Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850

This textbook is a comprehensive survey of urbanism and urban design since the industrial revolution, and a detailed history of designers’ efforts to shape modern cities. It begins with an overview of technical and social changes in mid-nineteenth century London and Paris, and then examines varied efforts to shape urban extensions and central new interventions elsewhere. These included tenement reform efforts for the working class in nineteenth century London and New York, Städtebau (city building) in German-speaking environments, the Garden City Movement, the American City Beautiful movement, “Town Planning” in Britain, and “urbanisme” in France. Less well known topics included are urban modernization in East Asia before 1930, and suburban planning in the United States from the 1910s and 1930s. The book also addresses social change and modern urbanism in Europe in the 1920s, including the emergence of CIAM (International Congresses for Modern Architecture), 1928-56; the political, technological and urban transformations of World War 2, the expansion of racially segregated decentralization in the United States; global urbanism and modernism after 1945; and European and Latin American postwar urbanism. It then takes up urbanistic aspects of postwar architectural culture, including critiques of modernist planning and responses to the ongoing challenges posed by efforts to create organized self-build settlements and to make more ecologically sustainable cities.

Publication Details

Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850
Yale University Press
May 15, 2018
360 pages, 7 x 10
125 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780300207729
Hardcover