ABSTRACT
Planning history has been from its origins an interdisciplinary enterprise, and should be understood as a field rather than a discipline with a self-conscious, deeply rooted identity. Rather than insights from within planning history, this chapter offers more of a historian’s—and specifically, an urban historian’s—view. Both are necessary in understanding the field: planning history relied and continues to rely on a cross-fertilization of historical methods with planning practices; in tracing the intellectual lineage of historical developments within planning, scholars relied on research methods fundamental to the practice of history (the use of archival, primary, and secondary sources), as well as the spatial analysis and surveying techniques of planning. Over the course of the 20th century, writers of planning history also came to incorporate subject matter and approaches typically found within other disciplines and fields like architecture, sociology, geography, political science, economics, and anthropology. In so doing, these scholars were participants in a much larger interdisciplinary movement: in much the same way geographers actively engaged scholars across the humanities and social sciences in a theoretically rich study of the production of space, for instance, scholars across the disciplines made use of cultural anthropologist Frank Boaz’s insight that “any sense of unity that the concept of culture implicitly predicts for a group is really a subjective unity, one that is constituted only in the mind of the observer, such as a politician, a market strategist, an urban planner, an artist, or a social scientist” (Rotenberg, 2012). Some of the best planning histories, then, have explained the development of subjective unities—unities that were at times hegemonic, at other times fraying, and inconsistently produced by an array of historical actors that could (but did not always) include official urban planners.
