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MODERNISM IN OPERATION
The story of city design is not straightforward. Even
in our abbreviated history, themes weave and in and
out of each other to form a complex tapestry. From
our postmodern perspective we often mistake mod-
ernism for a monolithic construct, but this is far from
the case. In architecture the early modernisms of
Michel de Klerk, or Hans Scharoun and Hugo
Haring, were far different from the unified vision
that sprang into three-dimensional reality in 1927 at
Stuttgart’s influential Weissenhoff Siedlung. This
model housing settlement, master-planned by
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and heavily influenced by
Le Corbusier, included housing prototypes from
most of the important European modern architects.
This orchestrated concentration of crisp white stucco
Figure 1.2
Le Corbusier’s vision of The
Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants,
1922. Tower blocks isolated in space and 
mid-rise slabs disassociated from the streets and
set apart in landscape became the standard
typologies for city building after World War II.
(
Drawing courtesy of the Le Corbusier
Foundation
)
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CHAPTER ONE
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PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND
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boxes established the architectural language that was
to become the International Style, but even within
this homogeneity, subtle differences remained (see
Figure 1.3).
Architect-inspired modernism also affected much
theory and practice in planning during the years fol-
lowing World War II. The legacy of urban renewal
still dominates thinking about postwar planning to
such an extent that it is easy to believe that everything
devolves from Le Corbusier’s erasure of the traditional
city and its replacement with the City of Towers in the
Park. There was much more to it than that.
British planner Sir Peter Hall cites the different
strands of twentieth-century planning thought at
some length, but for our purposes they can be sum-
marized under six headings, beginning with the
urban replacement approach advocated by Le
Corbusier and Ludwig Hilbersheimer. The second
strand comprises the Garden City and its legacy; the
third involves attempts to create the Regional City;
and the fourth features Beaux Arts monumental
master planning. Strand number five encompasses
transportation and its impact on urban form; and
the sixth incorporates democratic populism in
civic design, providing opportunities for citizens to
take charge of planning their own neighborhoods
(Hall, 2002).
Hall also makes note of one of history’s bitter jests
of the twentieth century: many of the radical ideas 
of urban visionaries like Ebenezer Howard, Le
Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright lay fallow for
years, only to reappear in later periods transformed
into parodies of their former selves. Ironically,
America’s endless sprawl finds some of its origins in 
F. L. Wright’s Broadacre City, for example, while many
soulless suburban developments in British green fields
are touted as direct descendants of Howard’s Garden
Cities. In cities across both nations, Le Corbusier’s
vision of gleaming skyscrapers in a lush and verdant
landscape was constructed as cheap and shoddy towers
rising amidst urban rubble (see Figure 1.4).
Today’s urban designer is heir to all six strands of
modernism, and we will deal with all of them during
our discourse throughout the book. Each is impor-
tant, but it is the legacy of urban renewal or ‘com-
prehensive development’ that colors community
memories most vividly. The relative success of Garden
Cities in postwar Britain pales in comparison with
the memories of bulldozed neighborhoods and col-
lapsed tower blocks. American families still recall
with bitterness being forced from their homes in the
1960s to make way for grandiose civic plazas and
monumental buildings.
The evidence of urban renewal’s physical and social
destruction in the name of community progress is
undeniable. Many slums that needed to be torn down
were justly demolished, but what replaced them was
often a concrete dystopia that bred only despera-
tion, despair and a new generation of social malaise.
And along with the slums, other communities were