Visual planning and urbanism in the mid-twentieth century: Conference at Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 11-13 September 2007

Abstract

Planning attitudes with a particular focus on visual and three-dimensional planning have been insufficiently studied in histories of modernism. This conference, sponsored by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, focused on ‘a strand of more practical urbanism, modernist in flavour but historically informed [which sought] to recover positive conceptions of the city and town after the perceived deprivations of the nineteenth century’. Dealing with a timespan similar to that of narratives of modernist planning which targeted a radical reformation of the city – from the CIAM doctrine codified by the Athens Charter to the de-urbanist proposals of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City – most of the attitudes discussed in the conference papers remained critical of such radical restructuring.