Name: Planting New Towns in Europe in the Interwar Years
SKU: 1-4438-9078-2
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Planting New Towns in Europe in the Interwar Years

Experiments and Dreams for Future Societies

Edited By: Helen Meller, Heleni Porfyriou

£47.99

The contributions here concern the prospects of building new urban environments and creating new societies in Europe during the interwar years, and serve to tease out connections between urban form and social aspirations, highlighting the moral basis of social planning.

The key theme of the papers in this book concerns the prospects of building new urban environments and creating new societies in Europe during the…

The key theme of the papers in this book concerns the prospects of building new urban environments and creating new societies in Europe during the interwar years. The contributions do not focus on the system of government – communist, fascist or democratic – but, rather, on what actually got built, by whom and why; and how the international communication of ideas was filtered through the prism of local concerns and culture. As such, the volume serves to tease out connections between urban form and social aspirations, and between the moral basis of social planning and how it was interpreted. Did the new towns of the interwar years actually create a planned society where visions met realities, aided by the design of new urban forms? This is one of the principal questions investigated by the contributors here in all the different political contexts of their chosen ‘new towns’.

Helen Meller is Professor Emerita of Urban History at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the Editor of Routledge’s ‘Studies in International Planning History’ series, having previously edited Planning Perspectives from 2006 to 2012. She has published widely on urban history, leisure activities in 19th century cities, women and cities, green spaces in cities, and international planning history.

Heleni Porfyriou is Senior Researcher and in charge of the Rome Unit of the Institute for the Conservation and Enhancement of Cultural Heritage of the National Research Council of Italy. Her current research interests concern urban conservation and the enhancement and management of historic cities in Europe and China. She has published extensively on urban morphology and the representation of space in modern Europe.

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