ABSTRACT
Planning history is in full swing. Christopher Silver notes that the sheer magnitude of global scholarship published in the field over the past three decades is impossible to summarize (Chapter 35), which is a strong indication of the field’s dynamism and growth. Nevertheless, as Carola Hein observes in her introduction, the Handbook successfully “combines theoretical, methodological, historical, comparative, and global approaches to planning history—a synthetic approach for which there is no precedent” (Chapter 1). Indeed, this ambitious work offers a faithful, representative snapshot of the state of planning history by many of its key protagonists. Various rounds of discussion and editing helped to produce chapters that reflect contemporary debates and preoccupations, and speak with one another concerning where the field is and ought to be headed. But rather than forming those “imaginary connective lines” for planning history in order to falsely ascribe a “center of gravity” to it, as some of the CIAM history critiques reveal (Mumford 2000; van Rossem 1996), the Handbook embraces the work-in-progress nature of the project. If its foundations as a subgenre were only established in the early 1980s, planning history enjoys a particularly nimble position from which to address critiques from within and without, a testament to its latecomer status (Chapter 2).
