Origins
Welwyn Garden City photo by David Mountain
Speaker - David Mountain
Garden Cities, new towns and green politics are three distinct areas of activity identified in the titles of Dennis Hardy’s histories of the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA.)
This talk explores the origins of the TCPA in Ebenezer Howard’s synthetic, ‘practical idealist’ movement-building, which brought together disparate social, political and technical trends into a distinct ideological project. It also explores the changing politics around the continuing design object of the Association’s most scathing critique: principally, large scale state-endorsed urban redevelopment, theorised in the 1980s as ‘monolithic.’
This talk asks whether and how the history of these changing areas of practice and critique help to identify and understand a foundational ideological programme underlying the Association’s philosophy. It is based on original doctoral research on the shifts in planning and architecture practice around the end of the post-war new towns policy and the emergence of urban regeneration.
Dr David Mountain is Research Manager at the Royal Town Planning Institute. He commissions research to support the planning profession and policy development, administers competitive research grants, and oversees the annual RTPI Awards for Research Excellence. He leads the Institute’s work on planning history. David is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, where he completed his ESRC-funded PhD on the end of the post-war British new towns programme and the rise of urban regeneration in planning practice. His dissertation included a study of areas of continuity and change in the history of the Town and Country Planning Association’s principles.
Readings and resources:
Reference above: Peter Self, “In Pursuit of Wholeness, Vision and Local Life,” Town & Country Planning 56, no. 7/8 (1987): 211.
Book (1988) The garden city utopia : a critical biography of Ebenezer Howard : Beevers, Robert, 1919-
Book x2 (1991): From garden cities to new towns : campaigning for town and country planning, 1899-1946 / Dennis Hardy and From new towns to green politics : campaigning for town and country planning, 1946-1990 : Dennis Hardy
Book (1981): Bourgeois utopias : the rise and fall of suburbia / Robert Fishman
Link for open-access historical journals: https://www.tcpa.org.uk/archive/