores Woolf’s writings up to the end of 1925 in relation to scientific ideas on wave-particle duality, providing the ‘retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels’ which Michael Whitworth has suggested shows that she was working ‘in anticipation of the physicists’. The chapter as a whole challenges this idea of anticipation, showing that Woolf was actually working in parallel with physicists, philosophers, and artists in the early twentieth century, all of whom were starting to question dualistic models and instead beginning to develop complementary ones. A retrospect on wave-particle duality is also provided, making reference to Max Planck’s work on quanta and Albert Einstein’s development of light quanta. This chapter pays close attention to Woolf’s writing of light and her use of conjunctions, suggesting that Woolf was increasingly looking to write ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’. Among other texts, it considers Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, and ‘Sketch of the Past’.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110017
Author(s):  
Shaik Mahaboob Basha

The question of widow remarriage, which occupied an important place in the social reform movement, was hotly debated in colonial Andhra. Women joined the debate in the early twentieth century. There was a conservative section of women, which bitterly opposed the widow remarriage movement and attacked the social reformers, both women and men. Pulugruta Lakshmi Narasamamba led this group of women. Lakshmi Narasamamba treated widow remarriage (punarvivaham) with contempt and termed it as an affront to the fidelity (pativratyam) of Hindu women. According to her, widow remarriage was equal to ‘prostitution’, and the widows who married again could not be granted the status of kulanganas (respectable or chaste women). Lakshmi Narasamamba’s stand on the question of widow remarriage led to the emergence of a fiery and protracted controversy among women which eventually led to the division of the most famous women’s organization, the Shri Vidyarthini Samajamu. She opposed not only widow remarriage but also post-puberty marriage and campaigned in favour of child marriage. This article describes the whole debate on the widow remarriage question that took place among women. It is based on the primary sources, especially the woefully neglected women’s journals in the Telugu language.


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