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Town Planning versus Urbanismo Michael Hebbert University of Manchester, UK Giorgio Piccinato (1987) has explained the the distinction between town planning and distinction between urbanismo and town urbanism. Cherry was Anglo-Saxon planning planning as follows. Town planning is Anglo- personified. Born in 1931 and educated as a Saxon, urbanism is Latin. Planning sees itself geographer, he entered local government in as a professional activity distinct from archi- 1953 and became a leading figure in the tecture and engineering, urbanism is a fight to establish town planning as a profes- shared culture or common ground between sional discipline in its own right. One of his these professions. Planning is rooted in social earliest published papers - ‘The Town Planner reformism, giving its practitioners a happy and his Profession’ (1962) - was an angry sense of their own rectitude, urbanism owes young man’s attack on the supercilious atti- more to the pluralism of real urban politics. tude of architects, engineers, and surveyors Anglo-Saxon planning dominated the post- towards a town planning profession which war years with its social-democratic values they regarded as inferior and secondary. and its simple scenario of planners (good) Cherry called upon universities to focus their versus speculators (bad). Piccinato observes educational curricula onto the planner’s that Leonardo Benevolo opened the history distinctive attributes, which he defined as the of modern planning, in his widely-read Le promotion of ‘amenity and convenience’. He Origini dell’ Urbanistica Moderna (1963), with summonsed the Town Planning Institute to Robert Owen’s social experiment at New be more aggressive in advancing the profes- Lanark. In Italian encyclopedias and texts of sion’s cause. the 1960s ‘urbanistica’ used to be synony- For the next five years, from 1963-8, he mous with new towns and housing policy. would work as Research Officer in the City But this hegemony of Anglo-Saxon attitudes Planning Department of Newcastle upon had been broken. Its social reform project Tyne under Wilfred Burns, who was then one was discredited and its elaborate apparatus of the very few British town planners to hold of paper-based socio-economic regulation the post of chief officer and head his own had stalled. For Piccinato, the future rested department within the city administration. with an urbanismo that allowed architects to Cherry described the winning of chief officer take tangible and realisable responsibility for positions in Newcastle and other cities as urban space. ‘Battle Honours in the war of attrition . to secure professional recognition’. It is one of the milestones in the Diamond Jubilee history of the Royal Town Planning Institute (Cherry Here at the conclusion of IPHS2004 in 1974), a narrative of the long march of the Barcelona, the Gordon Cherry Memorial chartered town planning profession from lecture offers a perfect opportunity to revisit small beginnings in 1914 to the granting of a [email protected] 89 Royal Charter (1970), establishment of univer- by its shift from architectural design towards sity programmes, a membership of thou- ‘a wider, interpretative fusion to a concern sands, and general public recognition. In this with social welfare’ (1982 147). Planning narrative, Cherry’s view of professional town historiography takes a parallel path from art planning matches Giorgio Piccinato’s. He does history to social sciences (1981 4). The roots not see it as a design profession: its tech- of the narrative are Anglo-centric, finding niques derive from social science and its the reward for Britain’s role in the Industrial values from social reformism. He himself had Revolution in its pioneership of garden cities a powerful sense of this reformist legacy, and green belts. Cherry helped to articulate a being as active the Bournville Village Trust sense of national leadership of a worldwide (trustee, chairman 1992-6) as he was in the movement, a notion which - despite the best Royal Town Planning Institute (service on its efforts of Stephen Ward (2002) - undergradu- Council for a quarter of a century, Presidency ates somehow still imbibe and regurgitate in 1978-9, Outstanding Service Medal 1995). the summer examinations : Cherry left Newcastle City Council in 1968 These many events make the proffession to become Deputy Director of the Centre for of Town Planning want it is today and Urban and Regional Studies (CURS) at the helps British Town Planning be amongst University of Birmingham. Entering academic the most succsesfull in the world. life at the age of 37, he had a short but Gordon himself was a good enough intensive university career. By the time of his historian to recognise that this march of death, age only 65, he had authored or coau- progress had not been altogether straighfor- thored nine books, edited a further four, and ward. The definition of our subject which he (with Tony Sutcliffe) launched both the jour- bequeathed to the IPHS website is ‘planning nal Planning Perspectives and the Spon book as a process, with all the quirks of the unex- series Studies in History, Planning and pected en route’. False hopes and disappoint- Environment. Above all, he had first founded ments are a recurring theme in his writing, and nurtured the Planning History Group discouraging any optimism about the making then transformed it into an International of place or the shaping of space. He regarded Planning History Society, an improbable the city as a ‘tantalizingly indifferent ‘ mech- concept brought to life by his own sheer anism for sustaining social contact or inspir- energy and enthusiasm. Glimpsed on an ing human aims and ideals (1972 246). envelope in the daily pile of post, Gordon’s handwriting was instantly recognisable - A long established European idea of regular, rounded, relentless. His hand urbanism is breaking down… Form is expressed both the talent for personal friend- disintegrating and the city is vanishing as ship by which he nurtured our global a central embodiment of collective art network of scholarship, and the qualities of and technics. New systems of communi- genial persistence by which he shaped it into cation have exploded the centuries-old institutional permanence. We are all in his association between place and people. debt. Suburban culture is quite different, and a loose metropolitan form of cities will change the urban way of life (1972 241). As an academic geographer Gordon The two sides of Gordon Cherry’s career fit Cherry arrived at the bleak conclusion that together like an arch. In his writing of plan- these polyform processes of metropolitan ning history we are always aware of that change were uncontrollable, and planners’ teleological drive towards independent efforts to shape them doomed to disappoint- professional status within a freestanding ment (1982 149). Perhaps it was his sense of policy sector. Planning’s progress is defined an impasse in contemporary town planning 90 that made him focus his energies so produc- and urban space shaped by time and infused tively on the past. by collective memory. Urbanism reoccupied a terrain that had been abandoned by modernism, the intermediate scale between the global concerns of the economic planner One point on which the narratives of Giorgio and the architectural building-as-object (Solà- Piccinato and Gordon Cherry coincide is the Morales 1997). Its defining methodology was international impact of Anglo-Saxon plan- analysis of plan-form (Moudon 1994), first ning in the immediate postwar years. It through the elaborate typomorphological extended even to France, birthplace of surveys of Saverio Muratori, Gianfranco urbanisme. Raymond Unwin, Lewis Mumford Caniggia and Carlo Aymonino, then through and the Reith Report were guiding influences a widening repertoire of cadastral study, in the Nouvel Urbanisme of the 1950s (Cohen figure-ground mapping and spatial typology 1996). At the high water mark, the to which seminal contributions were made by Sorbonne’s l’IUUP (Institut d’Urbanisme de Jean Castex and Philippe Panerai (Formes l’Université de Paris) replaced its conventional Urbaines 1977), Robert Krier (Stadtraum in syllabus of architectural design and urban Theorie und Praxis 1975), Colin Rowe and history with a curriculum of law, social Fred Koetter (Collage City 1978) and science and management theory. Henri Christopher Alexander (Pattern Language Léfèbvre, who taught social theory at the 1977). institute, advised his students that their new Searching a postmodern meaning for role-model was the robot-planner, pulling urbanity and citizenship, its intellectual roots apart the living tissue of towns so as to extended into richer territory than Ebenezer recombine the pieces into the synthetic Howard’s late Victorian temperance utopia: commodity-ensembles required by interna- to the idealism of Henri Bergson (Calabi tional neo-capitalism. Out in the villes 1996), to Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of nouvelles, planning’s supposed modernisation collective memory (Rossi 1982), and the criti- created landscapes of repression and submis- cal rationalism of Theodor Adorno and the sion to the ‘poisonous flower’ of Frankfurt school (Berndt 1967). The move- Americanization. The Institute was appropri- ment’s engagement with the city was highly ately punished after the 1968 riots by reloca- practical, emphasizing project over plan. As tion to the singularly unpleasant concrete Henri Léfèbvre had hoped, urbanism became campus of Université de Paris XII-Créteil, but principal instrument in the European left’s Léfèbvre and his fellow-critics of the Anglo- efforts to revive the legitimacy of municipal Saxon functionalist model brought about a politics and reconnect it to the grassroots of lasting paradigm shift in the discipline. From neighbourhood activism. Formative episodes 1970 onwards urbanisme meant a return to were the battle for La Marolle in Brussels, the the urban spaces of street and square, with mass squatting along the metro line in their complexity and richness of memory, and Amsterdam, the community-based renewal of a return to the mother-discipline of architec- the historic centre of Bologna, and the anti- ture.

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