Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century

by Peter Geoffrey Hall

Cities of Tomorrow is a critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it.

A critical history of planning in theory and practice in the twentieth century, as well as of the social and economic problems and opportunities that gave rise to it Trenchant, perceptive, global in coverage, this book is an unrivalled account of its crucial subject Comprehensively revised to take account of abundant new literature published since its original appearance, and to view the 1990s in historical perspective Reviews the development of the modern planning movement over the entire span of the twentieth century

Genres: Urban Planning, Architecture, Urbanism, History, Nonfiction, Urban, Cities

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Hall provides an interesting look at the theoretical side of 20th century city planning, and, unlike most writers, gives it a real international spin, examining everything from the Garden City in Japan to the "ABC Communities" along Stockholm's Tunnelbana, with some focus, of course, on the Anglo-American tradition. The problem here is the book is just too damned crowded with disorganized info and names.

Hall admits as much in the introduction, where he claims that his attempt to organize the book by broad (and almost undefinable) themes, such as "The City of Sweat Equity," and "The City in the Region," necessitated some jumping around. Still, the jumble is confusing.

There are some good stories here though. I didn't know that the UK tried to mimic President Johnson's disastrous "Community Action Programs" with "Community Development Projects" of their own. Formed in the wake of Enoch Powell's terrifying 1968 report on racial tensions in British cities (he pointedly drew the image of the Tiber river flowing with blood), the CDPs are described by Hall as a "carbon copy" of the American program, and like it, their hopes for local, democratic participation in decision-making ran head-long into local bureaucracies, and they were scrapped by 1976. The book is filled with such interesting international borrowings, both of failures and successes. One is the Enterprise Zone.

Ironically, considering his pseudo-socialist and anarchist leanings, Peter Hall himself was given credit by the new Thatcther administration for creating the idea behind their "Enterprise Zone" project, whereby areas of devastated central cities would be given freedom from regulations and bureaucracy with the hope that they would develop into mini-Hong Kongs. His discussion of the London Docklands' enterprise zone, then, is particularly worthwhile. Using the American idea of a government-sponsored development corporation (here the LDDC), the British ministry did succeed in reviving a once derelict section of London (every single dock in the area had shut down between 1967 and 1981), and they did create notable monuments such as Canary Wharf, but the LDDC's most notable, and surprising, effect was to scare the City into allowing more office development in order to retain banks against the Docklands' growing threat. This in turn led to an office glut, 40% vacancy rates, and the bankruptcy of the area's Canadian developer (O&Y - which later rebought the project with money from a Saudi Prince). It is a cautionary tale of how an idea can get detached from its moorings, and how old regulations can to distort a market even as they are dismantled.

My favorite part of the book, however, was Hall's insightful history into the background of the Moynihan report on the Negro family, released in 1965 to much derision and obloquy. Hall shows that the concerns about the disorganization of poor, black families goes back at least as far as WEB Du Bois's report on the Philadelphia Negro in 1900, and goes on through Robert Park's 1925 article on Chicago's "Zone of Transition," and E. Franklin Frazier's 1939 book on "The Negro Family in the United States." Hall shows that all of these writers made the link between urbanization, broken families, and crime long before Moniyhan, and writers such as William Julius Wilson continued examining the link afterwards. Each seemed equally at a loss about what to do about it. We remain at a loss today.

One problem. Hall cites the 1965 report as coming from "Senator" Moynihan, when Moynihan wouldn't become a senator until 1976. This is representative of a broader confusion. Hall seems to misunderstand several US programs like the New Deal HOLC and FHA, and misstates numerous facts about the United States. From a British writer these confusions are somewhat understandable, but they do make me wonder how much of that international story he so relishes is truly accurate.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I am of two minds on this book. Most importantly, it is a very comprehensive look at 20th century planning that takes a wonderfully international approach. The use of examples and vignettes is well done. However, the writing is difficult to power through. It is often obtuse and difficult to fully understand the finer points of Hall's descriptives and analyses. Sometimes it feels like you're listening to an inside joke and trying to decide if you should laugh along or simply accept that it is time to move onto the next paragraph. When I hovered over the two-stars on Goodreads and the caption "it was ok" popped up, that seemed to sum up my feelings quite well.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cities of Tomorrow well-deserves its place on Planetizen's list of Top 20 Books Every Planner Should Read . For anyone who wants to understand the knotty intellectual origins of 19th and 20th-century planning, or, put differently, see from a bird's eye view what has led urban planning to be such a mess, this books offers a marvelous armchair tour.

Hall's narrative jumps considerably around in time, ranging from the 1850s to the 2000s, and across the globe from Berkeley to Chandigarh to London and Brasilia. He apologizes in the preface for this apparent jumble, explaining that it's necessary given the convoluted course that ideas followed from brain to paper to built environment. This is the intriguing thesis of his book: that modern planning has often been such a mess because the most influential visions, by the likes of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Unwin, Daniel Burnham and others were rarely applied as, when, or where their theorists intended, leading often to disastrous results.

Some ideas were ahead of their time. In other cases, political conditions were unfavorable in a theorist's country of origin. For example, Le Corbusier's model for working class housing blocs never took hold in the prosperous, homogeneous European cities for which they were designed, but did so as underfunded projects in Chandigarh, India and the inner cities of Chicago (e.g. Cabrini Green), Baltimore, and St. Louis (e.g. Pruitt-Igoe), with disastrous results. Likewise Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of a self-sufficient, linear countryside-city (which he called "Broadacre City"), strung like a row of beads along an attractive parkway, was ultimately realized as the ugly, sprawling strip malls of middle America, now reviled almost unanimously by distinguished architects.

Some ideas fared well in translation. L'Enfant's plan for a "city of monuments" in Washington D.C. was superbly emulated in Canberra, the Australian capital, which also incorporated elements of the "Garden City" envisioned by Raymond Unwin and Raymond Parker in the U.K. Burnham's grandiose plan for modern Chicago was largely implemented, thanks to support from local business leaders who saw in it a great tourist draw, although the grand, European-style plazas he designed never did, and his master plan for San Francisco was scrapped in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. These exceptions aside, Hall seems to say that reality and the filter of local conditions often thwarted planners' noblest ideas and intentions.

The book is broken into chapters that suggest a progression of movements and ideas, yet also a circular, almost Sisyphean cycle in urban history. We move from The City of Dreadful Night (the age of the Victorian slum), through the City in the Garden and the City in the Region (a flourishing time of utopian visions), to The City on the Highway and The City of Enterprise (rapid urbanization and sprawl), and finally back where we started to The City of the Permanent Underclass (the seemingly unchanging fate of the inner-city poor). While conceding that the urban experience has generally improved since 1850, Hall doesn't heap any praise on planning for the progress. In his closing comments, he suggests that planning, in part because of its ambiguous political stature, and to a great extent its muddled intellectual legitimacy, has left a very mixed track record in addressing the health, prosperity and happiness of low-income urban populations.

Yea, this book will certainly not inspire legions of would-be planners. From Hall's account, enlightened ideas in planning have an abysmal rate of successful implementation. Most have been distorted or obstructed by wars, economic downturns, the changing winds of politics, or the tides of intellectual fashion. Only single-minded visionaries (e.g. Haussmann, Moses, Delouvrier, Burnham), backed by enormous power, could cut through the inevitable thicket of citizen protest, legal obstruction, physical obstacles and budgetary constraints to give form to their ideas. This style of top-down planning, Hall notes, has largely gone out of fashion (thank you, Robert Moses). But the response, community planning, has also shown its limitations. According to the natural cycle of things, big-picture planning may be on the ascendant again. Paris looks ready to fulfill the grand regional vision Delouvrier built in skeleton form with the RER in the 1960s. Even the U.S. seems ripe for bold new regional and urban visions. But if the meta-narrative in Hall's book is any indication, what comes next, however new it may seem will be for any informed historian of cities a fresh round of deja-vu.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hall writes an excellent history of planning theory and practice and has filled it with lots of great stories that keep the book from being too dry. Believe it or not, community/urban planning has a fascinating history with a lot of quirkly characters. I had to read this for class, and now I look forward to going back through it and reading for pleasure.

[Anisa Permana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy to understand.

[Patrick Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The evil that Le Corbusier did lives after him; the good is perhaps interred with his books, which are seldom read for the simple reason that most are unreadable".


Urban planning does not, sadly, have a reputation as the most interesting of subjects. In some respects, Peter Hall does a brilliant job of challenging the subject's reputation for somnolence. He deliberately relates the subject not only to wider political and social concerns but also to literature and the arts. He is an excellent writer in small chunks, and can be quite witty. This is most evident in the opening sentences of his chapters, one of which I have quoted at the beginning of this review. Another introduces us to "James Thomson, a poet whose Victorian industriousness never quite compensated for [his] monumental lack of talent".

Unfortunately, the book is not well organized, and struck this reader as being far too long.

[Heather Schwartz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I fell in love with this book during an Architecture Seminar Class and can only conclude that it was because it enveloped so many different aspects of what I liked at the time...philosophy, political history, modernism, postmodernism,...and all those crazy top-down socialized ideas in the early part of the 20th C. Both the good and the bad results, but more importantly the genius and the INTENTIONS behind the physical designs. Did I mention it's well written?

[Börkur Sigurbjörnsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Hall gives a nice and detailed history of urban planning and design. It has a strong focus on the people in the history of urban planning but does not go in depth about the technology and characteristics of different planning and design theories. As a novice in urban planning I was hoping to get a bit more of the latter. Yet I enjoyed the book and might browse it again when I have improved my technical background.

[Karena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book if you're curious about or studying different models of planning, or the history and development of cities.

[Chris Hamby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Hall manages to be very entertaining through a torrent of names, places, and dates. Great overview of Anglo-American planning history.

[Jude · Rating 1 out of 5]

An atrocious, unreadable book by an author who appears to hate everything

[Scott]

I finished this whole damn book at that is an a c h i e v e m e n t, oh boy

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Hall traces theories of urban planning from the Victorian era to his present (mid-1980s). This book is a good summary of twentieth-century urban planning, though at times, it's a bit dry, which is saying something, when I'm a fan of the genre.

Hall starts his account with the urban poor in Victorian England and in similar locations around the globe at the time. For him, modern urban planning essentially originates in this milieu, the idea being, How can we reform society such that the urban poor will no longer live in such squalor?

One of these early plans was the Garden City, but like most such plans, the original theory rarely made it into actual practice, and the idea got twisted out of its original intent. Also, like so many of the ideas, in part because it was never put into practice as written, the planning theory did not end up helping the poor. Rather, its benefits went mostly to the middle class and the rich. The Garden City, in theory, was to be a city--or series of cities--interspersed in gardens. Each would be of limited size, with a green belt around it. In the city, there would be moderate space for homes, and there would be businesses and work within the city itself. It's this latter portion of the idea that rarely made it into reality. Instead, such cities became suburbs, with people commuting into the big city for work. This meant such cities only helped those with enough means to afford such a commute. The urban poor remained urban.

Another idea was one much maligned by Jane Jacobs--that of Corbusier. He had the concept of towers in parks. Again, his idea was thrown a bit out of context. When applied to the urban poor, such towers did not create wonderful communities. But, Hall notes, such towers could and did work for those of higher class.

Then there were the nonplanners, the anarchists, who essentially denoted that cities should grow on their own and that planners should work around that. Had I taken notes during my reading I could have likely explained this section better, as well as the sections previously. I will probably need to read the entire book over at some point.

Hall eventually turns his attention to the split between academic planners and those who practice, a split that made its way more felt in the second half of the twentieth century and that showed how academics had become uninvolved in how cities really work. In this same timeframe, there were more private-public partnerships, and some cities actually saw renewal, but again, the solutions led mostly to gentrification rather than actually helping the urban poor. In other words, the poor, rather than being raised up, were simply pushed out.

A final chapter focuses on poverty and racism. As Hall rightly notes, the middle class did grow from the time of the Victorians to the present such that some issues are less troublesome than they were one hundred years ago. He is also an advocate, it seems, based on the research he cites, for the death of family being a large cause for the fall into or continuing life in poverty, more so than race (though the history of racism certainly plays a role in where people fall in terms of class). Urban planning, it seems, while intended to aid in resolving these issues has ultimately not been able to solve the problem.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hall argues that, though the dominant school interpretation about the historiography of urban planning was that it was a response to capitalism in organizing production and managing crises, he instead looks at its development in the 19th century. Starting as an answer to the question of the slums and utter poverty of places like London, where the threat of insurrection and social conflict bubbled below the surface, Hall argues that planning started as an anarchist strategy of building democratic societies from below against the market or bureaucratic control. It developed three major schools from there, the first being the garden city, in which cities would be radically decentralized and depopulated into networks of town built into nature. Even as city planners became able to implement many of their visions, the market began to reshape cities. The second big impulse was the subordination of the city to the regional by city planners. The third big impulse was City Beautiful movement, which reoriented city planning into civic pride and visions of a city that would uplift its citizens through aesthetically pleasing city planning. The remainder of the book looks to trends within city planning, from HG Wells vision of mass suburbanization of southern England to the sprawled vision of Los Angeles public transit system, to trends towards intellectualized bureaucracies of towers of the city, automobile cities, and then finally a return to the anarchistic roots of city planners which had an uncomfortable alliance with market forces proponents who wanted to strip away from cities the ability to hold back economic development by private profit seekers. Enterprise zones, for instance, allows little regulation in an attempt to create “Little Hong Kongs” within cities. He ends with a chapter that looks to poverty and the underclass, fueled by racial structures.

Key Themes and Concepts
-City planning swings between socialist-bureaucracy, decentralized anti-capitalist anarchism, and market-oriented ideas.
-Garden-cities look to decentralize cities and build networks of towns into nature.
-Regional city planning subordinated the city to the overall region.
-Civic Pride by City Beautiful movement, in which Urban Renewal with New York spending far more money than all other cities to remake its neighborhoods.
-The swing back towards mixed occupancy and ignorance of race in the 1960s city planners was a backlash against urban planning, but it probably contributed to yuppification of cities.

[বোন রোদ · Rating 1 out of 5]

0.1/10

I really wish I’d liked Cities of Tomorrow. Peter Hall was a UCL professor! And I’m a UCL student! He taught in the Bartlett school of Urban Planning, and I’m learning one of the modules he helped create! For all intents and purposes, I should’ve loved this. I’m a history buff. I love urbanism.

And yet.

Peter Hall has the worst opinions in urbanism.

There’s no two ways about it. Every single epoque in urban planning’s most destructive and backwards century—the twentieth—is covered in a disgustingly impartial light. Movements whose sole purpose was to displace black people with rich whites—and ended up making working-class neighbourhoods into slums in the process? The planners had good intentions; it was the golden age of planning; the time of ruthless progress. The tragically destructive process of urban motorway construction in the US and UK? An understandable response to the trends of the times. The entire process of suburbia? Well that’s just the free market at work, baby—never mind the fact that single family zoning (the most restrictive form of urban planning in tthe western world) is the only reason suburbia ever grew to its current extent!

This man fanboys over all the most tired and disproven urbanism theories of our history, casts a non-judgemental eye over the most malicious, and snidely criticises the few that have shown actual promise. From the 200th to the 650th page, it truly felt like Peter Hall was doing everything in his power to turn the reader away, including a baffling amount of name-dropping and time-hopping.

There was one redeeming feature—the only reason this book didn’t score even further in the negative: its first 200 pages are essential. As an urban planner, you are told again and again how bad the late nineteenth century cities were; how urbanism in the twentieth was in essence a reactionary movement blinded by the tales of decades long past. But this book really shows you how bad it was, leaves no doubt that that nineteenth century city was often hell on Earth. For its first 200 pages, I could not recommend this book more to anyone wishing to understand the foundations of urban planning. For the rest?

Please, do yourself a favour. Read the death and life of great american cities. Peter Hall may be snooty about it, but Jane Jacobs was a million times more intelligent and helpful than he’ll ever be.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have had this book for over 30 years and only just got round to reading it ! I found it unfortunately too dry and academic for my tastes. I would suggest that it is aimed mainly at those studying town planning and less at those wanting an entertaining and interesting read on cities and development such as that offered by Concretopia by John Grindrod which I have previously reviewed. Nevertheless, there were some very interesting sections on the garden city movement, the growth of the suburbs and the Corbusian approach to housing. Also, some interesting comparisons between the different approaches in the UK, US and Europe. How much you enjoy a book is often in my view dictated by the final few chapters, however this book unfortunately disappointed with a dry and lengthy chapter recounting in far too much details various social studies of the disadvantaged within American cites. Although worthwhile recounting in passing so far as they affected land use planning and development (not an awful lot) it represents an unfortunate meander off the main topic under consideration.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a perfect book, by any means: as with every general history of a very big topic I’ve ever read, Hall’s choices about when to go into detail and when to skim the surface are sometimes strange or frustrating; sometimes his aesthetic preferences are pushed too much to the front; and the penultimate chapter, in which he talks about race and segregation most directly, is...let’s say “dated.”

All that said, though, it’s still a remarkable feat of scholarship, tying together both general trends and specific developments in multiple countries over more than a century, and linking them to the larger history as well as to intellectual and academic developments. The bibliography is almost just a list of significant works of the last 120 years. It took me forever to get through, but that’s because it is just a colossal amount of information.

[Gabriel Casagrande · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm reading this book as a preparatory for my master's degree. As someone who is having the first contact with the subject, I think it's far from an easy read. Honestly, sometimes I find it quite overwhelming. There's definitely a ton of information and I've been learning a lot from it. But I really think there are some editorial issues. Sometimes I find myself reading paragraphs multiple times to get what he means. It's definitely not a fluid reading, and he abuses of the appositions. The timeline is also VERY confusing. I often have too stop like "hey, did this happen before of after that?". In fact, he warns us in the preface that he doesnt mean to perfectly respect the timeline but, man, it should have been said it is a real mess!

I think I can define it as good comprehensive book that takes some energy to understand.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, I need to revisit this one when I have an independent knowledge of planning as a discipline. The chapters that I did have a pre-existing knowledge about were fairly interesting, but as an introductory book to planning, Cities of Tomorrow is pretentious to the point of alienating even enthusiastic and curious readers. Throughout, Hall exhibits a limited capacity to account for the pertinence or necessity of namedropping, and as such readers are left to parse a litany of influential figures without being first rooted in their historical impact or importance. I felt like I was on a bad Tinder date with someone who tried to fluff his intellectual credibility by adding -esque to the names of white male scholars to improperly describe things.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is marvelous piece of art! It was definitely not an easy read for me but I very much enjoyed reading it. If you're looking to learn about the technical details of how cities were planned then this isn't the right choice. This book is more about the concepts and ideas of the main visionaries of the past and their visions for how people should live. Their visions are not only restricted to the way they build or how they're spatially organized but it also includes social and economic structures of how the community works. Reading through this book gave me a much better understanding of all the concepts, ideas and theories that shaped the way our cities were planned and how we plan the cities of our future.

[Carlos David Montoya V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un panorama general sobre las ideas, políticas, gestores, proyectos, diseñadores y controversias del urbanismo en el siglo XX, con enfoque principal en ciudades del norte global. Destacó la intención de clasificar momentos de desarrollo sin que sean lineales o independientes, lo que hace evidente los procesos de circulación y aprendizaje de las ciudades. Fue bueno volver a recorrer muchas de estas ciudades con la narración. Ser un observador más en tiempos distintos.

[Castironpot · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book that gives insight to a lot of different issues that planning has been asked to solve and how describes how effective these solutions have been.

The focus on the social and economic impact planning has had on normal citizens is great for explaining different sides of the issues that faces the urban planning.

[Lisa Trinh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wil je weten hoe steden gebouwd zijn? Waarom New York alleen rechte straten heeft en Italië kronkelende straatjes? Hoe flats zijn ontstaan en in welke steden ze goed en slecht geïmplementeerd zijn? Waarom fonteinen op plekken in de stad staan waar ze staan, en waarom ze tegenwoordig heel slecht zijn in het plaatsen ervan? Look no further, this book's gotchu.

[Carla Caballol · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an Urban Planner Student, this book helped me understand the different city planning/design paradigms. I really enjoyed reading this book, and recommend it to non-architectural readers, it's easy to read and understand.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid review of City Planning.

[Lily Keefauver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Geoffrey Hall is a silly guy. this was fine.

[James Lingman · Rating 2 out of 5]

The last chapter he blames all of the problems in urban centers on single black mothers.

[Abril]

Mi única critica es que da muchas idas y vueltas, y a la larga terminas entendiendo como fue evolucionando el urbanismo cuando lo terminas.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an informative book although in the beginning it was hard to get engaged in. The book follows the progression of ideas rather than of periods, regions, or thinkers. It creates a very disorienting picture, where names and facts blur together. At first, everything was hard to follow, but by the third or fourth chapter, a map of the history of Urban Planning began to unveil in my mind. Eventually, I feel like my understanding of Urban Planning has improved by learning how everything was competing against each other simultaneously, or from the ruins of the past. It is an interesting book structure and worth reading if only for that reason.

Overall, it is a great book for developing a broad idea of Urban Planning, although I might have preferred to focus more on the individual details, that was obviously not the purpose of the book.

I enjoyed the literary, personable, at times sarcastic, writing voice. I'm concerned that by having such a strong voice, it would create an impression of potential writer bias. I thought the book took reasoned stances, but there was an aura of subjectivity rather than objectivity.

The last chapter did not feel like a clean fit in the book according to previous chapters, although it did tie everything back to the first chapter. It did not talk about any Urban Planning themes as much as the issues affecting Urban Planning, which is good to have, but when every chapter is about Urban Planning themes, it does make the last chapter the odd one out.

Reading the book as the Black Lives Matters movement is currently protesting in the United States gave me a new understanding of movement and the historical background of African Americans, which I am grateful to have.

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fair warning: my rating has a lot to do with the sheer amount of time it took me to read this book. I'm interested in the topic and there are lot of tidbits to be gotten from the circulation of planning ideas around the United States and Europe (especially Britain, Germany, and Sweden). But even Hall's explanation of the non-chronological nature of the book's structure didn't prepare me for how convoluted it would all seem to me. The main reason is that Hall presents a seemingly endless litany of important planners and politicians. As an intellectual history, shouldn't more time have been spent on drawing out the effects of planning trends on the ground?

Also really, why is the last chapter there? Hall doesn't make a very convincing argument for the segue into discussing the sociology of black poverty, even if it does represent a failure of planning's lofty ambitions. While he does circle it back to the similar conditions of Victorian slums, the last chapter spends more time talking about how matriarchal systems breed poverty than showing examples of attempted solutions in the last 30 years.