Urban planning has always been a preeminent instrument of political power. In this volume, contributions from Europe and Latin America provide insight into the functions of planning under very different political and societal constellations over the last hundred years: dictatorships, parliamentary democracies and illiberalism; capitalism and state socialism; state interventionism and neoliberalism, societies in times of peace and societies marked by colonial, civil, world or cold wars. Dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s made extensive use of the potential of planning for economic growth, for brutal repression, but also for the integration of certain population groups and as an effective means of propaganda. The legacy of these dictatorships still characterizes many European cities today and confronts planning with complex tasks. Dictatorial state socialism planned to establish a new social order with a particular technocratic rationality, which did not, however, cancel completely the tendential autonomy of the professional planning sphere. Parliamentary democracies and illiberal regimes have developed specific new practices of using planning to rebuild cities in the interests of neoliberal economic growth and populistic legitimization of power. Histories of Urban Planning and Political Power takes the next steps in significantly expanding our understanding of planning and politics. The book will be of interest to students and scholars for Urbanism, Urban/Town Planning, Spatial Planning, Spatial Politics, Urban Development, Urban Policies, Planning History and European History of the 20th Century. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Capital cities have been the seat of political power and central stage for their state’s political conflicts and rituals throughout the ages. In the modern era, they provide symbols for and confer meaning to the state, thereby contributing to the “invention” of the nation. Capitals capture the imagination of natives, visitors and outsiders alike, yet also express the outcomes of power struggles within the political systems in which they operate. This volume addresses the reciprocal relationships between identity, regime formation, urban planning, and public architecture in the Western world. It examines the role of urban design and architecture in expressing (or hiding) ideological beliefs and political agenda. Case studies include “old” capitals such as Rome, Vienna, Berlin and Warsaw; “new” ones such as Washington DC, Ottawa, Canberra, Ankara, Bonn, and Brasília; and the “European” capital Brussels. Each case reflects the authors’ different disciplinary backgrounds in architecture, history, political science, and urban studies, demonstrating the value of an interdisciplinary approach to studying cities.

With an unusually nuanced view of African planning systems in a time of upheaval and political change, Planning Power examines British and French colonial town and country planning efforts in Africa to provide valuable reading for researchers and students in a wide range of disciplines.

"This book uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to understand how professionals, administrations, scholars, and social movements have surveyed, evaluated and theorized the city, identified problems, and shaped and legitimized practical interventions in planning and administration. Urbanization has been accompanied, and partly shaped by, the formation of the city as a distinct domain of knowledge. This volume uses 'politics of urban knowledge' as a lens to develop a new perspective on urban history and urban planning history. Through case studies of mainly 19th and 20th century examples, the book demonstrates that urban knowledge is not simply a neutral means to represent cities as pre-existing entities, but rather the outcome of historically contingent processes and practices of urban actors addressing urban issues and the power relations in which they are embedded. It shows how urban knowledge-making has reshaped the categories, rationales, and techniques through which urban spaces were produced, governed and contested, and how the knowledge concerned became performative of newly emerging urban orders. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of urban history and urban studies, as well as the history of technology, science and knowledge and of science studies"--

The question of who actually ran cities in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries has been increasingly debated in recent years. As well as trying to understand the distribution of political power and the rise of broad political participation, urban historians have questioned how and whether elites retained influence in municipal government. The essays in this collection provide a detailed examination of the relationship between urban elites and the exercise of 'power', bringing together economic, social and cultural history with the political history of power resources and decision-making. The volume challenges common perceptions of a monolithic urban elite by looking at specific case studies. Collectively these essays provide a more sophisticated view of the exercise of urban power as the negotiation of various elite groups defined by their economic, social, political or cultural privilege. To contribute to this complex account of the history of cities, elites, and their influence, the collection applies a range of methodological approaches to studying European and American cities, as well as the wider world.

Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles, historian and architect Dolores Hayden proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles. In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory. The second part documents a decade of research and practice by The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and Asian American families have experienced it. One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third chapter tells the story of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project deals with bitter memories—slavery, repatriation, internment—but shows how citizens survived and persevered to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities. Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati, Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history projects in cities and towns across the country.

The history of public policy in postwar America tends to fixate on developments at the national level, overlooking the crucial work done by individual states in the 1960s and ’70s. In this book, Nicholas Dagen Bloom demonstrates the significant and enduring impact of activist states in five areas: urban planning and redevelopment, mass transit and highways, higher education, subsidized housing, and the environment. Bloom centers his story on the example set by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose aggressive initiatives on the pressing issues in that period inspired others and led to the establishment of long-lived state polices in an age of decreasing federal power. Metropolitan areas, for both better and worse, changed and operated differently because of sustained state action—How States Shaped Postwar America uncovers the scope of this largely untold story.