ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design is a fully illustrated descriptive and explanatory history of the development of urban design ideas and paradigms of the past 150 years. The ideas and projects, hypothetical and built, range in scale from the city to the urban block level. The focus is on where the generic ideas originated, the projects that were designed following their precepts, the functions they address and/or afford, and what we can learn from them.

The morphology of a city—its built environment—evolves unselfconsciously as private and governmental investors self-consciously erect buildings and infrastructure in a pragmatic, piecemeal manner to meet their own ends. Philosophers, novelists, architects, and social scientists have produced myriad ideas about the nature of the built environment that they consider to be superior to those forms resulting from a laissez-faire attitude to urban development.

Rationalist theorists dream of ideal futures based on assumptions about what is good; empiricists draw inspirations from what they perceive to be working well in existing situations. Both groups have presented their advocacies in manifestoes and often in the form of generic solutions or illustrative designs. This book traces the history of these ideas and will become a standard reference for scholars and students interested in the history of urban spaces, including architects, planners, urban historians, urban geographers, and urban morphologists.

Prologue: The Nature of Urban Design

Part One: Antecedents of Twentieth Century Urban Design

Chapter 1. Religious Canons and Prescriptions

Chapter 2. The Classical and Beaux Arts Tradition

Chapter 3. Social and Philanthropic Urban Design

Chapter 4. The Garden Suburb

Chapter 5. The Urbanist Tradition

Part Two: Early Twentieth Century Manifestoes, Paradigms, Generic Concepts, and Specific Designs

Chapter 6. The City Beautiful

Chapter 7. Modern Empiricism

Chapter 8. The Rationalist Response

Part Three: Post-World War Two Pragmatic Urban Design and The Rationalist and Empiricist Responses

Chapter 9. The Post-World War Two Rationalists

Chapter 10. The Post-World War Two Empiricists

Chapter 11. The Postmodernist and The Deconstructivist Response

Part Four: Urban Design in an Age of Corporate Financial Capital

Chapter 12. Modernist, Neo-Modernist, and Hyper-Modernist Urban Design

Chapter 13. Hyper-Modernism, Parametricism, and Urban Design

Chapter 14. The Empiricist Responses

Chapter 15, Sustainable Urbanism and Urban Design

Chapter 16. Smart Cities and Urban Design

Epilogue: Looking Back to Look Forward

Chapter 17. A Critique of Twenty and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design

Chapter 18. The Way Forward: Toward Compact Cities