Provincializing planning: Reflections on spatial ordering and imperial power

This paper takes the development of the British town planning movement as its starting point to explore a series of challenges for the discipline’s historiography. The emergence of the professional field involved the circulation of ideas beyond the metropolitan core to colonial territories with spatial interventions that were deemed both physically and morally beneficial. The paper explores the role played by the discipline in developing spatialized forms of ethnic and racial differentiation within colonial territories. I conclude that British planning has largely ignored its own historiography, including the colonial legacy, enabling the discipline to assert its role as a socially progressive profession.

Facets of planning action: heritage, local environment and design

In this chapter and chapter 10, different facets and fields of planning are analysed, in order to give examples of how political and ideological analysis of planning can be undertaken for particular types of planning. This chapter takes a critical look at three facets of planning activity, for heritage, local environmental matters and design quality. It is argued that these are key aspects of British planning, with extensive achievements on each dimension. But the perspective in each field is seen as ideologically conservative, raising the consideration of these facets above a range of social and deep environmental concerns, which can be crowded out by the skewing of the perspective on these considerations. This skewing is reinforced by the play of local and national pressure politics, which gives a high profile to especially heritage and light green issues. This can however vary significantly between localities, depending on local political cultures.

Ideologies in Britain, with initial linking to planning

The primary ideologies are surveyed, taken to be the classic ideological composites, most centrally conservatism and socialism. Also introduced are several other kinds of ideological forces, primarily feminism, environmentalism and several dimensions of nationalism. These are then related in an initial manner to British planning, particularly that within England, concentrating on the periods of Conservative and Labour government in the last two decades. The significance of the classic left-right distinctions is brought out, whilst also stressing the importance in certain fields of the other ideological dimensions. These however generally have to build some relationship with one of the core ideological composites if they are to have a powerful impact on policy and practice at all levels of planning activity.

The Townscape Movement and the Politics of Post-War Urbanism

This article examines the political and aesthetic significance of the Townscape movement, an architectural and planning movement that emerged in the 1940s and advocated for urban density, individuality, and vibrant street life. Townscape’s vernacular, human-scale vision of urban life was a significant strand in post-war planning culture, one that existed alongside the archetypal forms of social democratic planning, from new towns to tower blocks. By examining the writings of key Townscape figures associated with the Architectural Review, this article argues that Townscape engaged with the tensions at the heart of the post-war social democratic project—individualism versus community, debates over expertise and authority, and responses to the culture of affluence. In doing so, it contributes to a broader urban historiography on the post-war ‘return to the city’, showing how post-war urbanism, usually depicted as an American phenomenon centred around the figure of Jane Jacobs, had its counterpart in a uniquely British planning movement.

Optimism, Traffic, and the Historic City in Post-War British Planning

The first chapter introduces the way architectural and planning ideas were conceived and perceived as responses to concurrent British concerns and ambitions. A widespread optimism about Britain’s economic future led planners to revise many of their assumptions about planning that had been formed in the aftermath of the Second World War. This chapter stresses the centrality of the growth of traffic for architectural thinking in the period, while also showing how architect-planners were influenced by a cross-cultural reinvestment in distinctly urban values, often centred on the slippery term ‘urbanity’. Planners developed an approach to the buildings of the past, where what was at stake was providing a new environment to a selected number of historical buildings, often at the expense of the more mundane built fabric of cities.